Outrage Is Not Optional

Russian journalist and dissident Masha Gessen began her career in the 1980s, cutting her teeth in the gay and lesbian press in the United States. Following the election, she wrote a touchstone piece on how to approach a terrifying political future in The New York Review of Books, titled "Autocracy: Rules for Survival." American exceptionalism suggests that the basic structure of the country-the system of checks and balances and the foundation of American democracy- is solid and safe forever. The presidential election has sparked a conversation about the role of the CIA and FBI, and some liberals in the United States have taken a political position that even a CIA coup against Trump would be welcome. No European country has a civil society like the American one, for the simple reason that in European countries there's a lot of state money that circulates in civil society-which I've always thought was a better system. [...]for a crisis like we're having, this weird church-state separation between American civil society and the government is a godsend. When the gay press became a vehicle for information about treatments, there was no internet. Journalists had to educate themselves on how the federal government regulated medication, and on biology and pharmacology in order to be able to read medical papers and write about them for an audience.