It’s beyond striking to watch President Obama talking calmly and reasonably about the transfer of power in the United States. It’s sad, but also heartening, to watch Hillary Clinton deliver a reasoned, thoughtful concession speech as the final act of dedicated service to the nation. Both have demonstrated such grace under unbelievable pressure, that it’s hard to find anything but admiration.
But grace is not always the answer, as Masha Gessen has noted.
However well-intentioned, this talk 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.
In fact, the evidence since the campaign, during the campaign, and in every moment of Donald Trump’s life is that he doesn’t intend to abide by the rules. He doesn’t mean to put the conflicts of the past behind him, or to show even a modicum of respect for the institutions, traditions, or historical limits of government. Handing him the keys to the kingdom as if this is another in a long line of neatly defined contests between political foes isn’t brave. It’s very, very foolish.
More dangerously, Clinton’s and Obama’s 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 Chamberlain’s 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 Clinton’s and Obama’s 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 Clinton’s speech but in spite of it.
The resistance to Donald Trump requires that this extraordinary, very not-normal situation not be normalized. Treating Trump as he was an ordinary politician, minimizing his atrocious statements, and ignoring the nature of the movement he was building was a huge component of what allowed this cancer to metastasize. Trump has been a fascist from the outset.
Sixty million people died in World War II, but fascism won. It didn’t win on the battlefield. It didn’t win right away. It won because the same fears, the same greed, the same hatred that fueled its growth in the first part of the twentieth century never went away. The symbols of fascism became anathema, but the causes … went deep. And gradually, slowly, one step at a time, all those vices became first tolerated, then treated as virtues, and then as the only acceptable view.
But the media would not go there. Would not say the “f” word, even as Trump used every word imaginable to demean women, immigrants, and anyone he added to his steadily growing list of enemies. The media could not be moved even by one of their own.
I warned, and eventually begged, a financially desperate and morally bankrupt media to stop promoting Mr. Trump, stop cowering to Mr. Trump, and protect the public from his persecutory plans.
I begged because the hardest hit will be those who are already the most vulnerable – blacks, Latinos, Muslims, immigrants. I begged because the historic victims of brutality are likely to become the future victims of an even worse brutality, one abetted not by a white supremacist movement lurking in the shadows, but dominating at centre stage.
This isn’t a joke. It was never a joke.
It’s also not an ordinary transition, in which we can watch the office changing hands and congratulate ourselves with thoughts of “Well, we didn’t win, but just look how charmingly civilized we are. Good democracy. Good boy.” This is deadly serious, and deeply dangerous, and resisting it means more than just frowning as the emperor’s barge floats past.
It’s far from too early to look at the rules Masha Gessen provides. Let’s make sure it’s not too late.
I have lived in autocracies most of my life, and have spent much of my career writing about Vladimir Putin’s Russia. I have learned a few rules for surviving in an autocracy and salvaging your sanity and self-respect. It might be worth considering them now:
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. … He has received the support he needed to win, and the adulation he craves, precisely because of his outrageous threats. Trump rally crowds have chanted “Lock her up!” They, and he, meant every word. ...
Rule #2: Do not be taken in by small signs of normality. … 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. ...
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.
I want to stop here to say—we are not immune to this. The idea that we’re somehow “special” among all the nations of the world is a big part of what made this possible. It can happen here. It just did happen here.
There are three more rules. Go read them. You need them. We all do.
It can happen here. So I began living life in retrospect, treasuring small moments: the last Christmas, the last first day of school, the last changing of the seasons. It felt fragile then, and it feels broken now.
I worry my children will not remember what it was like before. They are too young; simple joys will fade into political darkness. — Sarah Kendzior