Surviving Autocracy

by Masha Gessen

The leader or leaders who will help American politics heal after Trump will need to re-embrace the language of ideals—and hope. The longer Trumpism lasts, however, the harder that path will be, because of the damage Trump is inflicting on political language. When the time for recovery comes, as it inevitably will, we will need to do the work of rebuilding a sense of shared reality. For journalists, the task is much bigger than returning to an imagined state of normalcy before Trump, or even than deciding to retire some words and rehabilitate others. A new focus on using words intentionally will not be a matter for usage manuals but rather will require that journalists accept a responsibility that anodyne headlines, equivocal statements, and the style of extreme restraint have helped avoid. To state directly what they are seeing, journalists will have to reveal where they stand. To tell stories that situate the current moment in history, journalists will have to acknowledge that the media is inherently a political actor and decisions journalists make—which words to use and which stories to tell—are political decisions. And to make these decisions, journalists, too, will need to abandon the idea that politics is the province of technocrats—and accept their responsibility for shaping and facilitating the political conversation citizens must have in a democracy. In their relationship to the next president, journalists will have to reassert their position as representatives of ...