Masha Gessen's Surviving Autocracy Partly Explores Trump's Attack on Language

At Literary Hub, Masha Gessen discusses Trump's manipulation of language toward the end of meaning. "When writers and academics question the limits of language, it is invariably an exercise that grows from a desire to bring more light into the public space," Gessen writes, "to arrive at a shared reality that is more nuanced than it was before the conversation began: to focus ever more tightly on the shape, weight, and function of any thing that can be named, or to find names for things that have not, in the past, been observed or been seen as deserving of description." Later:

The “freedom of our speaking with one another” depends on a shared language. Trump’s attack on language is an attack on freedom itself. In his philosophy of the “rectification of names,” Confucius warned: “If language is not correct, then . . . morals and art will deteriorate; if justice goes astray, the people will stand about in helpless confusion. Hence there must be no arbitrariness in what is said. This matters above everything.” Trump’s lies and his word piles both are exercises in arbitrariness, continued assertions of the power to say what he wants, when he wants, to usurp language itself, and with it, our ability to speak and act with others—in other words, our ability to engage in politics. The assault on language may be harder to define and describe than his attacks on institutions, but it is essential to his autocratic attempt, the ultimate objective of which is to obliterate politics.

What can journalists, writers, and everyday speakers of American language do to resist the assault or to recover from the damage once it’s done? The Russian poet Sergey Gandlevsky once said that in the depth of the Soviet era he was taken with the language of hardware stores. He mentioned “secateurs” (garden shears). It was a specific word; it had weight, dimensions, shape.…

Read the full excerpt from Gessen's Surviving Autocracy at Lit Hub.