Autocracy: Rules for Survival
However well-intentioned, [lots of talk about working with Trump] 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.
Clinton and Obama’s very civil [announcements about Trump’s election victory], which ended in applause lines, seemed to close off alternative responses to his minority victory.
One of the falsehoods in the Clinton speech was the implied equivalency between civil resistance and insurgency. This is an autocrat’s favorite con, the explanation for the violent suppression of peaceful protests the world over.
The second falsehood is the pretense that America is starting from scratch and its president-elect is a tabula rasa. Or we are: “we owe him an open mind.” It was as though […] now that the campaign was over, Trump would be eager to become a regular, rule-abiding politician of the pre-Trump era.
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.
I have lived in autocracies most of my life[…]. 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.
- 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.
- For all the admiration Trump has expressed for Putin, the two men are very different; if anything, there is even more reason to listen 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
- He has received the support he needed to win, and the adulation he craves, precisely because of his outrageous threats. Trump rally crows have chanted “Lock her up!” They, and he, meant every word. If Trump does not go after Hillary Clinton on his first day in office, […] it will be foolish to breathe a sigh of relief.
- To begin jailing his political opponents, or just one opponent, Trump will begin by trying to capture members of the judicial system.
- since Trump plans to use the judicial system to carry out his political vendettas, his pick for attorney general will be no less important.
- 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.
- 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 again–but by that time Dubnow had been killed.
- Rule #3: Institutions will not save you.
- many of these institutions are enshrined in political culture rather than in law, and all of them–including the ones enshrined in law–depend on the good faith of all actors to fulfill their purpose and uphold the Constitution.
- 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.
- The power of the investigative press[…]will 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 campaign
- Rule #4: Be outraged.
- 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.
- 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. 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 fruitless–damage cannot be minimized, much less reversed, when mobilization is the goal–but worse, it will be soul-destroying. In an autocracy, politics as the art of the possible is in fact utterly amoral.
- Rule #6: Remember the future.
- Nothing lasts forever.
- 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.