With a presumption of good faith
Masha Gessen in the NYRB November 10, 2016 on the rules of survival in an autocracy:
[Obama] added, “The point, though, is that we all go forward with a presumption of good faith in our fellow citizens, because that presumption of good faith is essential to a vibrant and functioning democracy.” As if Donald Trump had not conned his way into hours of free press coverage, as though he had released (and paid) his taxes, or not brazenly denigrated our system of government, from the courts and Congress, to the election process itself—as if, in other words, he had not won the election precisely by acting in bad faith.
Similar refrains were heard from various members of the liberal commentariat, with Tom Friedman vowing, “I am not going to try to make my president fail,” to Nick Kristof calling on “the approximately 52 percent majority of voters who supported someone other than Donald Trump” to “give president Trump a chance.” Even the politicians who have in the past appealed to the less-establishment part of the Democratic electorate sounded the conciliatory note. Senator Elizabeth Warren promised to “put aside our differences.” Senator Bernie Sanders was only slightly more cautious, vowing to try to find the good in Trump: “To the degree that Mr. Trump is serious about pursuing policies that improve the lives of working families in this country, I and other progressives are prepared to work with him.”
Blah blah blah, but he’s not that guy. He never has been, and he wasn’t then, and it was obvious he wasn’t. Then he spent four years demonstrating how thoroughly he isn’t that guy. He’s a bad man. Really bad. The kind of bad where there’s no good to leaven it a little. The kind of bad that prefers doing bad things to doing good ones. The kind of bad that enjoys watching people suffer. The kind we all hope never to encounter.
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 Donald Trump had not, in the course of his campaign, promised to deport US citizens, promised to create a system of surveillance targeted specifically at Muslim Americans, promised to build a wall on the border with Mexico, advocated war crimes, endorsed torture, and repeatedly threatened to jail Hillary Clinton herself. It was as though those statements and many more could be written off as so much campaign hyperbole and now that the campaign was over, Trump would be eager to become a regular, rule-abiding politician of the pre-Trump era.
Eight years later, he’s eager to become the worst monster any of us have ever met in our nightmares.
Apparently Masha goes by only the letter M now, as she tumbles further down the trans rabbit hole.
It’s hard to believe she’s the same person who had such piercing insights once not long ago.
What a psychological mess the world has become over the last ten years. It’s hard not to blame social media for a lot of it. It has shredded our information networks and the webs of informational trust and social cohesion that had built up around them. The legacy media was never perfectly trustworthy, and whatever social cohesion we had was far from ideal, but what has replaced it is far, far worse. Now it seems everyone is adrift, clinging onto their own private little icebergs of reality, angry and afraid of the world all around them.
Arty, the world has been a psychological mess for much longer than that; social media, combined with the Trump ascent, simply ripped off the covering hiding the mess. Until we recognize where it started, and that it is real and not a misunderstanding by the Trump voters, that they really wanted him, we aren’t going to be able to clean up the mess. Even if we do recognize that, it may be too late.
Oh, his fans wanted him and consider hurting their perceived enemies worth whatever it costs but to the dumb fucks that put him over the top he was just a bloody Rorschach blot and a way of somehow changing the price of gas. They’ll not like it but given the (lack of) media environment will they even notice?
I suppose it’s probably made more difficult to do a class analysis when absolutely everyone in the USA thinks that they are middle-class and so are all other citizens, from the poorest to the most obscenely wealthy. It’s further complicated by the cruelty of a system in which almost everyone less wealthy than Trump is only one serious healthcare crisis away from absolute penury.
I suppose that, rather than fix the system, it’s easier to complain about having to pay anything at all for petrol. Here’s a table of petrol prices in USD per litre:
https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/gasoline-prices
As you can see, people in the USA have been paying way less for fuel than most, but the lack of sensible planning and infrastructure, together with a ridiculous focus on owning vehicles which are extremely thirsty, means that even though fuel is cheap, they’re probably spending a significant amount of money on it – money they notice paying, unlike the rip-off which is private health insurance.