News from the Division of Languages and Literature

“Trump comes along and taps into the deep anxieties of people who are truly anxious because they have been economically and socially unstable for more than a generation,” says Gessen in an interview in The Nation. “He taps into that and says, ‘OK, I’ll take you back to an imaginary past.’ There is very little on the other side to counterweigh this emotional appeal. You can’t counterweigh it by saying, ‘I have a good résumé, and I’ll fix things.’”