How Do You Explain Water to a Fish?
In the months after the 2024 election, America still felt fundamentally stable and familiar. I remember walking into class after the election and seeing my queer history professor with the look of having just seen a ghost. I too carried that same pallor in the weeks that followed. For far too many, the election of Donald Trump did not signal the end of American democracy or a rupture in our democratic norms. They still clung to the idea that nothing had changed.
Life at Harvard as a clinical instructor at the law school and masters student at the Kennedy School of Government continued on as usual. The Kennedy School even put together the usual post-election, "let's all come together and talk about this" as if what hadn't happened was a cataclysmic event that would fundamentally reshape everyone's lives for the worse. In short, the message was this is just politics as usual. It was anything but. It felt like everyone around me were like fish who couldn’t perceive the water around them, unable to see the profound change in environment because it had become their “normal.” The moment had me wondering, how exactly do you explain water to a fish?
That question haunted me in those months. Normalcy bias set in all around. Everyone wanted to believe things would be fine, that “it can’t happen here.” When extraordinary events become everyday, humans tend to normalize them as routine. Psychologists define normalcy bias as the tendency to underestimate looming threats and to continue as if everything is normal, even when the status quo has collapsed. People defaulted to inaction, “clinging to the belief that things will return to ‘normal’ instead of recognizing that a fundamental change has already occurred.”
I spent those same post-election months reading nearly every book on authoritarianism I could get my hands on from Hannah Arendt to Anne Applebaum and M. Gessen. I remember reading a chilling historical echo in the account of those who lived in Nazi Germany. In Milton Mayer’s interviews with Germans who lived through Hitler’s rise, one man recalled how even in academia, “you speak privately to your colleagues… but what do they say? They say, ‘It’s not so bad’ or ‘You’re seeing things’ or ‘You’re an alarmist.’” If you kept sounding the alarm, colleagues would “pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic.” Hearing my peers at Harvard dismiss my warnings in almost identical terms gave me the eerie sense of history repeating itself. Like those Germans who normalized the Nazis’ ascent step by step, people at Harvard were downplaying the danger as it unfolded in real time. Each new breach of democratic norms by Trump, each attack on the press or courts, was met with shrugs. After all, daily life continued; the sky had not yet fallen.
Yet I felt the sky falling in slow motion. I had studied enough history to recognize the classic authoritarian playbook in action. Trump wasn’t a political aberration to laugh off; he was following a script we’d seen before. As Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt showed in How Democracies Die, modern autocrats often come to power legally and then hollow out democracy from within. They undermine independent institutions like courts and the press, persecute the opposition through “legal” means, whip up resentment against vulnerable groups, and change laws to entrench their rule. This happens incrementally. There’s no overnight coup to jolt the populace awake. Instead, “each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse… You wait for one great shocking occasion… but the one great shocking occasion never comes.” The slow drip of abnormal events becomes the new normal. By the time people realize something is fundamentally broken, it’s often too late.
“It Can’t Happen Here” – Until It Does
I watched this normalization process in disbelief. My classmates rationalized each outrage. The first Trump administration wasn't so bad. You'll be okay if you have legal status. The president’s proposals were just bluster. The threats to jail political opponents were unlikely to be acted on. Even professors I respected voiced confidence that American institutions such as the judicial system would hold, that checks and balances would rein in the excess. Their assumptions were rooted in the idea that America was exceptional, immune to the authoritarian rot that plagued other nations. They were convinced “it” simply could not happen here, even as it was happening here. This is the paradox: people think democratic backsliding is something dramatic that only happens elsewhere, failing to see it unfolding in familiar surroundings.
In truth, authoritarianism in the 21st century often wears a suit and tie and speaks the language of laws and courts. It doesn’t always announce itself with tanks in the streets. As Levistky et al. noted, “authoritarianism is harder to recognize than it used to be… The descent into competitive authoritarianism doesn’t always set off alarms,” because modern strongmen use nominally legal tools to erode freedom. Governments slowly weaponize law enforcement and media against opponents while the majority of citizens go about their lives imagining everything is fine. The population becomes boiled frogs who don't jump out of the pot because the temperature rose so incrementally.
Cassandra’s Curse
During the beginning of the year, I often felt like Cassandra, the legend of Greek myth cursed to utter true warnings that no one heeds. I remember warning classmates to return from overseas before inauguration day due to the potential for a travel ban similar to the one in 2017 that could prevent them from returning. I was scoffed at and told I was overreacting. Instead, I heard patronizing assurances: “It’s not so bad,” “You’re seeing things,” “You’re an alarmist.” As the cliche goes, the road to fascism is lined with people telling you you're overreacting.
Being dismissed as alarmist took a personal toll. Living under constant political stress can distort one’s mental well-being. People under repressive regimes often internalize the oppression, coming to mistrust their own thinking and judgment. I experienced a taste of that gaslighting. I would lie awake at night replaying conversations where friends told me I was being too emotional, too negative. This isolation and self-doubt are exactly what an authoritarian environment breeds: it destroys trust between citizens (even between friends) and can make you doubt objective reality.
Ironically, what made me “paranoid” in others’ eyes was not paranoia at all, it was clarity born of vulnerability. I’m a transgender woman, and the last few years has seen a steady drumbeat in the persecution of trans people. You're not paranoid if they're actually after you. Trump courted voters with thinly veiled promises to eliminate “gender ideology.” I sat in horror watching the Trump campaign make trans issues a centerpiece of their campaign as they spent a quarter of a billion dollars attacking trans people. When you belong to a group that authoritarian-minded leaders scapegoat to this extent, you develop a finely tuned sense of danger. It’s like being a canary in a coal mine. The early poisonous gases of fascism, the hatred, the propaganda, the calls to purge “undesirables," hit you first. We notice the atmosphere becoming toxic before others do, because we are the ones struggling to breathe.
Demonizing a minority is a classic tactic of authoritarian regimes. Authoritarians often scapegoat vulnerable communities to rally support and divert blame. Naming a supposed crisis and blaming it on a minority group is a tried-and-true way for would-be autocrats to create an “us vs. them” mentality. Around the world, we see this pattern: Viktor Orbán in Hungary smears LGBTQ+ people as a threat to children in order to justify cracking down on dissent, just as Putin in Russia has weaponized anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment to solidify his power. In the United States, the far right’s fixation on trans people as a moral panic follows the same dangerous script. Trump himself, during a 2024 campaign event, marveled that his promise to eradicate “transgender insanity” from schools drew louder cheers than his tax cut proposals. I knew I was in danger, but how could I warn other they were too?
America is not magically immune to authoritarianism or fascism. We are simply another nation, made of human beings with the same cognitive biases and fears as any other. Despite that, I kept thinking, how could some of the world’s smartest students and professors be so blind to patterns described in countless history books and political theories? I realized that privilege played a role. Many of my peers, largely not from vulnerable groups, had the luxury of trusting the system. The threat was theoretical to them, whereas to me it was visceral.
I truly felt exasperated at times, frantically warning about the dangers that others found intangible or exaggerated. Only later, as the abuses piled up, detentions of college students for writing op-eds and protesting, the elimination of federal funding to universities, the open destruction of the federal government, and the economic meltdowns over tariffs, did some of those who once rolled their eyes at me come around to say, maybe you had a point. By then, I took no pleasure in being right. Like Cassandra watching Troy burn, I felt only heartbreak that my warnings had been necessary at all.
In the end, explaining water to a fish may be nearly impossible , but showing the fish that it’s in water, by gradually widening its world, just might save it. For all of us immersed in our day-to-day “normal,” the goal is not to live in fear, but to live in awareness. We must recognize when what feels normal is not normal at all, but rather a boiling pot that threatens us all. I refuse to stop sounding the alarm, because I want people to see the truth not live in the murky depths of denial. If that makes me an alarmist, then so be it.
