Masha Gessen, Biden and Trump Have Succeeded in Breaking Reality, NYTimes, July 20, 2024.
The last three paragraphs:
As for Trump, despite the gestures he made in his speech on Thursday night toward national reconciliation, tolerance and unity, the convention reflected the ultimate consolidation of his power. If he is elected, a second Trump administration seems likely to bring what the Hungarian sociologist Balint Magyar has termed an “autocratic breakthrough” — structural political change that is impossible to reverse by electoral means. But if we are in an environment in which nothing is believable, in which imagined secrets inspire more trust than the public statements of any authority, then we are already living in an autocratic reality, described by another of Arendt’s famous phrases: “Nothing is true and everything is possible.”
It’s tempting to say that Trump’s autocratic movement has spread like an infection. The truth is, the seeds of this disaster have been sprouting in American politics for decades: the dumbing down of conversation, the ever-growing role of money in political campaigns, the disappearance of local news media and local civic engagement and the consequent transformation of national politics into a set of abstracted images and stories, the inescapable understanding of presidential races as personality contests.
None of this made the Trump presidency inevitable, but it made it possible — and then the Trump presidency pushed us over the edge into the uncanny valley of politics. If Trump loses this year — if we are lucky, that is — it will not end this period; it will merely bring an opportunity to undertake the hard work of recovery.
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