How Do We Make Art Under Autocracy?

A question I don't have the answer to and (scroll down for it) an urgent call to action.

Time is short, so if you don’t have time to read this whole post, please scroll down for an URGENT action item to save libraries nationwide.

"Life under autocracy can be terrifying, as it already is in the United States for immigrants and trans people. But those of us with experience can tell you, most of the time, for most people, it's not frightening. It is stultifying. It's boring. It feels like trying to see and breathe underwater because you're submerged in bad ideas, being discussed badly, being reflected in bad journalism, and eventually, in bad literature and bad movies." — Masha Gessen, writing in the New York Times (gift link)

A strange thing has happened over the past two months. We have moved, at lightning speed, from democracy to autocracy. There are many horrifying results of this transition—the illegal arrest and disappearance of immigrants and dissidents (as well as ordinary citizens who were mistaken for immigrants), the dismantling of critical programs and initiatives, the cruel targeting of political enemies and vulnerable populations, the attacks on education and science. These were all things I knew to expect. I knew, also, to expect literary censorship, having read Project 2025’s stated goal of incarcerating authors and librarians. (It’s on page 5.)

What I didn’t think about was what it was going to be like to make art in this new context.

I’m writing a novel at the moment that is about, among other things, the movement of refugees in a fictional world. When I started the book, I had things I wanted to say about the concept of home in a time when the climate crisis is forcing many people to flee their homelands. I still want to talk about those things. But in the current context, it’s hard to keep my fictional world separate from the real one. Whether I want it to be or not, my book is now in conversation with the sadistic violence and lawlessness of this administration and with every hateful statement being made about immigrants and refugees.

I’m also writing a nonfiction narrative for readers age 9 to 12. It was conceived as a lighthearted and heart-warming story, an escape from the darker topics of my previous nonfiction. I wrote the proposal in an optimistic mood, believing that Kamala Harris would triumph in the November election. Now, as I write the book itself, that mood is hard to recapture. Children are going to need comforting stories in the days ahead, and I’m determined to provide one. But as I write about events that took place less than two years ago, I feel as if I’m writing about another century.

When I imagine these books entering the world, I struggle to envision what the publishing environment will be like. There are practical concerns, like the question of where books will be printed if we are in a trade war with China. There are existential ones, like the threats to both libraries and librarians. And then there are the Orwellian threats to reality itself. Draft social studies standards in Oklahoma instruct students to find “discrepancies” in the 2020 election, propagating the false narrative that Trump won that race. The contributions of Black, Latino, and female military heroes have been deleted from Pentagon websites as if they never existed. Libraries on military bases are being stripped of their books. The Administration’s “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling” decree asserts that all instruction should “instill a patriotic admiration for our incredible Nation.”

How do we write for children who are being schooled in lies and propaganda? What stories do we tell an audience that may not ever learn how to distinguish fact from fiction? How do we continue to nourish their empathy, their optimism, and their commitment to justice while also giving them tools to survive the dark days ahead?

Trump, of course, would be delighted if no new stories were written and no art was created. His goal is an anodyne simulacrum of art, designed to soothe an impoverished populace into feeling untroubled by the injustices imposed upon them. In his continual nostalgia for an imaginary past, he has issued an executive order dictating that federal buildings must respect “classical architectural heritage.” (Justin Shubow, who drafted the president’s architectural decree, describes brutalist architecture, with its uniquely Jewish history, as looking “extremely foreign.”) The Washington Post reports that in taking over the Lincoln Center, Trump and his hand-picked board members are interested in staging community theater staples like “Phantom of the Opera,” “Camelot,” “Fiddler on the Roof,” “Cats” and “Hello, Dolly!” rather than anything written in recent decades, and in doing so without equity actors. Meanwhile, the National Endowment for the Arts has eliminated grants to under-served groups and communities and is now prioritizing patriotic projects that “celebrate the nation’s rich artistic heritage and creativity by honoring the semiquincentennial of the United States of America.”

If all of this sounds ominously familiar, it’s because it’s a page straight out of the authoritarian playbook. The Third Reich also decreed that art, literature, music, theater, and architecture should be free of foreign and “degenerate” influences, destroying or dismantling anything that was insufficiently Aryan and blackballing artists who didn’t toe the line.

“Bad ideas do a lot of the work of building autocracy,” Masha Gessen notes in the essay quoted above. “By forcing us to engage with them, they make our conversations, our media and our society dumber. By conjuring the unimaginable — radical changes in the geography of human relationships, the government and the world itself as we have known it — they plunge us into an anxious state in which thinking is difficult. That kind of anxiety is key to totalitarian control.”

The past two months have indeed made my creative thinking feel more labored and murky. Everything is suddenly about Trumpism, whether it wants to be or not. It’s as if an edict had been issued that a pile of desiccated dogshit was the only permissible artistic subject matter. No one is saying we can’t make art—not yet anyway. But it takes an act of will to turn the dessicated dogshit of the present moment into something alive and inspiring.

So far, my only answer is to soldier forward, trying to listen to the voice within rather than the mindless braying of our putative leaders. Today, I spoke to a group of high school students and told them how much the world needs their voices, their ideas, their creativity, their truthfulness.

I believe that: for them, for you, for me, for all of us. Somehow, all of us will need to get to work.

In the meantime, please take a minute to protest Trump’s latest attack on libraries.

This is the URGENT ACTION ITEM I mentioned at the top of the post.

Trump’s latest executive order defunds the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), an agency that is already operating at a minimum level, making up only 0.0046% of the overall federal budget. The agency funds libraries and museums in all fifty states and generates tens of millions of dollars in private philanthropy. Two important organizations, Every Library and the American Library Association, are asking people who care about libraries to call their representatives or send them a personalized letter begging them to overturn Trump’s executive order and to continue funding for IMLS in fiscal year 2026.

Take action here.

And please continue to support the arts by visiting museums and galleries, buying and reading books, attending concerts and performances, and making as much of your own work as you feel moved to make. We need your voice.

I bow to you,

Dashka