Surviving Autocracy by Masha Gessen

Author:Masha Gessen [Gessen, Masha]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2020-06-02T00:00:00+00:00

16.

HOW POLITICS DIES

What was lost first, and almost imperceptibly, was substantive political discussion. Countries look to their political leaders to articulate who they are as a people, what future they are building, what hopes, dreams, and ideals unite them and make them a political community. In the Trump era, there is no past and no future, no history and no vision—only the anxious present. There can be no hopes, dreams, and ideals where there is no shared reality; and there is no political community where there is only the self-obsessed and endlessly self-referential president. One did not notice the disappearance of political speech immediately—it was like an object that, by the time one realizes it is gone, has been absent for some time.

In 2019, Trump delivered a Fourth of July address that in the earlier days of his administration might have been described as “presidential.” Commentators noted that Trump didn’t use the opportunity to attack the Democratic Party, to issue explicit campaign slogans, or, it would appear, to make any impromptu additions (with the possible exception of one moment, when he claimed that American troops commandeered enemy airports during the Revolutionary War). The president was so disciplined on the occasion of the republic’s two hundred and forty-third birthday that Vox called his speech “inoffensive.” Slate gave the speech credit for being “not a complete authoritarian nightmare.” The Times noted that Trump called for unity, in a gesture uncharacteristic of his “divisive presidency.” The word “tame” popped up in different outlets, including Talking Points Memo, which concluded that “the whole thing was pretty standard.”

The celebration itself was in fact anything but standard. After two and a half years, Trump got what he had first said he wanted for his inauguration: a military parade, complete with flyovers. But against this background, Trump delivered one of his less explicitly offensive speeches—unless, that is, one considered its place in the tradition of presidential Fourth of July addresses.

Trump’s most recent predecessors had presided over Fourth of July naturalization ceremonies. A rhetorical link between the holiday and immigration had long seemed unbreakable. During his last Independence Day as president, Bill Clinton chose to speak in New York Harbor, against the backdrop of Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty. “Perhaps more than any other nation in all history, we have drawn our strength and spirit from people from other lands,” he said. “On this Fourth of July, standing in the shadow of Lady Liberty, we must resolve never to close the golden door behind us and always, not only to welcome people to our borders but to welcome people into our hearts.” In a much-criticized series of Independence Day events in 1986, President Reagan lit the torch of the Statue of Liberty and noted the swearing in of twenty-seven thousand new citizens across the country. He also referred to the “immigrant story” of his then new Supreme Court nominee, Antonin Scalia.

That immigrant story was, of course, the story the Trump administration has abandoned. Trump’s American story

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