By David Pan · Monday, June 28, 2021 The following commentary is based on a text that appeared originally in German in Junge Freiheit. An English translation of the interview with Hans-Georg Maaßen in Die Weltwoche has been posted separately today in TelosScope, here.
The interview with Hans-Georg Maaßen documents his reactions toward the charge of anti-Semitism against him by several German media outlets in the last few weeks since he announced his candidacy for the German Bundestag. The controversy has revealed more about the deterioration of the German media landscape than about Maaßen’s own views and character. Spurred on by a charge against him of racism and anti-Semitism by climate activist Luisa Neubauer on ARD’s political talk show Anna Will, media outlets scoured Maaßen’s writings with the hope of giving their accusations some substance. The dearth of the evidence against him led them in the end to an article that he published with Johannes Eisleben in English in TelosScope. But rather than engaging with the specific arguments of the article, the commentators have engaged in a kind of witch hunt.
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By David Pan · Friday, June 18, 2021 Telos 195 (Summer 2021): Global Perspectives on Constitutionalism and Populism is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.
 After watching the images of the January 6 Capitol riot, many Americans concluded that right-wing populism threatens the basic rules of our constitutional order. In this view, the U.S. Constitution establishes a universal order that is detached from any particular orientation and provides the neutral ground upon which differences can be discussed, while populists upset the rules of discussion and destroy the basis of a common project. Consequently, since populism is at odds with the Constitution, the solution would be to try to reimpose a measure of rationality upon the unruly. Yet the nagging concern behind this perspective is not just the violation of rules but the suspicion that populism is ultimately motivated by racism and sexism. In this case, the real opposition would not be between constitutionalism and populism but between two understandings of the Constitution, that is, two conceptions of the character of the people, one egalitarian and the other racist. The difficulty is that the laws of a constitution cannot exist independently of a people with a specific history. Rules cannot be neutral but imply a perspective on the world, and the conflict between constitutionalism and populism may in fact be a symptom of a conflict between two factions within the people, each of which is attempting to establish itself as the proper representation of the will of the people as a whole.
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By David Pan · Friday, March 19, 2021 Telos 194 (Spring 2021): Political Theology Today is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.
 What does political theology mean today? At the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute conference from which many of the essays in this issue originated, a primary goal was to discuss the crisis of secular liberalism and “how faith is reshaping culture and politics today.” But even this project perhaps limits too much the scope of political theology, implying that we have a choice between reason and faith, or that political theology is a commitment to faith rather than an analysis of the element of faith that underlies all of our endeavors. The idea of political theology begins with the premise that every existing human order is built upon some understanding of ultimate meaning. The task would then be to analyze the kind of meaning that each existing order embodies and determine the kinds of decisions about meaning that are made and need to be made at various points in its history. Even secular liberalism, to the extent that it constitutes an existing order, presumes some answer to this question of meaning, and a closer look at the political theology of the United States reveals a mythic dimension that underlies its liberal democratic processes. The essays in this issue examine the political theological underpinnings of economy, politics, technology, and religion, laying out the ways in which these areas of human life develop not as autonomous spheres but as the result of struggles over a set of political theological choices.
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By David Pan · Friday, December 18, 2020 Telos 193 (Winter 2020): Race, Russia, and Rights is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.
 What is not up for discussion? The answer to this question defines a political order, and the repressiveness of such an order will depend on where this boundary is set between the discussable and the undiscussable. But it is not as if more discussion necessarily means less repression. Certain topics—genocide, torture, slavery—definitely need to be off the table as legitimate political measures. Other topics—the choosing of rulers and historical facts—need to be discussable in order to avoid tyranny. In between lies a gray area whose definition will establish the character of each political order. Conversely, a lack of consensus on this issue will lead to political instability that goes beyond the content of political debates, indicating that the question of discussability coincides with the problem of political identity. This issue of Telos will consider three areas in which discussability has become the main issue, leading to implacable conflict.
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By David Pan · Friday, September 25, 2020 Telos 192 (Fall 2020): Truth and Power is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.
 There is a strong temptation to oppose the idealism of truth to the realism of power in order to criticize and turn away from politics as a base pursuit. Science, facts, and ideals are cited as the objective truths that so often are ignored in favor of ideology, lies, and self-interest by those who wield power. Yet this opposition between truth and power can itself become a dubious tactic, as it is often the speaker who seeks to define an opinion as truth. This situation is complicated by the circumstance that there are three forms of truth that are often merged in such discussions.
First, there are natural scientific truths that even autocrats and totalitarians do not seek to deny, as they are the source of the technological tools that can support any attempt to maintain power. Here, there is certainly no conflict between truth and power. Not only does political power depend on technological achievement, but natural scientific facts cannot be covered up by lies and ideology for long. Consequently, political actors must pay attention to natural scientific and technical knowledge, even if they then instrumentalize it in different ways.
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By David Pan · Monday, June 15, 2020 Telos 191 (Summer 2020): Going Viral is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.
 While “going viral” has taken on a new meaning by recuperating an old one, it is the virtual experience that seems to be more enduring. Not only has the pandemic sped up the shifting of human activity onto virtual platforms, but the viral dynamics of social media seem set to outlast the microbial versions: it has turned out to be easier to lock down the Wuhan virus than President Trump’s Twitter feed. Yet in both cases, it is unclear whether it is the actual spread or the fear that is the greater danger. For this fear leads to the call for more authoritarian measures, whether this means censoring Twitter posts or locking down the population. But if viral spread leads to the reassertion of sovereignty, we also come to realize that the freedoms we have taken for granted are in fact the result of a curated space, in which the rules for interaction have always formed the hidden framework within which our lives have unfolded. As these framing conditions come into focus during the crisis, we have the opportunity to reimagine them in such a way as to retrieve sovereignty not as a kind of authoritarian reaction but as an understanding of how our values must inform the boundaries we set. This issue of Telos considers how the experience of going viral has come to dominate our political life as well as how our reflection on this process can free us to consider the alternatives.
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