The US press corps recently released an open letter to the incoming president, published in the Columbia Journalism Review. It is carefully strident, anticipating the tensions while setting out a position of strength and intent.
It signals tactical shifts: finding alternatives to White House access, limiting the flow of false or incomplete information, cultivating sources in the bureaucracy, the prospect of joint investigations between news organisations that normally compete.
'We believe there is an objective truth, and we will hold you to that,' the journalists state. This would be a small start in correcting the false-balance narratives and conspiracy theories that have plagued news coverage and social media — from which media organisations have profited.
Over the past several years, the following terms have become currency: truther, denialist, post-factual, post-truth, fake news. It is a vocabulary that explains some of the anxieties of our time. It lends itself to the sensation that something fundamental is at stake.
Except for linguists and philosophers, most of us take language for granted. We don't remember or think about how we learned the basics and built on them. Whether Auslan, Arabic, Braille, Mandarin or Xhosa, we use such systems to interact with the world around us and make sense of experience.
We may think of words as units of agreement. 'I' am not 'you'. The 'sky' is 'up' not 'down'. These linguistic agreements about the concrete was basis for civilisation, as humans named things that could be safely eaten and grown, instituted rituals and hierarchies, delineated territory, and attributed value to resources for trade.
The State Library of Victoria, for instance, holds a shard of cuneiform that says: 'Taxes paid in sheep and goats in the 10th month of the 46th year of Shulgi, second king of the Third Dynasty of Ur'.
Many of the earliest written records were similarly prosaic. Language was initially a way of imposing order, of fixing memory and holding together entire socio-economies. It stands to reason that when language is decoupled from reality — or at least agreements about a shared, objective reality — there are de-civilising effects.
"Donald Trump is the apotheosis of this deepening incongruity between language and lived realities."
History proves the case. The construction of racial difference led to slavery, colonisation and segregation. Nazi propaganda facilitated ghettoes, invasion and genocide. Systematic denial of climate change has led to policy inertia, which must soon be reckoned with.
Language is the first and last contest. It manifests in the appropriation and co-option of words that minorities have long used to challenge ongoing histories of oppression, such as privilege, safe spaces and genocide. Many white men now see non-discriminatory policies as privileging women and minorities, claim safe spaces for themselves (like gaming), and hold that diversity and pluralism amount to white genocide.
Donald Trump is the apotheosis of this deepening incongruity between language and lived realities. In the weeks before the US election, Salena Zito wrote of Donald Trump: 'The press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.' This resonated in the Philippines, where the difficulties of parsing between literal and figurative expression was already destabilising relationships between the president, the press, the judicial and legislative branches, the police force and civil society. Not being able to take consequential public statements as meant — that loosens threads that bind democracies.
In other words, the work cut out for US journalists is cut for all who live in this era. If language no longer organises reality in a way that meets basic agreement, not much holds us together. That might be why we feel that something beyond politics is at stake.
Fatima Measham is a Eureka Street consulting editor. She tweets @foomeister .