In May, at a prison colony in the Siberian city of Omsk, a lawyer paid his weekly visit to his client, the Russian dissident Vladimir Kara-Murza. They sat together in a small room, separated by a pane of glass. Kara-Murza, who had been poisoned in 2015 and 2017, presumably by Vladimir Putin’s secret police, was serving the second year of a twenty-five-year sentence for his public opposition to the invasion of Ukraine.
The lawyer had news to deliver: Kara-Murza had been awarded a Pulitzer Prize for columns he had written for the Washington Post. The news, Kara-Murza recalled, “sounded like something from a different planet, from some kind of a parallel reality.” He was pleased, of course, though he assumed that he would never collect the prize in person. Like Alexei Navalny, like so many political prisoners before him, he believed that he would die in his cell.
Yet the unimaginable happened. On August 1st, Kara-Murza was part of a prisoner exchange, and in late October he stepped onto a stage at Columbia University’s Low Library, to receive his Pulitzer. He gave a brief speech to an audience that included the other winners—among them the Post’s David Hoffman, who had won for his reported editorials on the technologies that authoritarian regimes deploy to suppress dissent. The occasion, Kara-Murza admitted, was “surreal.”
For the staff and the readers of the Post, the next day was equally surreal: the paper’s publisher and C.E.O., William Lewis, announced that its planned endorsement of Kamala Harris would not run. All manner of explanation was offered—respect for the reader, a return to the editorial page’s more neutral roots—but these contortions convinced no one. Most concluded that what had happened was that the paper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, who has plenty of business with the federal government, and with the election approaching, dared not offend Donald Trump. This was the same Bezos who had endorsed a Trump-era slogan for the paper—“Democracy Dies in Darkness”—and supported a great deal of extraordinary reporting. Now, it seemed, Bezos was suffering from degeneration of the spine. Columnists expressed their embarrassment and anger. Three editorial-board members, including Hoffman, resigned. Within a few days, according to NPR, two hundred thousand readers had cancelled their subscriptions.
What was the meaning of this sorry episode? Or, for that matter, of the similarly last-minute decision of Patrick Soon-Shiong, the owner of the Los Angeles Times, to kill a Harris endorsement that his editorial-page editors had drafted? (Cue the resignations. Cue the cancelled subscriptions.)
Every editor who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that endorsements are of modest influence at best. The editors of this magazine, when it recently published a lengthy essay describing (for the thousandth time) the authoritarian prospects of a second Trump Presidency, and endorsing Kamala Harris, had no illusions. Editors may be as prone to sanctimony as they are to the common cold, but there was never any thought that such an endorsement would suddenly tip the balance in the battleground states, much less win majorities in the Deep South or the Great Plains. The point was that we, like other publications, attempted to make a cogent case, and had the editorial freedom to do so.
Perhaps experience ought to tell us that it is ridiculous to clutch our pearls every time a person of immense political power or financial means acts in his own selfish interest. Bezos is hardly alone. Senator Mitch McConnell, who denounced Trump in the immediate aftermath of January 6th and, in private, has called him “stupid” and a “despicable human being,” is endorsing him. The billionaire Nelson Peltz has referred to Trump as a “terrible human being,” and yet is helping to bankroll him. Is there anything still to know about Donald Trump? Deeply conservative and reticent figures who have long working experience with Trump—such as his former chief of staff John Kelly and the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley—have gone on the record to declare him a fascist, a peril to national security, and yet they cannot seem to dissuade Elon Musk, Stephen Schwarzman, Paul Singer, Timothy Mellon, and a line of other plutocrats from backing him. Éric Vuillard’s “The Order of the Day” opens with a lightly fictionalized scene of two dozen German industrialists and financiers summoned, in 1933, to meet Hermann Göring, who demands their fealty. If the Nazi Party wins the election, Göring tells them, “These would be the last elections for ten years––even, he added with a laugh, for a hundred years.” Where have we heard similar “jokes”?
No small part of Trump’s authoritarian campaign is his insistence on dominance. And, though his aides and supporters are dismissive of comparisons to previous embodiments of fascism, the elements are all there: the identification of “vermin” and “the enemy within”; the threat to deploy the military against dissenters; the erasure of truth, the “big lie.” The maga rally at Madison Square Garden last Sunday did not feature starched gray uniforms, swastikas, or disciplined salutes. Lee Greenwood is no Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. But the rhetoric was rife with scapegoating, racism, and lies.
In Russia, Putin has not replicated the Stalinism of the nineteen-thirties so much as he has modernized it. He has not gone to the trouble or the expense of re-creating the totalism of the old Gulag system. Instead, he carefully selects his victims—an opposition journalist here, a liberal politician there—and makes sure that their destruction is clearly understood by the Russian people. Similarly, the authoritarianism that Trump intends to establish will be of its moment. There will be no Lefortovo, no Treblinka. But mass deportations? That is a campaign promise, Trump told the crowd at the Garden, to be carried out “on Day One.”
The literature of anti-authoritarianism—Czeslaw Milosz’s “The Captive Mind”; Václav Havel’s essays and letters to his wife, Olga; Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoirs; Frederick Douglass’s autobiographies—are written by souls larger and vastly more heroic than common mortals. Yet they describe the ways that human-scale people, all of us, can refuse complicity, and act in the face of repression and outrage, if that is what public life comes to. The reporters and the editors at the Post who have resigned or spoken out against something as seemingly trivial as a spiked editorial may not be risking their lives or their immediate material comfort, but they are writing an endorsement that is worth signing on to: In order to stand up, one must have a backbone. ♦
Source : The New Yorker