Surviving Autocracy

Surviving Autocracy
Masha Gessen

Near the end of this terrific assessment of where the United States, and the West more generally, is at politically Masha Gessen tells us that “Three years of Trumpism has extinguished whatever remained in American politics of the language of solidarity or the idea of public welfare.”

I don’t want to sound superior or blasé about this, because that’s not how I feel, but this ship sailed a long, long time ago. Lewis Lapham has tracked for decades the falling fortunes of the word “public” in our civic discourse, from signifying something noble and valuable to referring to anything corrupt and worthless. The same cynical transformation in Russian political language is described by Gessen, with Trump only left to mock such notions as democracy and moral principle as fit only for suckers and losers.

Gessen comes at the issue of Trump’s aspirational autocracy (or, more broadly, what I would call Republican oligarch envy) from different angles but I think what she has to say about the corruption of language by way of Trump’s mangled “word piles” is perhaps the most on target. We don’t have an honest language at hand anymore to describe what has been happening to Western democracy. We can speak the names of the crimes we are witnessing, but they’ve lost their meaning.