nov 10, 2016 - NYT Review of Books: Six rules for surviving autocracy

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Autocracy: Rules for Survival
Masha Gessen
Trump is anything but a regular politician and this has been anything but a regular election. It might be worth considering the rules I’ve learned for surviving in an autocracy and salvaging your sanity and self-respect.
November 10, 2016

"Thank you, my friends. Thank you. Thank you. We have lost. We have lost, and this is the last day of my political career, so I will say what must be said. We are standing at the edge of the abyss. Our political system, our society, our country itself are in greater danger than at any time in the last century and a half. The president-elect has made his intentions clear, and it would be immoral to pretend otherwise. We must band together right now to defend the laws, the institutions, and the ideals on which our country is based.”

That, or something like that, is what Hillary Clinton should have said on Wednesday. Instead, she said, resignedly,

We must accept this result and then look to the future. Donald Trump is going to be our president. We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead. Our constitutional democracy enshrines the peaceful transfer of power. We don’t just respect that. We cherish it. It also enshrines the rule of law; the principle [that] we are all equal in rights and dignity; freedom of worship and expression. We respect and cherish these values, too, and we must defend them."


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 Hitler's anti-Semitism was all posture. More recently, the same newspaper made a telling choice between two statements made by Putin's press secretary Dmitry Peskov following a police crackdown on protesters in Moscow: "The police acted mildly—I 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 should—both 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 him—from 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.
2: Gessen’s second rule for surviving autocracy was “Do not be taken in by small signs of normality.” When Gessen wrote that they were referring to the human tendency to treat periods of relative calm as somehow indicative that the threat posed by autocracy would pass. It’s natural for people to believe that “things will be okay;” viewing discrete periods of relative calm as something more meaningful and permanent is a natural reaction to living under unprecedented stress. Gessen simply warned Americans not to allow themselves to be deceived by this.
Gessen revisited this essay in 2017, amending one of the rules to “Pay attention to the ways in which the Trump presidency breaks the moral compass.”)
“It is no exaggeration to say that Mr. Trump is running for the presidency on a platform of lawlessness, promising to wield the power of the state against his enemies — real or imagined. Today, millions and millions of Americans support him for that reason or despite it.”
3: The third rule is “Institutions will not save you”), which warns that they are entirely dependent upon Trump being repudiated by the American electorate. Otherwise, the same man who has already hinted at pardoning the violent felons who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, would be in a position to nullify and thwart those proceedings, by violence if necessary,Observes, “there are few moral or legal hurdles left to clear after pardoning war criminals.”
(this last reference is to Trump pardoning charged with brutally killing defenseless prisoners and civilians, had become a cause celebre to the political right. Their pardon by Trump set a tone of condoning patently lawless behavior in furtherance of his political ends.
Gen. Mark Milley, upon becoming the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 2019, “found himself in a disconcerting situation: trying, and failing, to teach President Trump the difference between appropriate battlefield aggressiveness on the one hand, and war crimes on the other.”
Trump’s answer was, “But you’re all killers – right?”
4: Rule number four is “Be Outraged."
“No single event or revelation has produced enough outrage to cause Trump to be removed from office, nor has one seemed to hurt his chances for reëlection. Not Charlottesville. Not the revelation of a Trump Tower meeting with a Russian lawyer who promised to deliver dirt on Hillary Clinton. Not the regular revelations of past acts of corruption and of current lies. Not the continued spectacle of a government of haters and incompetents. The outrage dissipates, and Trumpism persists.”
(This, of course, was before the public revelations of his attempt to overthrow democracy, his massive business fraud and stealing highly classified government documents and lying about them for almost two years)
5: Rule number five: Don’t make compromises.
“I also feared that a great many federal employees would face an impossible choice between staying in their jobs under a reprehensible Administration and leaving, forfeiting the chance to do good within a system that had started rotting from the top. Trump’s attacks on the institutions of government have been so fast and brutal, however, that many people made the choice without torment: they left.
Democracy is based on compromise. A commitment to purity can ultimately serve only to widen the divide between those who elected Trump and those who could not imagine his Presidency. A commitment to purity, in fact, risks becoming a commitment to refusing to imagine his Presidency, even a year after the election. A commitment to purity is antithetical to political engagement. Yet political engagement risks or even demands a measure of normalization.”
6: Rule six: Remember the future.
This seems counter-intuitive, but I think it refers to the ability to extrapolate from the present a worst-case scenario.
“We will enter the post-Trump future with decimated federal agencies and a frayed judiciary stacked with Trump appointees. Much of the opposition, however, has been concerned less with preserving or revitalizing institutions than with devising novel means of removing Trump from office.”

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