I’ve had this on my shelf for a while — I picked it up at a used bookshop a couple years ago, and it’s sat on my shelf like a relic. I’m not American, but even for me, revisiting the Trump years isn’t something I really ever felt necessary. For some reason it seems to have renewed relevance.

I’ve been a fan of Masha Gessen’s writing for a long time: my dad gave me The Man Without A Face, their biography of Putin, years ago, and I’ve followed their stuff in the New Yorker and other outlets since.

This book hit the press in spring of 2020. Timing it with the election likely made it quite the fast seller, but so much happened immediately after this book came out that it feels almost quaint (which I recognize the irony of). It really is a picture of a very specific moment in time – after the first pandemic lockdowns had started, before Trump lost the election and January 6 happened.

And the events of January 6, 2021, and so much of what happened after that, do so much to validate Gessen’s thesis – we have normalized this behaviour. The right-wing politicians have neutralized the press by making their words meaningless. It’s enough to make you wistful for the good old days of Gessen’s book.

Surviving Autocracy surely lands a little differently than it did on publication, but it’s no less important. Rather than a retrospective from the closing days of something, it’s possibly a preview to another four years of it.

It’s incredible to look at the events that were so shocking and relive the near-daily feeling of astonished disbelief of those days. Particularly for me, Gessen’s recounting of the ‘Muslim ban’ back and forth brought back forgotten memories of daily jaw-dropping news.

Anyway, no matter the outcome of the current election, this book is illuminating. It’s easy now to look back at those days and see January 6, 2021 as the day everything changed, but this book reminds us that so much changed in the four years before it, that we have yet to truly understand what the lasting damage is.

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