Maya Angelou tried to teach us that when someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time. Similarly, Marsha Gessen, writing in The New York Review of Books two days after Donald Trump was elected in 2016, warned us that we should believe Donald Trump, 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. . .”
Here is the concession speech Gessen says Hilary Clinton should have made:
“Thank you, my friends. Thank you. Thank you. We have lost. We have lost, and this is the last day of my political career, so I will say what must be said. We are standing at the edge of the abyss. Our political system, our society, our country itself are in greater danger than at any time in the last century and a half. The president-elect has made his intentions clear, and it would be immoral to pretend otherwise. We must band together right now to defend the laws, the institutions, and the ideals on which our country is based.”
Of course, being traditional and conciliatory, Hilary did not make that speech but argued that we should honor the peaceful transfer of power and support the new President.
Gessen, who had spent a career, living in autocracies and writing about Vladimir Putin’s Russia, warned us in November 2016 and provided six rules we should have followed to deal with the impending autocracy in the United States.
See Gessen’s analysis and warnings at the following site: