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...
During the Presidential campaign, Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen wrote this article for the New York Review of Books, predicting what America would look like immediately in the wake of Trump's election. She presciently described a period of protests and counterdemonstrations, much like we are seeing right now, and most strikingly captured the feeling of unreality during the transition when the stock market, for example, would chug along unconcerned, much like it has over the past few days, and people went about their daily lives, much as we all are now starting to do. The article described what would come next as well, as Trump mobilized certain segments of the American populace to support his policies. I invite you to read it here.
After November 8, 2016 (a calendar date which may end up etched in the world's consciousness as September 11, 2011) Gessen wrote another article for the NYRB, originally titled “Why We Must Resist" and now bearing the heading of "Autocracy : Rules For Survival”.
As we await the inauguration of the first President to be accused of child rape, the first President who has successfully prevented Americans from seeing his tax returns, the first President who won the office on a platform of hatred and rhetoric intended to divide and inflame Americans against each other, and the first President to rely on Twitter-bots masquerading as grassroots support, the natural temptation is to cleave to illusions of normalcy, if for no other reason than to preserve our individual sanity.
Thus as Donald Trump meets with President Obama for a chat about the transfer of power, both emerge representing it as “encouraging,” and we all take in a collective breath while the shards of shattered hopes laying on the floor appear to reconfigure themselves in such a way that if we squint our eyes and shut our ears for an instant, things may seem like they may actually not be as horrible as we had contemplated. We are urged by the losing candidate to help the new President govern, by our Party that they are willing to cooperate, by our outgoing, now irrelevant President that we must “look to the future.”
By the New York Times, which bears at least partial responsibility for Trump’s election, that we must “give Trump a chance.”
Meanwhile Trump’s legislative arm in the Republican Party, Paul Ryan, begins to outline the process for the gradual dismantling of Medicare, and an acknowledged Climate Denier is casually announced for the post of EPA head, and plans are carefully laid to eliminate women’s reproductive rights on a national scale with the nodding approval of an indestructible and everlasting right-wing Supreme Court majority.
And we see a television interview in which President-elect Trump appears to waver on the repeal of Obamacare, except that he actually doesn’t, and we think for a fleeting instant to ourselves that he might repudiate his base’s cherished dream of wiping out healthcare for 22 million people. Because, as he said, “we can’t have people dying in the streets.”
Of course we can’t, we agree, breathing a sigh of relief at this new semblance of humanity in a President who stubbornly refuses to condemn the waves of racist violence that are now infiltrating even our public schools.
Gessen, who has lived under autocracies, is having none of it. And neither should we.
Her rules for surviving the coming onslaught are terse and to the point.
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.
The entire rise of Hitler was predicated on assumptions by other world leaders and a hopeful media that he did not mean what he said. While Trump is not Hitler, he now has the power and tools of government to make life as miserable and fearful for many Americans as if he was.
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.
Americans' short attention span and the normalization of Trump by our news media is exactly what got him elected in the first place. Although it may be counter-intuitive in our media cycle-centric world, the fact that things take time to get worse does not prevent them from getting worse. Trump’s probable Chief of Staff, Breitbart CEO Steve Bannon, is a propagandist with absolutely no knowledge of economics or experience in government. At some point, the rest of the world is going to realize that the U.S. Economy is essentially rudderless.
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.
The problem with reliance on the strength of American institutions, Gessen points out, is that those institutions require a modicum of good faith by our political representatives to survive. The Republican Party has already demonstrated that it would hold the Judicial Branch hostage in an election. It has vowed to default on the national debt if the whims of its most radical members are not catered to. Before the election of a feckless Donald Trump it was abundantly clear that our institutions are of little importance to a potent and virulent wing of the Republican Party, which, newly emboldened by a rubber-stamp President has no reason to hold back on their destruction.
The corporate press and media, of course, proved themselves impotent, having enabled Trump's rise in the first place. Gessen argues that the media’s need for access—and Trump’s selective manipulation of that need—will likely render it powerless.
The corrosive effects of “normalizing” what was once unthinkable can also dim the sense that life before Trump was a far better prospect than what came after, as many of us discovered during the Bush Administration. So Gessen's next point is key:
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 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.
Gessen warns that the easiest way to enable an autocrat and diminish whatever power you have is to compromise for the sake of "expediency.”
Rule #5: Don’t 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 done—or at least, they will say, minimizing the damage...[.]
And finally, although right now this might be very difficult, remember that all things must pass, and there is a future that has not been written.
Rule #6: Remember the future. Nothing lasts forever. Donald Trump certainly will not, and Trumpism, to the extent that it is centered on Trump’s 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 Trump’s all-too-familiar white-populist vision of an imaginary past.
Lastly, I would add one of my own. Remember we are not alone. We are the majority.
We will get through this.
[See also this post by roonie]