Unsettling the World (Modernity and Political Thought) by Jeanne Morefield

Author:Jeanne Morefield [Morefield, Jeanne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781442260306
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2022-04-28T18:30:00+00:00

Rather than Fields of Battle

The election of Donald Trump did more than offer America a terrifying glimpse of a racist, postdemocratic future. It also ushered in a new era of liberal panegyrics. In the pages of popular and semipopular academic journals, cable news, social media—any communicative space that would cozen their anguished howls—liberal public intellectuals struggled to come to terms with the election of a commander-in-chief who was willing to simply say things aloud that, for years, his more self-controlled predecessors had kept on the down low. In the context of foreign policy alone, Trump’s racist references to “shithole countries,” his glib asides about the size of his “nuclear button,” and his cavalier willingness to ask foreign governments to interfere in American elections (thus accidentally revealing the extent to which the United States has interfered in the elections of states around the globe since the end of the Second World War) relentlessly exposed the fragility of America’s enlightened self-perception.

Such utterances have driven some of the most mainstream liberal public intellectuals and political theorists to suddenly become fascinated by the politics of populism, identity, and—in the words of Rogers Smith—the “stories we tell ourselves” about “who we are.”138 For thinkers like Walzer, this has meant explicit hand wringing about what liberalism means “for us” in the context of a country in which nearly half of Americans want a White nationalist autocrat to be their president.139 Liberal thinkers and pundits worry about the “dangers” they didn’t see coming from the placid flow of American culture, dangers lurking behind our current moment.140 Similarly, Trump’s election compelled supporters of the “American-led liberal world order” like John Ikenberry to clutch their pearls in horror at the “hostile revisionist power” who sat in the Oval Office, scheming to overthrow everything good about that world order—“trade, alliances, international law, multilateralism, environmental protection, torture, and human rights.”141 In all, liberal public intellectuals have responded to Trump by turning inward and perseverating on “who we are” while mourning the loss of the liberal world.

Not surprisingly, given that Trump often presents like a character out of central casting for a film about the rise of Hitler or Mussolini, a number of these thinkers have turned toward investigations of Nazi Germany in an effort both to theorize the potential populist dangers flowing like toxins through the liberal body politic and to interrogate the aesthetic qualities of what William Connolly calls Trump’s “aspirational fascism.”142 From early journalistic fixations with Trump’s seeming passion for Mein Kampf to the subsequent explosion of cross-disciplinary literature on right-wing populism, scholars and public intellectuals have sought historical lessons in the rise of the Third Reich and in the Frankfurt School’s account of the authoritarian personality.143 In an indication of just how deeply the similarity between Trumpism and Nazism seemed to cut, in the week after Trump’s inauguration, so many people rushed out to buy Hannah Arendt’s classic text The Origins of Totalitarianism that Amazon completely sold out of copies.144

This turn to Arendt is simultaneously both deeply understandable and more than a bit ironic.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.