One week into the Age Of Trump

Wading through the shit flows emanating from 5th Avenue and D.C. feels exhausting. It seems important to try. A few post-election articles have helped me navigate.

1). Insight and outrage fill Ryan Lizza's commentary about the president-elect's first week: 

Donald Trump's First, Alarming Week As President-Elect

What's worst? Assaulting the free press and 1st Amendment on a near-daily basis? Ignoring the rule of law and using the DOJ as a weapon against perceived enemies? Suborning U.S. foreign policy interests to Russia? Normalizing white supremacy and hardcore xenophobia (with the appointment of former Breitbart editor Stephen Bannon as senior counselor), not to mention garden-variety bigotry (with the appointment of a man the GOP in another era rejected for a federal judgeship, Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, as head of Justice)? Putting paranoid Islamophobia at the heart of national security policy (with the appointment of Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn as national security adviser)? Running roughshod over conflict of interest laws (by, among other things, seeking security clearances for son-in-law Jared Kushner and having Ivanka Trump, designated to run the family business and without security clearance, sitting in on Trump's first meeting with a foreign head of state [Japan])?

2). I was heartened by this smart take on fighting an elected, personality-driven authoritarian from an Italian finance professor, Luigi Zingales, who witnessed the era of Berlusconi. 

The Right Way To Resist Trump

Lessons: The GOP scorched-earth policy didn't make Obama a one-term president. Focus on policy, not personality. Find philosophical areas of overlap, and wage battles for distributed systems of power (such as an independent judiciary and an empowered, adversarial press) and Democratic principles. 

3). And this, from Russian and American journalist Masha Gessen, who witnessed the rise of Putin, strikes me as essential reading for the new era: 

Autocracy: Rules For Survival

Her 5 rules: Believe the autocrat; his words reveal his darkest impulses. Don't put blind faith in institutions (such as an independent judiciary and an empowered, adversarial press). Don't normalize the extreme. Be outraged. Don't compromise core principles. 

Gessen's article strikes me the one most likely to be worth revisiting in the difficult months and years ahead. 

4). In a different vein, Farhad Manjoo's analysis on the destabilizing role of social media to our political and media power structures, and the gains in power for formerly marginalized groups such as white supremacists and hacker collectives, is far-sighted and frightening. 

Social Media's Globe-Shaking Power

Summary quote: "It’s time to start recognizing that social networks actually are becoming the world-shattering forces that their boosters long promised they would be — and to be unnerved, rather than exhilarated, by the huge social changes they could uncork."

5). For political lessons the Democratic Party needs to draw from the election, I haven't seen a smarter read than Bay Area writer Ezekiel Kweku's: 

Skin In The Game: How To Beat White Nationalism In The Polls

Key quote, which responds to a lot of energetic and wasteful discussions I've seen on my social media feeds: "The practice of pigeonholing voters into the categories of 'racist' and 'not racist' is counterproductive. A more useful frame is to decide which voters can be persuaded to vote for Democratic candidates and which can't." 

Peace.