masha gessen said on election night that same week, in november 2016, when it became clear in the wee hours of the morning on election night, that donald trump was going to win the presidency gessen argued that clinton instead of giving the speech that she gave she could, she perhaps should have just said this. and i will warn you, this is a little dark. it is a little stark. but given that she wrote this basically hours after election night, it also feels oddly prescient just a few years down the road now. so here's the alternate concession speech for hillary clinton as imagined by masha gessen. it starts, "thank you. thank you, my friends. 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 greeter 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 institutio

that was masha gessen a couple of days after the 2016 election. not long after timothy snider's book on tyranny was published. it followed a similar line of logic, looking at lessons from the collapse of various democracies across europe over the course of the 20th century to learn lessons for us, to learn lessons for how to protect our democracy and how to know if we're losing that fight to protect our democracy and what we should do then. snydey, quote, the european history of the 20th century shows us that societies can break democracies can fall, ethics can collapse and ordinary men can find themselves standing over death pits with fwuguns in their hands. we might be tempted to think that our democratic heritage protects us from such threats. this is a misguided reflex. americans today are no wiser than the europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism. our one advantage is we might learn from their experience. now is a good time to do so. he published this book right at the time of the inauguration of donald trump. the short book goes on to la

masha gessen said on election night that same week, in november 2016, when it became clear in the weeht, that donald trump was going to win the presidency gessen argued that clinton instead of giving the speech that she gave she could, she perhaps should have just said