2025 Readings 96

 Recently I've decided to add a third book to my Images of Fascism class for the spring, Anne Applebaum's Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World. I had ordered it a couple months back, and finally knocked it off in a couple days this week. She certainly makes many of the same points that Sarah Kendzior makes in her books, and I consider them both to be impeccable sources. To me, it's almost impossible to read books like this, written by serious scholars, (and not the hacks who produce Russian-friendly propaganda on the right), and not understand the the horrible situation that we are in. I'm amazed when talking heads wring their hands and talk about the very real possibility that we will slide into autocracy, when we have already slipped into autocracy. There were so many passages in Applebaum's book that spoke to me, so it's hard to pick one, but here's one that's spot-on. 

But many of the propagandists of Autocracy, Inc., have learned from the mistakes of the twentieth century. They don't offer their fellow citizens a vision of utopia, and they don't inspire them to build a better world. Instead, they teach people to be cynical and passive, cause there is no better world to build. Their goal is to persuade people to mind their own business, stay out of politics, and never hope for a democratic alternative: Our state may be corrupt, but everyone else is corrupt too. You may not like our leader, but the others are worse. You may not like our society, but at least we are strong and the democratic world is weak, degenerate, divided, dying.

Applebaum is talking about Russia and China and Iran, etc., but she's also clearly talking about the US under Trump as well. I just kept thinking about the forty percent who don't vote, for many of the reasons they have been programmed to believe that she references above. Sometimes at the Food Shelf we would run drives to help our visitors sign up to vote. Many of them would say, in various ways, that there's no point because both options are bad. You would try to avoid thinking, "yes, and this is another in a series of bad decisions which left you queued up at the Food Shelf this morning," because, truthfully, many of them were simply victims of a cruelly unfair system that crushed far too large a percentage of the population into poverty. However, that answer, that both options are bad, is exactly the answer that those in power want people to give. I'm hardly happy with the modern Democratic party, but, especially if you are poor, there are profound differences between the two parties, and the one party is only offering you surface-level patriotism and freedom, and there is a true difference. If you can convince forty percent of the population not to vote, then you can rely upon a fanatical thirty percent who will always vote (and vote how they are told), and you simply need to grab a couple swing states (no doubt, sometimes by cheating) and you will be in power forever.

Obviously, Applebaum's book is not only highly recommended, it is essential.