Already, as the shock subsides, people are reaching desperately for an illusion of normality. And we can see two things happening.

The first comprises efforts to persuade people that Trump can’t be as dangerous as he seemed during the campaign, that he’s a typical salesman — willing to say anything to close the deal. And that the American constitutional system was so constructed to prevent any tyrant being an efficient wielder of power.

The second is that we see the aphrodisiac effect of power in action. It’s like great wealth — power creates a force-field around individuals that leads apparently sane and decent people to lose their judgement, and sometimes their principles. And of course it’s a giant attractor for unscrupulous and ambitious people. We could see this happening on CNN on the night of the election: the panellist who was supposed to represent the Trump point of view was treated like a pariah at the beginning of the night; but by the end he had attained the status of the Oracle of Delphi. We will see a lot more of this kind of servile cringe in the months ahead.

Meanwhile in the New York Review of Books Masha Gessen, a Russian and American journalist, author, and activist noted for her opposition to Vladimir Putin, has written a powerful antidote to this kind of human frailty. Her piece is worth reading in full, but here’s an excerpt from her ‘Rules for Surviving’ autocracy.

Rule #1: Believe the autocrat. He means what he says. [See the photograph above.] 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…

Rule #2: Do not be taken in by small signs of normality. Consider the financial markets this week, which, having tanked overnight, rebounded following the Clinton and Obama speeches. Confronted with political volatility, the markets become suckers for calming rhetoric from authority figures. So do people. Panic can be neutralized by falsely reassuring words about how the world as we know it has not ended…

Rule #3: Institutions will not save you. It took Putin a year to take over the Russian media and four years to dismantle its electoral system; the judiciary collapsed unnoticed…

Rule #4: Be outraged. If you follow Rule #1 and believe what the autocrat-elect is saying, you will not be surprised. But in the face of the impulse to normalize, it is essential to maintain one’s capacity for shock. This will lead people to call you unreasonable and hysterical, and to accuse you of overreacting. It is no fun to be the only hysterical person in the room. Prepare yourself.

Rule #5: Don’t make compromises. Like Ted Cruz, who made the journey from calling Trump “utterly amoral” and a “pathological liar” to endorsing him in late September to praising his win as an “amazing victory for the American worker,” Republican politicians have fallen into line. Conservative pundits who broke ranks during the campaign will return to the fold. Democrats in Congress will begin to make the case for cooperation, for the sake of getting anything done—or at least, they will say, minimizing the damage…

Rule #6: Remember the future. Nothing lasts forever. Donald Trump certainly will not, and Trumpism, to the extent that it is centered on Trump’s persona, will not either. Failure to imagine the future may have lost the Democrats this election. They offered no vision of the future to counterbalance Trump’s all-too-familiar white-populist vision of an imaginary past.

Way back in July, Dave Winer wrote an astute blog post that was a model of wisdom and common sense in relation to Trump. In it he pointed out that Trump is what we Internet folks call a troll. And we know how to deal with trolls:

The simple fix

It’s so important a lesson, learned so many times by so many people, through so much pain, that it has been codified into a mantra, so we never forget.

1. Don’t feed the troll.
2. Don’t feed the troll.
3. Don’t feed the troll.
4. Don’t feed the troll.
5. Don’t feed the troll.

Etc. Yet we keep feeding the troll.

Why?

Why indeed? Last night, the cast of the Broadway musical Hamilton gave Vice President-elect Pence a bit of a lecture. Right on cue, Trump then tweeted:

“The Theater must always be a safe and special place. The cast of Hamilton was very rude last night to a very good man, Mike Pence. Apologize!”

You can imagine the result. Liberal apoplexy on social media. Which leads the inimitable Jack Shafer to write:

Meanwhile, in the villainous golden lair he maintains in Trump Tower, Baby Donald laughed his best Dr. Evil laugh. Got ‘em again, he thought. Yesterday’s settlement of the Trump University lawsuit is the real news, but my Twitter incitement will dominate all else for at least 12 hours as people tweet, “How could he?”, “Oh, now he’s for safe spaces?” and “Don’t tell artists what to say or do!”

Spot on. And Trump’s opponents fell for it hook, line and sinker. As Shafer notes,

Have none of them been paying attention to Trump’s Twitter strategy for the past 17 months? For anybody who has read a half-dozen of Trump’s tweets, the pattern is obvious. He compiles these tweets precisely in order to elicit strident protest. It doesn’t matter to Trump that the cast of Hamilton was polite and respectful to Pence. It doesn’t matter that being rude to office holders is an inalienable right—hell, a responsibility!—of all Americans. To Trump’s followers the content of any one of his rebukes matters less than whom it’s directed at — New York liberals and their fellow travelers in this instance.

What’s been truly amazing about Trump’s Twitter strategy is how spectacularly successful it’s been. All through the campaign, while the rest of the world was asleep he unfailingly composed a tweet that ensured that he would lead the following morning’s news. And all that people could say was that a person who tweeted in the middle of the night must be off his head. Au contraire. Trump used Twitter as a way of keeping mainstream TV news on the hook.

And he’s still doing it.

So back to Dave Winer’s advice: stop feeding the troll. Let him tweet into the void. And focus instead on his plan to install his family in the Presidential Palace that we used to call the White House and the diehard reactionaries he’s installing in charge of the national security state.

Jeff Jarvis has a thoughtful essay on Medium about the failures of journalism in the campaign. Worth reading in full. This para caught my eye, though:

The idea of “balance” in any one media outlet has turned out to be as deceiving and bankrupt as the idea of “objectivity” — indeed, worse, for false balance is used to justify friction and fighting on the air and the damaging, uninformative scourge of the “surrogate” in this election. After helping to manufacture the Trump phenomenon, CNN actually believes hiring Corey Lewandowski provides balance. That’s not about informing the public. That’s not about journalism. That’s about producing entertainment.

Interesting article in the New York Times about a post-mortem conference call held by the Clinton campaign leadership. In it, Hillary apparently said that the FBI Director’s actions during the campaign’s closing weeks cost her the election. It’s not a conspiracy theory, though, because she’s not claiming that this was Comey’s intention.

“There are lots of reasons why an election like this is not successful,” Mrs. Clinton said, according to a donor who relayed the remarks. But, she added, “our analysis is that Comey’s letter raising doubts that were groundless, baseless, proven to be, stopped our momentum.”

Mrs. Clinton said a second letter from Mr. Comey, clearing her once again, which came two days before Election Day, had been even more damaging. In that letter, Mr. Comey said an examination of a new trove of emails, which had been found on the computer of Anthony D. Weiner, the estranged husband of one of her top aides, had not caused him to change his earlier conclusion that Mrs. Clinton should face no charges over her handling of classified information.

Funnily enough, in those last weeks — when Comey suddenly announced that the FBI was looking into Clinton-related emails on the laptop of the estranged husband of her closest aide and then, a few days later announced that the Bureau saw no reason to change its earlier view that Clinton should not be prosecuted — some of us began to wonder what he was up to. And of course conspiratorial explanations were raised as well as the usual cock-up theories. Comey is no J. Edgar Hoover, but still…

In a way, though, the most interesting thing about the Clinton debacle is the vivid demonstration it provides of how a modern, lavishly-funded, meticulously-planned, faultlessly executed, and digitally-delivered election strategy could be defeated by a campaign run by a contemporary version of a circus barker. The NYT report of the conference call makes this point well.

Before Mrs. Clinton spoke on Saturday, her finance director, Dennis Cheng, thanked the donors on the call, each of whom had raised at least $100,000. The campaign brought in nearly $1 billion to spend heavily on data efforts, to disperse hundreds of staff members to battleground states, and to air television advertisements — only to fall short to Mr. Trump’s upstart operation.

Donors conceded that, ultimately, no amount of money could match Mr. Trump’s crisp pitch, aimed at the economically downtrodden, to “make America great again.”

“You can have the greatest field program, and we did — he had nothing,” said Jay S. Jacobs, a prominent New York Democrat and donor to Mrs. Clinton. “You can have better ads, paid for by greater funds, and we did. Unfortunately, Trump had the winning argument.”

Of course nobody on the call was tactless enough to suggest that the failure might have had something to do with the fact that in a political climate fuelled by rage against political elites it might not have been a great idea to run someone who is, par excellence, a paradigmatic example of said elites.

I suppose — clutching at straws — one good outcome of the 2016 campaign is that it brings to an end the weird ascendancy of dynastic candidates in what is supposedly a democracy. Before Trump appeared on the scene, I thought it would boil down to a contest between the Bush and Clinton dynasties. At least we have been spared that.