This Is Who We Are Now
When Donald Trump won the first time, I spoke to a journalist friend in Turkey to commiserate. I told her about all the protests that were planned, and she gently tried to prepare me for disappointment. She and her friends had protested Recep Tayyip Erdogan when he was prime minister, she said. But in time, the protests subsided, and life within a country of diminishing freedoms ground on. This conversation stayed in my mind throughout the Trump presidency as a warning against letting down our guard. When Trump was finally ejected from the White House, I felt patriotic pride in the endurance of the anti-Trump resistance, which had never for a moment accepted his authoritarian grotesquerie as our new normal.
It won’t be that way this time. Trump’s first election felt like a fluke, a sick accident enabled by Democratic complacency. But this year, the forces of liberal pluralism and basic civic decency poured everything they could into the fight, and they lost not just the Electoral College but also quite likely the popular vote. The American electorate, knowing exactly who Trump is, chose him. This is, it turns out, who we are.
So I expect the next few months to be a period of mourning rather than defiance. My own instinct — which conflicts with the demands of my job — is to retreat into my family, to look for solace in time with friends, in theater and in novels, to block out the humiliating truth about what my country has decided to become. On Wednesday morning I returned to an essay from The New York Review of Books published in 2019 about the Russian term “vnutrennaya emigratsia,” or internal emigration, a deliberate embrace of one’s own alienation. “For many Russian authors and artists for centuries, the idea of ‘turning inward’ and living oblivious of the political concerns of the moment has been a vital skill and even an art form,” wrote Viv Groskop. It’s a skill, I suspect, that many of us will at least temporarily try to cultivate to avoid going completely insane.
