How to Survive Election Year 2024

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Terracotta Warriors. O. Louis Mazzatenta / NGS Image Collection

I was invited into my kid’s classroom last week to check out the results of the third grade’s research into ancient China. 

There were shoebox dioramas of the Great Wall and the terracotta warriors, and, in the case of my child, gruesome battle scenes between warring factions.

“Goodbye crule (sic) world!” cried a dying clay soldier. 

The driving question for their projects was: “How power is gained, used, and justified?”

Who owned property and who didn’t? Who could demand labor from other people? Who could offer a reprieve from suffering?  Who ordered the building of the Wall, and who died building it?

You’re never too young to think about power, it seems. 

I’ve been thinking about it a lot as we head into 2024, a year dominated by the presidential election, with the threat of another Trump presidency, and the steady drip of disheartening political analysis from news stories and Instagram captions, group chats and hallway conversations.

And I wanted to have an inspirational bulwark against this tide.

So as a guide for the year, I picked Surviving Autocracy, by the National Book Award winner and New Yorker staff writer, Masha Gessen. 

It was first published in April 2020, as COVID lockdowns had started to descend across the country and as the full impacts of the Trump presidency were coming into view. It is a quick and riveting read, and snapped my mind awake.

The Trump years were a national trauma, Gessen writes, from the Muslim ban to the horrors of the COVID response, from Brett Kavanaugh to January 6. 

Reading the book, my head began to spin again remembering the experience of those years of lies, cruelty and arrogance. 

“Being an engaged citizen of Trump’s America means living in a constant state of cognitive tension…means accepting a constant challenge to fact-based reality,” Gessen writes.

“The need to pay constant attention to the lies is exhausting, and it is compounded by a feeling of helplessness in the face of ridiculous and repeated lies.”

It was the experience of feeling like something is so beyond the pale, so insane, so criminal, that it can’t possibly be happening. And yet, because it was happening, we are forced to think that perhaps it isn’t so bad. 

(Hence, political commentators describing Trump as “presidential” in the very rare instances when he wasn't completely unhinged.)

One way to heal from that trauma is a practice of narrative therapy, and Gessen’s book is an effort to contribute to our national healing. To say what happened, and not to normalize it.

“Public rituals of telling stories of the Trump era would be healing because they would ensure that people are heard. They would create accountability and transparency,” Gessen writes.

“Most important, they would force us to ask the question: What made the Trump presidency possible?”

The four years of Trump, the years in between and the specter of another round can make a person feel powerless.

Fortunately, we’re not powerless. 

Maintain Your Highest Ideals

Gessen is an expert on current-day autocrats, having spent much of their career documenting the rise of Vladimir Putin in Russia. And they believe we have lessons to learn from that experience.

“In the Russian language today, the entire vocabulary of principles and ideals has, after decades of abuse, been relegated to disuse,” they write.

“Even in private conversation, Russians will frequently apologize for using words or concepts that they feel are marked with “pathos,” a word that has come to connote, not so much suffering, as earnestness and loftiness of concept. 

In the public sphere, the language of “pathos” does not exist at all: a word like “democracy” can only be pronounced with a smirk,” they write.

It’s not merely depressing to think that we can’t utter the word ‘democracy’; it’s dangerous. 

So speak your ideals unapologetically. 

Hannah Arendt, the political theorist who studied the rise of the Nazis, observed that “gullibility and cynicism” define the audiences for totalitarian leaders. 

Be on alert: Do we believe what we are told, without question? Are we cynical to the point of tuning out entirely?

Or are we committing, with courage, to the our highest democratic ideals?

Understand politics as participation

There are few things I enjoy less than reports from the “campaign trail”: congested largely with meaningless anecdotes and baseless analysis.

Politics in our media has come to mean posturing, slogans, and can’t-bring-myself-to-watch “debates” between candidates vying for a soundbite. “Hollow procedure, inflated rhetoric, tactical positioning are dismissed as ‘just politics,’” Gessen writes.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

“Political,” Gessen writes, “should refer to the vital project of negotiating how we live together as a city, a state, or a country; of working across differences. Of acting collectively.”

Journalists, Gessen says, have to understand the word as “meaningful and consequential,” so that it can’t be dismissed, and so there’s a chance it can be believed. And we should hold our representatives to that standard.

Institutions will not save us. We have to defend them.

Just after the election, Gessen published a piece,“Autocracy: Rules for Survival,” in which they warned that our institutions will not save us. (That essay became the basis for the book.)

There is no institution in the U.S. that is so strong, they write, that we do not have to defend it: from our school boards, to our courts, to our election system itself. 

“Many of these institutions are enshrined in political culture rather than in law, and all of them—including the ones enshrined in law—depend on the good faith of all actors to fulfill their purpose and uphold the Constitution.”

So what happens when good faith disappears? What happens when our political leaders disrupt the status quo by lying, by theft, by election denial?

We must be willing to fight for it.

“In the face of the impulse to normalize, it is essential to maintain one’s capacity for shock,” Gessen wrote in 2016. 

“This will lead people to call you unreasonable and hysterical, and to accuse you of overreacting. It is no fun to be the only hysterical person in the room. Prepare yourself.”

We can keep our ideals high.

We can have the country we want and the systems that serve us all. But to do so we must maintain our commitment to protest, to be outraged.

Trumpism shrinks the circle of who counts as “one of us,” Gessen writes.

“We have to recall that what undergirds the Congress and the courts, the media and civil society, is the belief that this can be a country of all its people.

Moral aspiration forms the foundation of its institutions.”

In looking at those political voices who held moral authority in the Trump period — Representatives John Lewis and Elijah Cummings, and the women of The Squad, Gessen writes, “Distinct as their visions might be from one another, all focus on dignity rather than power, equality rather than wealth, and solidarity rather than competition.”

In my child’s third grade classroom, eight-year-olds looked to the past to understand power.

But we, the grown-ups, have to stay awake to the way power works in the present if we want to ensure their futures.

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