With mainstream media, celebrities, and Silicon Valley making a U-turn and starting to treat Trump as if he's just a normal politician, reminds me that it is incredibly worrying if people become complacent and accepting of what is going to happen once Trump and his fascist cabinet obtain power in January. Masha Gessen (who fled Russia) wrote about the rules you need to stick to in order to avoid falling into complacency and acceptance of autocracy. Please read it in full, it's really good with important lessons. So people shouldn't ever forget the anger and the fire they are feeling these days.
Rule #1: Believe the autocrat. He means what he says.
Rule #2: Do not be taken in by small signs of normality.
Rule #3: Institutions will not save you.
Rule #4: Be outraged.
Rule #5: Dont make compromises.
Rule #6: Remember the future.
Read the full article here: http://www2.nybooks.com/daily/s3/no...&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=sumome_share
This will be a recurring theme in the coming days, weeks, months, and years. People will fall into complacency and normalcy and grow accustomed to the fascism of Trump - it is important that we do not. Resist and survive.
However well-intentioned, this talk [Obama & Clinton's addresses to the nation] assumes that Trump is prepared to find common ground with his many opponents, respect the institutions of government, and repudiate almost everything he has stood for during the campaign. In short, it is treating him as a normal politician. There has until now been little evidence that he can be one.
More dangerously, Clintons and Obamas very civil passages, which ended in applause lines, seemed to close off alternative responses to his minority victory. (It was hard not to be reminded of Neville Chamberlains statement, that We should seek by all means in our power to avoid war, by analyzing possible causes, by trying to remove them, by discussion in a spirit of collaboration and good will.) Both Clintons and Obamas phrases about the peaceful transfer of power concealed the omission of a call to action. The protesters who took to the streets of New York, Los Angeles, and other American cities on Wednesday night did so not because of Clintons speech but in spite of it. One of the falsehoods in the Clinton speech was the implied equivalency between civil resistance and insurgency. This is an autocrats favorite con, the explanation for the violent suppression of peaceful protests the world over.
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. This will happen often: humans seem to have evolved to practice denial when confronted publicly with the unacceptable. Back in the 1930s, The New York Times assured its readers that Hitlers anti-Semitism was all posture. More recently, the same newspaper made a telling choice between two statements made by Putins press secretary Dmitry Peskov following a police crackdown on protesters in Moscow: The police acted mildlyI would have liked them to act more harshly rather than those protesters liver should have been spread all over the pavement. Perhaps the journalists could not believe their ears. But they shouldboth in the Russian case, and in the American one. For all the admiration Trump has expressed for Putin, the two men are very different; if anything, there is even more reason to listen to everything Trump has said. He has no political establishment into which to fold himself following the campaign, and therefore no reason to shed his campaign rhetoric. On the contrary: it is now the establishment that is rushing to accommodate himfrom the president, who met with him at the White House on Thursday, to the leaders of the Republican Party, who are discarding their long-held scruples to embrace his radical positions.
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. Panic can be neutralized by falsely reassuring words about how the world as we know it has not ended. It is a fact that the world did not end on November 8 nor at any previous time in history. Yet history has seen many catastrophes, and most of them unfolded over time. That time included periods of relative calm. One of my favorite thinkers, the Jewish historian Simon Dubnow, breathed a sigh of relief in early October 1939: he had moved from Berlin to Latvia, and he wrote to his friends that he was certain that the tiny country wedged between two tyrannies would retain its sovereignty and Dubnow himself would be safe. Shortly after that, Latvia was occupied by the Soviets, then by the Germans, then by the Soviets againbut by that time Dubnow had been killed. Dubnow was well aware that he was living through a catastrophic period in historyits just that he thought he had managed to find a pocket of normality within it.
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 centurys accomplishments in building a constitutional democracy.
[...]The national press is likely to be among the first institutional victims of Trumpism. There is no law that requires the presidential administration to hold daily briefings, none that guarantees media access to the White House. Many journalists may soon face a dilemma long familiar to those of us who have worked under autocracies: fall in line or forfeit access. There is no good solution (even if there is a right answer), for journalism is difficult and sometimes impossible without access to information.
The power of the investigative presswhose adherence to fact has already been severely challenged by the conspiracy-minded, lie-spinning Trump campaignwill grow weaker. The world will grow murkier. Even in the unlikely event that some mainstream media outlets decide to declare themselves in opposition to the current government, or even simply to report its abuses and failings, the president will get to frame many issues. Coverage, and thinking, will drift in a Trumpian direction, just as it did during the campaignwhen, for example, the candidates argued, in essence, whether Muslim Americans bear collective responsibility for acts of terrorism or can redeem themselves by becoming the eyes and ears of law enforcement. Thus was xenophobia further normalized, paving the way for Trump to make good on his promises to track American Muslims and ban Muslims from entering the United States.
Rule #4: Be outraged.
If you follow Rule #1 and believe what the autocrat-elect is saying, you will not be surprised. But in the face of the impulse to normalize, it is essential to maintain ones 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.
Rule #5: Dont make compromises.
Like Ted Cruz, who made the journey from calling Trump utterly amoral and a pathological liar to endorsing him in late September to praising his win as an amazing victory for the American worker, Republican politicians have fallen into line. Conservative pundits who broke ranks during the campaign will return to the fold. Democrats in Congress will begin to make the case for cooperation, for the sake of getting anything doneor at least, they will say, minimizing the damage. Nongovernmental organizations, many of which are reeling at the moment, faced with a transition period in which there is no opening for their input, will grasp at chances to work with the new administration. This will be fruitlessdamage cannot be minimized, much less reversed, when mobilization is the goalbut worse, it will be soul-destroying. In an autocracy, politics as the art of the possible is in fact utterly amoral. Those who argue for cooperation will make the case, much as President Obama did in his speech, that cooperation is essential for the future. They will be willfully ignoring the corrupting touch of autocracy, from which the future must be protected.
Rule #6: Remember the future.
Nothing lasts forever. Donald Trump certainly will not, and Trumpism, to the extent that it is centered on Trumps persona, will not either. Failure to imagine the future may have lost the Democrats this election. They offered no vision of the future to counterbalance Trumps all-too-familiar white-populist vision of an imaginary past. They had also long ignored the strange and outdated institutions of American democracy that call out for reformlike the electoral college, which has now cost the Democratic Party two elections in which Republicans won with the minority of the popular vote. That should not be normal. But resistancestubborn, uncompromising, outragedshould be
Read the full article here: http://www2.nybooks.com/daily/s3/no...&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=sumome_share
This will be a recurring theme in the coming days, weeks, months, and years. People will fall into complacency and normalcy and grow accustomed to the fascism of Trump - it is important that we do not. Resist and survive.