Venezuela, Renee Good and Trump’s ‘Assault on Hope’

In the early twentieth century, there was this anarchist idea about the propaganda of the deed. The propaganda of the deed was that there were these forms of direct action and many of them violent, assassinations, bombings, that when you did them, they were so spectacular. Everybody would hear about them. And when everybody heard about them, there would be copycats by making the impossible possible, by making clear that society did not work how you thought it worked, that the state did not have the power you thought it had, that could rupture society itself and create the possibility of a moment of revolutionary upheaval. I think there is a way in which you should and can understand the Trump administration as operating often through propaganda of the deed. Now they're not an anarchist collective, they're a state. They're a regime. But they operate, not so often through the dull work of rules and laws and legislation and deliberation, but through spectacle and through the meaning of particular spectacles. Venezuela was a spectacle. They do not seem to have planned for the aftermath. They were decapitating the Maduro regime, but they left the regime otherwise, completely in place. Nobody seems to know even in the administration what it means for America to be running Venezuela, but it was an example, an act that showed something. And even before the capture of Maduro, they had chosen not to fight the drug war, the fentanyl scourge, through laws and legislation on addiction and and drugs, but instead do these very high profile bombings of alleged drug boats that even if they were drug boats, they're probably carrying cocaine because fentanyl doesn't come here that way. It was spectacular. It was a message. It was showing what they could do. It was a deed that everybody could see and would talk about. Liberation day, you can keep going on and on and on like this. The Trump administration is an administration of spectacle. And I've heard it sometimes described as reality TV administration, but I don't think that's quite right. Because what reality TV wants is ratings. But these spectacles, this propaganda, is meant to carry messages. It is meant to make clear how the world now works. My guest today is Masha Gessen, who grew up in The Soviet Union, who's my colleague here at Times opinion, has written remarkable books like The Future is History about living under Vladimir Putin. And who's been a clear and relentless and very perceptive voice on what it means and what it is like to live in a country that is turning into a different kind of regime. And I wanted to talk to them about what propaganda is being spread through these deeds. What rupture with the way things were done? What revolutionary moment the the Trump administration is trying to instantiate through all these moments of spectacle that we are living through one after another after another. As always, my email, Ezra …