Autocracy: Rules for Survival
Masha Gessen, who grew up in Putin’s Russia, has six rules for getting through the Trump years.
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.
Read the whole thing.
Of course he means what he says.
The one point, however, that she doesn’t cover in the article is the difference between Putin and Trump in temperament. Putin is focused and methodical. Trump is volatile and inconsistent. He doesn’t always know what he wants, he only knows what he wants now.
After all, when you win the White House with the slogan, “Make America hate again,” what else would you expect?
As noted it will be interesting to see if Trump can control himself, long term I doubt it. It will also be interesting to see if it matters, like the article says the corporate media will no doubt try to rationalize Trump, good luck on that. Interesting, and terrifying, times or what?
I don’t fear Trump; I fear the unified Republican government.
“There seemed to be a natural divide in the way Americans conducted themselves in social intercourse. He was a bit formal, certainly not demonstrative, by which they decided he was arrogant. He did not smile easily, by which they understood his pale-eyed attentions were something like a naturalist’s looking at a insect. He was a neatly composed, self-assured man who had left a European civilization whose constraints he did not want to be part of. He has come to America, as everyone else did, to be free. But Americans lacked something — perhaps the sense of human consciousness as tragedy. It was this sense that had governed his desire to do science since he’d been a schoolboy. For if not science, then despair.” –E.L. Doctorow, ‘The March’
@DG: Did you get to the march Thursday? Went on until 9, but my parking meter ran out at 7:30. It was a women’s march, which my Maoist friend neglected to tell me, so I caught breathers while they chanted “GOP, hands off me.” If you hear of any further demonstrations, please post it here.
We shall overcome