Indulge me in a bit of bunker-mentality catastrophizing for the moment. Sometimes it's worth being mentally prepared for the worst, even if you're hoping for the best.
Walk with me for a (too long) bit and be suspicious of power with me. Imagine the possibility that we may have elected someone with authoritarian tendencies to the White House. If that were the case, how would we act, and how would we know that we had crossed a line from the normally constituted order into an extra-constitutional order?
Marsha Gessen's new article in the New York Review of books takes us some distance there:
Autocracy: Rules for Survival | by Masha Gessen | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books
Here are her rules for surviving an autocracy from the article:
Gessen comes from a background of dealing with established autocracies, where citizens are more political price-takers than price-setters, and that's not the American context. Americans have the mixed blessing of not being accustomed to autocrats: mixed because it's good we haven't had to go through it, but bad because we may be unskilled in recognizing them.
So, perhaps, it's worth while to think about how we would recognize an autocracy, should it (heaven forbid) ever emerge, and how we might respond. If we look at the emergence of autocratic/authoritarian/fascist/totalitarian regimes (not to equate those categories, but to recognize the potential progression) from the perspective of citizen response, I think we can broadly periodize courses of action given the phases of autocracy into (1) Fight, (2) Run, and (3) Die Well.
(1)
Fight. The first phases of an autocratic regime are (a) the dissemination of propaganda, (b) censorship of the press and/or the citizenry, and (c) the use of mass rallies to energize the ruler's base and create an illusion of widespread public support. They may not occur in this order, but all have been historically necessary to shore up the power of the autocrat. This phase has been effectively resisted through legal and extra legal methods, so fighting back seems a prudent choice.
(2)
Run. The second phase is the persecution of scapegoated minorities and the disappearance of dissenting elites. At this point, living as a public person in dissent is no longer possible, and running is a reasonable course of action because the institutions and practices of resistance have been eroded.
(3)
Die well. The third phase is the declaration of some sort of emergency that allows the ruler to suspend the constitution and/or the rule of law. From the perspective of the citizen, the initial hope is to still make it out, and the other apparent hope is to shut up and hide. The end of this phase is to take hold of one's life and choose the spin it takes all the way to the backstop.
All of the above proceeds as bald assertion in order to avoid boring everyone, but I expect that anyone familiar with the histories of Germany, Italy, Japan, Argentina, the Philippines, and/or Spain will see some of these broad phases present in those cases.
None of this is to accuse Trump preemptively of being a monster. It's only, in the spirit of Montesquieu, to be suspicious of power and always prepared for the worst.
By imagining the worst possible world that goes all the way into the dark, my hope is that while living in a world well short of that darkness we might recognize our own moment correctly and act appropriately.
The catastrophizing I've done above - esp #3 - might seem off the wall, but we've dealt with all of this darkness in (barely) living memory. It is real and it is possible. I think preparing for the possibility of its revival makes us better citizens.
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