Masha Gessen Is Worried About Outrage Fatigue
Interview by
Your book “The
Future Is History” traces the lives of intellectuals following the fall of the
Soviet Union and the rise of Vladimir Putin. What do you make of the political
climate in the United States, which feels particularly hostile to intellectuals
and experts right now? The
basic idea of the book — that a people robbed of the tools of
self-understanding find themselves at a dead end — actually has relevance to
this country. Not that I think Americans are at a dead end, but we should be
cognizant of that danger.
So I can imagine
you weren’t enamored of the term “alternative facts.” I get really nervous when impossible phrases
are created. In academic circles, the idea of fixed facts has been
problematized for a long time, so that in itself doesn’t disturb me. The
postmodern project was to get a better understanding of facts by questioning
whether we can have them. Now we’re confronted with a nihilistic project of
just saying there’s no such thing as facts.
Based on what you
know about the Russian government, do you believe there’s going to be evidence
of collusion between this president and the Russian government? I have doubts that the investigation will be
able to produce definitive evidence of sustained coordination between the Trump
campaign and the Russian government. It’s a lot of wheeling and dealing, a lot
of freelancers and subcontractors — it’s really mostly people trying to make
money. There’s no strategy. Will they be able to show that the government
funding was for hacking the Democratic National Committee? I don’t think so. I
don’t think that Donald Trump is capable of holding a thought for more than
three seconds, so how can we possibly imagine that he actually had some sort of
sustained relationship that had an articulated strategy behind it?
So much has been
made of Trump’s affinity and respect for Putin. What do you think Putin thinks
of Trump? I think that he
feels disappointed. Putin really assumed that once Trump — who had such clear
admiration for him — was elected, it would be convenient for Trump to change the
relationship with Russia profoundly and instantly. On a larger scale, I think
that it’s very difficult for Putin to deal with an unpredictable interlocutor,
because he has always been the madman on the international
stage. Weirdly, I think it would have been easier for Putin to deal with
Hillary Clinton, who would have been tough but very consistent.
In your essay
“Autocracy: Rules for Survival,” your third rule was that institutions will not
save you. What do you make of United States institutions in the last
year? A lot of what we
think of as democratic institutions are informal ones, like the White House
press briefing. There is no law that guarantees press access to the White
House. Communication was lessening during the Obama years. There was every reason
to suspect that Trump was going to create an adversarial relationship and that
people were going to be faced with the impossible dilemma between
sort-of-complicity and access.
At the same time,
there’s a strong pushback to that: It feels like a big news story drops every
weekend. The question is
how sustained and effective this pushback can be over the course of four or
eight years. Institutions function in relationship to one another, so when you
have an institution that is being destroyed, the system begins to tear. A great
example of that is the travel ban — the reason the judiciary was able to act so
quickly was that civil society, which is also an institution, had sprung into
action. The whole democracy depends on its existence. We’re seeing civil society
fatigue with the different iterations of the travel ban, which is basically the
exact same travel ban all over again, and that’s what I’m really worried about.
Gradually, the fatigue is starting to stick.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/03/magazine/masha-gessen-is-worried-about-outrage-fatigue.html
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