Imma up this from comments (w/ mods) — on that ~meme about keeping a list so you remember whatever pre-Trump:
I had a viscerally negative reaction to the idea. If felt defeatist and inward from the beginning, focused on personal memories rather than social action. Of course I understand the trauma, but I don’t think it was just that Trump was elected; beneath that was a lack of conviction, almost a bad conscience, about the possibility of taking real personal risks to oppose this political turn. And that, for the most part, is what we’re seeing: people adapting, getting by, turning inward, diminishing their hopes and even realizing their fears. (No judgment implied there, any more than I’d judge anyone in a brutal downward political turn somewhere else.) But idea of the list seemed too willing to embrace that capitulation in advance, which is exactly what it said on the label. What do you expect from the advice of “experts on authoritarianism”? We’d get very different advice from “experts on utopianism” or even just from “progressive activists.” The list seemed like a strategy (as in “coping” strategy or “productivity” strategy) suited to a milieu that had already given itself over to the to-do list, a genre that in any case is like a treadmill on thin ice. What were people supposed to do with these lists? When? In what context?