How Autocrats Meddle With Elections
The Trump administration has its eyes on the midterms and beyond. In this episode, Anne Applebaum speaks with North Carolina pastor Dawn Baldwin Gibson, whose vote was challenged, and voting rights expert Stacey Abrams about voter suppression tactics, gerrymandering, the SAVE Act, and the growing threats to free and fair elections in America.
When the rules of elections are rewritten by those in power, the mechanisms of accountability break down. This is the pattern Applebaum has documented across autocracies worldwide — and it is now playing out domestically.
Why SALT Features This Work
SALT documents the mechanisms by which lethal force becomes routine and insulated from accountability. Anne Applebaum’s work maps a broader pattern: how autocratic systems form, how they cooperate across borders, and how they dismantle the institutions designed to check their power.
Understanding the playbook is the first step to resisting it. Her research provides the historical and global context for what SALT documents at the local level.
Action Is The Antidote To Doomscrolling Anxiety
Edward Norton makes the case that action — not doomscrolling — is the antidote to the anxiety so many people feel about the state of democracy. When you channel that energy into something concrete, the paralysis breaks.
Norton closes with a stirring reading of Walt Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” a poem that speaks directly across time to remind us that every generation has faced these anxieties — and that we are not alone in them.
This is the core of what SALT believes: Freeze, Remember, Rise. Document what’s happening, then act. The alternative — scrolling in silence — is permission.
From “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” — Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1856)
Flood-tide below me! I see you face to face!
Clouds of the west — sun there half an hour high — I see you also face to face.
Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes, how curious you are to me!
On the ferry-boats the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home,
are more curious to me than you suppose,
And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence are more to me,
and more in my meditations, than you might suppose.
It avails not, time nor place — distance avails not,
I am with you, you men and women of a generation,
or ever so many generations hence,
Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt,
Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd,
Just as you are refresh’d by the gladness of the river and the bright flow, I was refresh’d.
It is not upon you alone the dark patches fall,
The dark threw its patches down upon me also.
Closer yet I approach you.
You have waited, you always wait, you dumb, beautiful ministers,
We receive you with free sense at last, and are insatiate henceforward.
Great or small, you furnish your parts toward eternity,
Great or small, you furnish your parts toward the soul.
Autocracy in America — The Full Series
A podcast from The Atlantic reporting on the sweeping changes unfolding in the United States. Hosted by Anne Applebaum with experts from Johns Hopkins University and beyond. Three seasons documenting how democratic norms erode in real time.
Essential Reading
Essential works on democracy, resistance, and the human spirit — required context for understanding what SALT documents.
Walt Whitman’s masterwork — a radical declaration of human equality, connection across time, and democratic spirit. “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” speaks directly to future generations: “I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence.” The original American poem of resistance through presence.
How modern dictatorships — Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela — form sophisticated networks of kleptocratic finance, surveillance technology, and shared propaganda to preserve power and undermine democracy worldwide.
Why democracies slide into authoritarianism. Applebaum examines the seductive lure of nationalism and one-party rule, drawing on personal experience across Poland, Hungary, the UK, and the United States.
How Soviet control was imposed on Eastern Europe after WWII — the step-by-step dismantling of civil society, media, and democratic institutions. A case study in how totalitarian systems are built.
The Ukrainian famine of 1932–33 — a deliberate act of state terror that killed millions. Essential background to understanding state violence as policy and the long roots of the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
The definitive history of the Soviet concentration camp system. When state power operates without accountability, this is where it leads. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.
Knowledge Is Resistance
Understanding the patterns of autocracy is the first step to stopping them.