One Hillary Clinton supporter outside her hotel in New York the morning after the election said, “I’m feeling physical pain. I’m shocked. I’m sad.” Articles with headlines like “Day of Mourning,” “An American Tragedy” and “Autocracy: Rules for Survival” have bounced across the Internet. As the New Yorker’s David Remnick wrote, “This is surely the way fascism can begin.”

At times like these, it helps to look to our past for perspective. And the truth is that we’ve been here before, many times, throughout the 19th century and in living memory.

In 1968 and 1980, the same liberal, educated and urban swaths of the country voiced similar fear and despair about the outcome – a sense that the nation as they knew it could not survive. And yet here we are, decades later, still enamored with the republic they were sure was doomed.

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