Philip Gourevitch, a long-time writer for The New Yorker, argues that institutions have stabilized America and much of the rest of the world. But Donald Trump’s move into the Oval Office, Gourevitch says, has been like a wrecking ball, destroying institutions that have held up the country for centuries.
During a Monday night lecture at UW-Madison, Gourevitch mixed historical precedent with contemporary analysis in a speech that served both as a biting modern-day evaluation of America’s global standing with Trump as president and an extensive history lesson on foreign affairs.
Gourevitch calls Trump the most consequential president since George Washington, likening the significance of a pre- and post-revolutionary America to a country before and after Trump’s presidency. He says Trump has “totally [changed] what’s going on on this continent in a couple of months.”
“There is whatever we had for the last couple hundred years and then there was this giant rupture,” Gourevitch says. “Nobody has as rapidly, as dramatically, assaulted our institutions from within and taken them on.”
He bookended his talk with quotes from an Abraham Lincoln speech about the importance of institutions to democracy. The destruction of institutions and “the established order of things” has been a key tenet of the Trump administration, says Gourevitch.
Though Trump has not passed any major pieces of legislation, Gourevitch says that it’s not fair to say the current administration is failing. He says they’ve gutted institutions by simply not appointing new people as ambassadors, greatly weakening the state department and foreign policy as a whole. This breaking of institutions, Gourevitch argues, has a significant effect on international relations.
He says this effect on international affairs has been dramatic, arguing the election of Trump has been the biggest shock since the fall of the Berlin Wall. He says America’s interventions on the world stage in the past have given a sense of order throughout the world.
Gourevitch has covered international affairs for more than two decades. His first article in The New Yorker, published in 1995, covered the genocide in Rwanda. He later wrote a book on the subject, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Gourevitch acknowledges that America’s foreign policy wasn’t perfect before the 2016 election — listing what he called mistakes like the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as not intervening in humanitarian crises. But now the institutions that have held America steady for decades are explicitly under attack and that is having ripple effects around the world.
Citing a recent speech by Trump, Gourevitch says the president painted two significant evils afflicting America: ISIS and bureaucracy. The latter is key to the survival of the country, Gourevitch argues.
“Bureaucracy... is expertise. It defends its own interests at a certain point. It’s one of the few things that becomes what Lincoln talked about that he called institutions,” Gourevitch says. “It is the thing that resists pure ideology. It says, ‘I’m sorry, but it’s getting warmer around here. There is no future if we don’t do something.’”
Trump’s reading of the danger of institutions is different from that of George Orwell or Franz Kafka, who warned of the threat of totalitarianism. Gourevitch says the president mostly attacked the expertise that comes with bureaucracy, which gets handed down methodically from worker to worker.
In a moment of romanticizing bureaucracy — a rare occurrence — Gourevitch says it fulfills the vision of “America as a kind of can-do competence.”
Even with two credible threats of nuclear war, Gourevitch says the destruction of America would come from within, as institutions fall.
“[Lincoln] didn’t fear a foreign attack. He said, ‘Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant to step the ocean and crush us in a blow? Never,’” Gourevitch says. “‘No,’ Lincoln said, ‘The only danger that America really need to fear would come from within.’”
