The Overlooked Hallmark of the Trump Administration—and Other Autocracies
We generally understand the President’s failures as the products of cruelty and incompetence. But there is a third source: indifference.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-overlooked-hallmark-of-the-trump-administration-and-other-autocracies
I have written a lot of articles and several books about Russia’s transformation under Vladimir Putin, but the experience I’ve always found hardest to describe is one of feeling as if creativity and imagination were sucked out of society after he came to power. The reason is not so much censorship or even intimidation as it is indifference. When the state took over television, for example, it wasn’t just that the news was censored: it was that the new bosses didn’t care about the quality of the visuals or the writing. The same thing happened in other media, in architecture, in filmmaking. Life in an autocracy is, among other things, dull.