Surviving ​Autocracy 1 csillagozás

Masha Gessen: Surviving Autocracy

“An ​indispensable voice of and for this moment.” –Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny

A bestselling, National Book Award–winning journalist’s bracing elucidation of our tumultuous times.

In the run-up to the 2016 election, Masha Gessen stood out from other journalists for the ability to convey the ominous significance of Donald Trump’s speech and behavior, unprecedented in a national candidate. Within forty-eight hours of his victory, the essay “Autocracy: Rules for Survival” had gone viral, and Gessen’s coverage of his norm-smashing presidency became essential reading for a citizenry struggling to wrap their heads around the unimaginable. Thanks to the special perspective that is the legacy of a Soviet childhood and two decades covering the resurgence of totalitarianism in Russia, Gessen has a sixth sense for signs of autocracy—and the unique cross-cultural fluency to delineate its emergence to Americans. Now, as the 2020 race takes shape, this incisive… (tovább)

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Riverhead, New York, 2020
288 oldal · ASIN: B0842GDC43
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Riverhead, New York, 2020
270 oldal · puhatáblás · ISBN: 9780593191972

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And even when we could find the words to describe the exceptional, barely imaginable nature of Trumpian stories, that approach could not scale. How could we talk about a series of nearly inconceivable events that had become routine? How do we describe the confrontation of existing government institutions with a presidential apparatus that wants to destroy them?

I found some possible answers in the work of Hungarian sociologist Bálint Magyar. In struggling to define and describe what had happened in his country, Magyar had realized that the language of both the media and the academy was not up to the task. After the Eastern Bloc collapsed in 1989, both local and Western commentators adopted the language of liberal democracy to describe what was happening in the region. They talked about elections and legitimacy, rule of law and public opinion. Their language reflected their assumptions and their limitations: they assumed that their countries would become liberal democracies—this seemed the inevitable outcome of the Cold War; and they had no other language at their disposal anyway. But if we use the wrong language, we cannot describe what we are seeing. If we use the language developed for describing fish, we cannot very well describe an elephant: words like “gills,” “scales,” and “fins” will not get us very far.

When some of the post-Soviet societies developed in unexpected ways, language impaired our ability to understand the process. We talked about whether they had a free press, for example, or free and fair elections. But noting that they did not, as Magyar has said, is akin to saying that the elephant cannot swim or fly: it doesn’t tell us much about what the elephant is. Now the same thing was happening in the United States; we were using the language of political disagreement, judicial procedure, or partisan discussion to describe something that was crushing the system that such terminology was invented to describe.

Magyar spent about a decade devising a new model, and a new language, to describe what was happening in his country. He coined the term “mafia state,” and described it as a specific, clan-like system in which one man distributes money and power to all other members. He then developed the concept of autocratic transformation, which proceeds in three stages: autocratic attempt, autocratic breakthrough, and autocratic consolidation. It occurred to me that these were words that American culture could now borrow, in an appropriate symbolic reversal of 1989: these terms appear to describe our reality better than any words in the standard American political lexicon.


Hasonló könyvek címkék alapján

Timothy Snyder: The Road to Unfreedom
Ezra Klein: Why We're Polarized
Susan Sontag: Illness as Metaphor
Aldous Huxley: Brave New World Revisited
Chris Hedges: America: The Farewell Tour
Tressie McMillan Cottom: Thick
Dan Pfeiffer: Un-Trumping America
Art Spiegelman: In the Shadow of No Towers
Michael Lewis: The Fifth Risk
Joseph S. Nye Jr.: Is the American Century Over?