Book In Review
The Anti-Fascist Book Club opens Book Five with the first four chapters of Masha Gessen’s Surviving Autocracy, and the experience is immediately disorienting. Gessen wrote the book about Trump’s first maladministration. Nick and Tara are reading it inside his second. The panel covers Gessen’s opening analysis — Trump as a hollow figurehead who turns money into power and power into money, the press flattened into “a view from nowhere,” and the normalization mechanisms that made the takeover legible as politics-as-usual. What the hosts return to, over and over, is that the book reads like a manual for the present because the present is a repetition. Tara names the dynamic that animates the entire conversation: the fascism got entrenched because Democrats kept extending presumption of good faith to people who had given them, “against all evidence to the contrary,” every reason not to.
That framing reorganizes the rest of the hour. Tara walks through Gessen’s argument that journalism collapsed into stenography — reporters beaten into having no opinion, expected to read the lies straight, while the bullying of the institutions does the actual work of regime construction. The corporate media, Tara argues, is in the boat it is in because Trump’s “I can say what I want when I want, when I want to” became something to be transcribed instead of something to be confronted. Nick agrees but pushes the responsibility further up. He pulls Obama’s transition statement — the “presumption of good faith in our fellow citizens” line — and calls it “one of the biggest lies in American history.” This is the panel’s editorial position, stated plainly: Obama and the Democratic Party had the constitutional powers and the bully pulpit to name the actual crimes Trump committed to take office the first time. They chose the high road. The country has been paying the bill ever since.
The pair then push on the language problem that Gessen’s book exposes — and which the panel argues the American left still has not solved. Nick objects to the loanwords. The right’s American billionaires are not oligarchs; they are robber barons. The threat is not Russian or Nazi by analogy; it is Confederate by direct lineage. Nick locates the second Trump administration squarely in the neo-Confederate inheritance of the modern Republican Party, treats January 6 as the long-deferred raising of the Confederate flag over the Capitol, and argues that calling Trump a “Russian asset” is descriptive but calling the regime “Confederate” is mobilizing. The panel pulls Bacon’s Rebellion into the same frame: the original American technology for breaking cross-class solidarity was race, and the same lever is still being pulled — Christofascist white supremacy positioned against everyone else, including the white indentured class that thinks it is being protected.
Where the book ends in 2020, the panel extends it into 2026. Gessen’s account of the Reichstag fire as an authoritarian template becomes the hosts’ framework for reading the Hantavirus emerging across the South, ICE at polling locations, and RFK Jr. seated at the head of what Nick rechristens “Health and Human Sacrifices.” The argument is careful and specific: the regime did not manufacture the virus, but it will manufacture the response, suppressing spread in white-majority areas and accelerating it elsewhere, then invoking pandemic to justify cancelling or restricting elections. The panel is not predicting from nowhere; they are reading the book’s analytical pattern forward. Gessen identified the move. Nick and Tara are flagging the moment. They want the audience to flag it too — loudly, repetitively, and in American vocabulary, because the corporate press will not.
The closing turn is the call the series exists to make. Surviving Autocracy is a diagnosis, not a rescue plan, and Part One offers no save. Nick is clear about what that means: “Nobody’s going to come save us but us.” The work, as both hosts frame it, is to talk constantly about what is actually happening, to name treason as treason and traitors as traitors, and to build the communities that authoritarian systems most need to sever. That is the through-line for the whole book club, and it is the thread the panel will pull for the next several weeks as they work the rest of the book.
Books Mentioned
Surviving Autocracy by Masha Gessen — IndieBound
Where to find resources
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Banner & Backbone Authors’ Notes
The America we strive for — it is one where we willingly remember the teachings of our past, humbly learn from our failings, proudly celebrate our successes, and boldly lead the way into a future for all people.
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Anti Fascist Book Club Team
~ Nick Paro | Kristofer Goldsmith | Stephanie Wilson | Tara Devlin ~
