‘Stand Back and Stand By’ for Autocracy

Review by Bill Doughty

Praising lawlessness of supporters, demonizing the media, lying to the public, threatening free elections, changing the meaning of words, and destroying institutions are clear signs of autocracy.

That’s according to two authors who discuss the threat to democracy in the fall of 2020: Masha Gessen in “Surviving Autocracy” (Riverhead Books, Penguin; 2020) and Anne Applebaum in “Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism” (Doubleday; 2020). These books are literary grandchildren of Hannah Arendt’s “The Origin of Totalitarianism” and close cousins of Timothy D. Snyder’s “On Tyranny.” Snyder, in fact, endorsed the books and authors as “extraordinary,” “penetrating, and “indispensable.”

Gessen takes a scholarly approach in laying out the case for an imminent threat to American democracy. He quotes from the works and words of Arendt, George Orwell, Michiko Kakutani, Ronald Reagan, and Confucius.

He pinpoints President Trump’s “contempt for excellence” and corruption. “Trump’s incompetence is militant. It is not a factor that might mitigate the threat he poses: it is the threat itself.” He adds, “Trump not only doesn’t know what he’s doing –– he did not even know what he was not doing.”

If impeachment had succeeded in removing Trump from office, Gessen writes, “it would have constituted a triumph of institutions over the autocratic attempt. It did not.”

Trump’s embrace of white nationalism and his failure to acknowledge the threat of white power terrorists –– including his call to arms to “stand by,” to “LIBERATE MICHIGAN,” and to come to polling places on election day –– are all part of a pattern.

Trump’s contemptuous disregard for military justice is also part of the picture. Gessen writes:

“The hero Trump chose during the fall of his impeachment was Navy SEAL Chief Petty Officer Edward Gallagher. In the summer of 2019, Gallagher faced trial for allegedly killing an unconscious, unarmed captive in Iraq. The Navy fumbled the investigation, and in the last minute a witness who had been granted immunity testified that he, not Gallagher, had killed the young man; Gallagher was acquitted on most charges … After Gallagher was acquitted, Trump congratulated him by tweet. He then intervened to reverse the Navy’s decision to discharge Gallagher without honors –– once again demonstrating that the commander in chief can issue orders by tweet. Trump reinstated Gallagher’s rank and pay, and stripped the prosecutors in the case of their Navy medals. Ultimately, the struggle over Gallagher’s fate cost the secretary of the Navy, Richard Spencer, his job.”

Gallagher and Trump; SECNAV Spencer boxed in.

Gessen notes that Gallagher was turned in by members of his platoon, who were interviewed saying he was “freaking evil” and “perfectly okay with killing anybody that was moving,” intentionally targeting women and children, saying he “just wants to kill anybody he can.” Trump invited Gallagher to his residence at Mar-a-Lago and praised him as an American hero.

According to Gessen, Gallagher embodied the essence of the presidency: raw, unchecked power, contempt for rules, laws and norms, and an unbridled desire to act out of hatred.

Gessen writes, “Raw power can overtake moral authority, and perhaps today it is easier than ever before, but a determined effort to preserve ideals when they are under attack can serve as a bridge to the future.”

In “Twilight of Democracy,” Applebaum –– who describes herself as “educated conservative elite” –– takes a denser and more global view, building her own bridge from the past to the present and future to explain how autocracy continues to thrive.

She takes the reader on a tour of Poland, Hungary, England, EU, Spain, and France before landing in the United States. Like Gessen, she relies on Arendt and Orwell as bedrock literature, but she also cites Graham Greene’s “The Quiet American,” Marcel Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past,” and Svetlana Boym’s “The Future of Nostalgia.”

Applebaum laments that the “party of Reagan became the party of Trump,” noting, “Reaganite optimism disappeared and slowly hardened into apocalyptic pessimism shared by so many others.” Echoing Gessen, Applebaum quotes Reagan’s UN ambassador, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, who said, “To destroy a society, it is first necessary to delegitimize its basic institutions.”

In a timely insight, Applebaum warns of the threat of autocracy and tyranny in the time of a pandemic. “Throughout history, pandemics have led to an expansion of the power of the state: at times when people fear death, they go along with measure that they believe, rightly or wrongly, will save them –– even if that means a loss of freedom,” she writes.

She explains, “People are often attracted to authoritarian ideas because they are bothered by complexity.” “Restorative nostalgics” see the world in black and white, without nuance; they want a return to what they perceive as a simpler past:

“Restorative nostalgics don’t just look at old photographs and piece together family stories. They are mythmakers and architects, builders of monuments and founders of nationalist political projects. They do not merely want to contemplate or learn from the past. They want, as Boym puts it, to ‘rebuild the lost home and pitch up the memory gaps.’ Many of them don’t recognize their own fictions about the past for what they are: ‘They believe their project is about truth.; They are not interested in a nuanced past, in a world in which great leaders were flawed men, in which famous military victories had lethal side effects. They don’t acknowledge that the past might have had its drawbacks. They want the cartoon version of history, and more importantly, they want to live in it, right now.”

Applebaum shows that tyranny can rise from the radical left as well as the radical right. But extreme right-wing domestic terrorism is the greatest threat in the United States now, according to the FBI. There is a connection between racism and defending the Confederacy, Confederate monuments, and gun-carrying vigilantes.

Later in her book she shows how that world view, exemplified in “America First,” is a siren call to white nationalism and radical right-wing terrorists. 

“Like those who live on the extreme edges of the American far left, some of those who live on the extreme edges of the far right have long been attracted to violence. There is no need to rehearse here the history of the Ku Klux Klan, to tell the stories of Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh and Charleston shooter Dylan Roof, or to describe the myriad individuals and militia movements who have plotted mass murder, and continue to plot mass murder, in the name of rescuing a fallen nation. In 2017, an Illinois militia set off a bomb at a Minnesota mosque. In 2018, a man who believed Jews were plotting to destroy white America murdered eleven people at a Pittsburgh synagogue. In January 2019, a group of men calling themselves ‘the Crusaders’ plotted to put a bomb in an apartment complex in Garden City, Kansas, because they hoped to murder a large number of Somali refugees. These groups and movements were also inspired by a confection that democracy is worthless, that elections cannot bring real change, and that only the most extreme and desperate actions can stop the decline of a certain vision of America.”

Governor Whitmer at her Oct. 8 press conference.

Just this past week, the FBI and Michigan State Police busted a plot by right-wing terrorists to kidnap and possibly kill the governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer. Whitmer thanked law enforcement and called out President Trump for his dog whistle calls to those among his supporters who are white nationalists.

In a press conference Oct. 8, Whitmer said, “Just last week, the president of the United States stood before the American people and refused to condemn white supremacists and hate groups like these two Michigan militia groups. ‘Stand back and stand by,’ he told them. ‘Stand back and stand by.’ Hate groups heard the president’s words, not as a rebuke, but as a rallying cry, as a call to action. When our leaders speak, their words matter. They carry weight. When our leaders meet with, encourage, or fraternize with domestic terrorists, they legitimize their actions and they are complicit. When they stoke and contribute to hate speech, they are complicit.”

Both Gessen and Applebaum cite Reagan’s openness to immigration and focus on optimism for the future.

President Reagan and First Lady Nancy Reagan.

Whitmer herself brought up the 40th president of the United States: “In 1981, President Ronald Reagan spoke to the NAACP’s annual convention, and his comments stand in sharp contrast to what we have seen on the national and state level from his own beloved party in 2020. He said, ‘A few isolated groups in the backwater of American life still hold perverted notions of what America is all about.’ Recently, in some places in the nation, there’s been a disturbing recurrence of bigotry and violence.  Then Reagan sent a direct message to those who still adhere to senseless racism and religious prejudice: ‘You are the ones who are out of step with our society,' he said. 'You are the ones who willfully violate the meaning of the dream that is America. And this country, because of what it stands for, will not stand for your conduct.’”

Applebaum offers this chilling conclusion that provides the title for her book: “It is possible we are already living through the twilight of democracy; that our civilization may already be heading for anarchy or tyranny, as the ancient philosophers and America’s founders once feared…”

But, like Gessen, she offers explicit and implicit antidotes to a muddy downward slide toward autocracy. Explicitly: Build cooperation and coalitions; embrace allies; promote “rational thought, rule of law and integration;” and be “rooted to a place and yet open to the world.” Implicitly: become educated, practice critical thinking, and take the high road –– in the face of hate and anger, show love and kindness.