Guest post: The rewriting of the rule book has already begun

Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on Drag them and burn them he says.

As Timothy Snyder put it, they are clearly (from memory) preparing the ground for worse things to come. I don’t know to what degree it’s a conscious strategy (as opposed to instinctual, trial and error etc.), but anyway it’s a prime example of the weaponization of cognitive dissonance: Signal your illiberal and authoritarian agenda in advance while making sure there is just enough plausible deniability to give you an alibi (”it’s just trolling”, ”not to be taken literally” etc.). Get your followers into the habit of going along with, excusing or explaining away, even actively applauding increasingly dehumanizing and violent rhetoric, unambiguous, shameless lies, blatant corruption, openly authoritarian and illiberal behaviors etc. until such trangressions have definitely become normalized, legitimate, within the range of acceptable behavior. Then, once the actual violence begins, your followers have no face-saving way of turning back. Claiming ignorance is definitely not an available option at this point, nor, for that matter, has it been since before Trump was first elected back in 2016. The guy is many things, but subtle is not among them.

I take no comfort in the idea that there will be another election in four years, nor in the idea that a president can only serve for two terms. That was under the old rules. The rewriting of the rule book has already begun, and with foxes now in complete control of all the henhouses the way things have always worked in the past is hardly a reliable indicator of what can or cannot happen in the future. The same trends we have seen in the U.S. have already killed democracies elsewhere, and judging by everything we have observed so far I see little to support the American exceptionalist idea that ”it can’t happen here”.

I often worry that I’m becoming a bit of an ”alarmist”, a ”doomsayer”, an ”apocalypticist” etc., but in this case, as it turns out, even my pessimism didn’t go far enough. As I have previously stated, I would have been surprised if Trump didn’t win the election, but I also predicted that he wouldn’t win the popular vote. I stand corrected.

Of course Trump himself is not going to live forever, but Trumpism is going to be with us for the rest of our lives, and with a popular majority now having a stake in defending their choice, just like the other frequently prophesied ”Peak Tr…”, I wouldn’t count on ”Peak Trump” to happen anytime soon.

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