One year ago, Masha Gessen provided what has, unfortunately, proven to be the indispensable guide to what the election of Donald Trump would mean to our nation.
Trump is anything but a regular politician and this has been anything but a regular election. Trump will be only the fourth candidate in history and the second in more than a century to win the presidency after losing the popular vote. He is also probably the first candidate in history to win the presidency despite having been shown repeatedly by the national media to be a chronic liar, sexual predator, serial tax-avoider, and race-baiter who has attracted the likes of the Ku Klux Klan. Most important, Trump is the first candidate in memory who ran not for president but for autocrat—and won.
Today it’s Michelle Goldberg who has delivered a piece that’s equally insightful, and perhaps even harder to accept.
The country has changed in the past year, and many of us have grown numb after unrelenting shocks. What now passes for ordinary would have once been inconceivable. The government is under the control of an erratic racist who engages in nuclear brinkmanship on Twitter. He is dismantling the State Department, defending the hollowing out of the diplomatic corps by saying, on Fox News, “I’m the only one that matters.” …
You can’t protest it all; you’d never do anything else. After the election, many liberals pledged not to “normalize” Trump. But one lesson of this year is that we don’t get to decide what normal looks like.
While we’re sometimes cheered by tales of Trump’s endless absurdity or boosted by signs of some possible relief, what’s harder to face is the extent to which we’ve been relentlessly ground down. Crushed. Transformed into something both baser and more dangerous than what we were on this day minus a year.
And what Goldberg has captured—perhaps too well—is how thoroughly overwhelmed resistance has been to this point.
Wednesday, Nov 8, 2017 · 2:33:54 PM +00:00
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Mark Sumner
Obviously, last night’s election results were about as good as could be imagined, and a clear repudiation of Trumpism.
Just remember rule # 4.
Be outraged... it is essential to maintain one’s capacity for shock. This will lead people to call you unreasonable and hysterical, and to accuse you of overreacting. It is no fun to be the only hysterical person in the room. Prepare yourself.
Stay outraged. It’s a good day to celebrate … but not to relax.
A year ago, Gessen’s rules for autocracy looked bleak: dark artifacts lifted from the failure of other states. Boogeymen for the political set. But now … they seem all too prescient.
Rule #1: Believe the autocrat. He means what he says. Whenever you find yourself thinking, or hear others claiming, that he is exaggerating, that is our innate tendency to reach for a rationalization. …
Rule #2: Do not be taken in by small signs of normality. Consider the financial markets this week, which, having tanked overnight, rebounded following the Clinton and Obama speeches. Confronted with political volatility, the markets become suckers for calming rhetoric from authority figures. So do people. …
Rule #3: Institutions will not save you. It took Putin a year to take over the Russian media and four years to dismantle its electoral system; the judiciary collapsed unnoticed. The capture of institutions in Turkey has been carried out even faster, by a man once celebrated as the democrat to lead Turkey into the EU. Poland has in less than a year undone half of a quarter century’s accomplishments in building a constitutional democracy.
What Trump said about immigrants? He meant it. His willingness to destroy the environment? Absolutely serious. His disregard for rules, for convention, for every tradition that had served to glue our political system together is relentless. His willingness to destroy the press, subvert the Justice Department, and invert the purpose of every government agency is unlimited. Right now, the EPA administrator and his hired-from-industry minions are meeting at a luxury resort with representatives of the chemical industry, where they will talk about further removing the barriers to using known toxins. And we accept it.
If Gessen’s article defined the rules, Goldberg’s fills in the box score.
This nightmare year has upended assumptions about the durability of the rules, formal and informal, governing our politics. There’s a metaphysical whiplash in how quickly alarm turns into acceptance and then into forgetfulness. It was astonishing when Trump installed Steve Bannon as his chief strategist, a man who had previously run a white nationalist tabloid; now it feels like ages ago that he was even in the White House. (He’s been gone less than three months.)
It was staggering when credible evidence emerged that one of the president’s former national security advisers, Sebastian Gorka, was a member of a Nazi-aligned Hungarian group called the Vitezi Rend, and even more staggering when that revelation didn’t immediately end his White House career.
But the most difficult thing to accept out of Goldberg’s piece may be what it shares with Gessen’s: the experience of people who have been there before.
A secular Turkish journalist told me, her voice sad and weary, that while people might at first pour into the streets to oppose Trump, eventually the protests would probably die out as a sense of stunned emergency gave way to the slog of sustained opposition.
Maybe we’ll start to edge away from Trump today. Maybe the results of this election will show an America that rejects racism as policy and crudeness as strength. That’s a hope that deserves some thoughts and prayers and votes and volunteers and hey, there’s still time to get to your local Democratic headquarters and do some good.
But just in case, read these articles. Read Gessen. Read Goldberg. Maybe print them out. Just in case.