Hey, folks! Anand here.
I just had another informative, illuminating, head-spinning, therapeutic, and, dare I say, healing conversation with Ruth Ben-Ghiat, the scholar of authoritarianism and editor of Lucid, the newsletter covering autocracy and threats to democracy globally.
Thank you to the more than 4,000 of you who joined live. Talk about building a new kind of media. Wow. We are floored.
People who like freedom and democracy turn out to be numerous. That is good news.
If you missed our live conversation, we encourage you to watch the entire video above.
In the public interest, we are opening this video to all. But we’re also asking candidly that folks support the half dozen or so people who now write for and edit and otherwise support the work of The Ink by becoming a paying subscriber.
Take a moment to support fearless, independent reporting, and to help us keep bringing you conversations like this one. Or give a gift or group subscription.
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Call notes from The Ink’s managing editor, Michael Berk
We covered a lot of territory:
* It’s the three-year anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and, even more significantly, perhaps the end of an 80-year transatlantic era as Donald Trump does his best to withdraw from America’s commitments and replace them with a mafioso, art-of-the-deal transactionalism — and we talked about how this leaves a vacuum for Russian and Chinese power.
* We talked about the continuing failure of legacy media to call things what they are — to continue to tell the story of what Trump and Musk are up to as a business story, of Musk applying startup techniques to government, of Trump acting like a businessman — when, Ben-Ghiat reminds us, these “drain the swamp” efforts are one of the oldest authoritarian scams.
* We looked at what the German elections might mean, and saw some signs of hope in the AfD’s underperformance — and the way in which young voters turned to the left in big numbers. For Ben-Ghiat, this is a lesson that, to oppose autocrats, you can’t run to the center — you need to dig in and stand for progressive values.
* And, as we often do, we talked about the psychological ground of politics, about how Musk’s OPM letter demanding federal employees justify their existence in bullet points is part of an overall strategy to create trauma, one that goes back to Project 2025 and OPM head Russell Vought’s plan to keep government workers in distress. As Ben-Ghiat told us, this is part of the playbook: authoritarians threaten — and they don’t need to act further because people just obey. That’s what people need to resist.
Everyone should head over to Lucid, by the way, and read Ben-Ghiat’s account of her disinvitation from delivering her Bancroft Lecture at the U.S. Naval Academy — it’s a case study in how authoritarians stifle dissent and something everyone should be aware of — because it illustrates how afraid they are of that dissent, and how critical it is to express it.
Marching orders
We’ve been trying to turn these talks into opportunities and come up with advice you can act on right away.
A point we kept coming back to in this morning’s conversation was that our sense of alarm is not joined by enough people. We are outnumbered by people who are broadly sympathetic but not alarmed. And that’s something that we need to change.
Our marching orders for you this week are simple:
Be the anti-fascist skunk at the garden party of apathy and obedience.
If you hear about local protests, tell everyone — as Anat Shenker-Osorio told us last week, creating social proof — giving people the incentive to act like they think their neighbors are acting — is essential to building political power, and it’s easy to get started.
* The enemy is denial and the desire for life to go on, to be able to go about your business as usual. It’s up to us to make the connections, to show people how what Trump and Musk are doing will make business-as-usual impossible.
* If you hear about local protests, tell people, spread the news — if people think nobody is resisting, that creates negative momentum. So create positive momentum
* Most people don’t want to be subjugated — they want to be free. Remind them.
Again, in the public interest, we are opening this video to all. But we’re also asking candidly that folks support the half dozen or so people who now write for and edit and otherwise support the work of The Ink by becoming a paying subscriber.
Take a moment to support fearless, independent reporting, and to help us keep bringing you conversations like this one. Or give a gift or group subscription.
Your support allows us to open these ideas to as many people as possible, no paywall.
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