By Russell A. Berman · Wednesday, December 12, 2018 Telos 185 (Winter 2018) is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.
 Recall the 2016 campaign and even more the aftermath of the Trump victory: otherwise reasonable people rushed into heated rhetoric regarding the imminence of dictatorship and the end of democracy as we know it. Comparisons of the America of 2016 and Germany of 1933 proliferated, while denunciations of Republicans as Nazis or Nazi collaborators became common. It would be a worthwhile project for a student or scholar of American culture to cull through those statements and confront their authors with them today: if they were so wrong in 2016, what value is their judgment today, moving forward?
For those predictions were simply and utterly wrong. Of course, the Republican in the White House and the Republican-controlled Congress pursued a version of a conservative agenda (although not always with success, as in the case of health care). But the rule of law prevailed, courts could decide against the government, the liberal part of the press has been articulate in its critique of administration policies, and, in a quite normal and proper manner, the midterm elections took place. American institutions have proven much more robust than the hysterics of little faith claimed in 2016. Those prophets of dictatorship owe us an accounting—or actually an apology—for their hyperbole. They significantly trivialized what really happened under the Nazi dictatorship, and they cavalierly slandered that slightly less than half of the American electorate that voted for Trump. Time for some critical self-reflection? This is not at all a suggestion that they must endorse the president, but it is way past time for them to concede that his supporters are not a priori Nazis, no matter how much juvenile fun name-calling affords.
Continue reading →
By Paul Grenier · Friday, September 7, 2018 Are the divisions that fragment the United States primarily driven by some deep flaw in its political life, or was the United States doing just fine, thank you very much—until Russia came along during the 2016 presidential race and started sowing division and dissension?
Framed that way, the question answers itself. Whatever some state-sanctioned Russian actors may have done to pester the American political process, it is obvious that America’s deep divisions exist for reasons having essentially nothing to do with Russia. They long precede the last election.
Even if Russia’s interventions into American electoral politics turn out to be more significant than they presently appear, this cannot change the more fundamental reality that our confrontational posture, including vis-à-vis Russia, is by no means something external to the United States’ Lockean liberal political concept.
Continue reading →
By Mitchell Dean · Tuesday, March 27, 2018 It is difficult to know what constitutes the latest social media “scandal” for the news organizations that promote it as such. Of course, it follows the seemingly unending political concerns around social and digital media since the election of President Trump and other cornerstone events such as the Brexit vote. It stands in the long line of concerns about email hacking, Russian “meddling,” “fake news,” undignified presidential tweeting, and bots, and the indictments of workers of a Russian internet agency. There is the more general, but somewhat vacuous, thesis that the “politics of truth” has been replaced by a “politics of untruth.” Within this framing, there is the sense that “democracy” is under attack through social media; that populists, the “alt-right,” shady billionaire donors, foreign authoritarians and nativist Svengalis have found secret pathways to sow discontent within Western democracies and tip elections and plebiscites to previously unconscionable leaders and unimaginable outcomes.
Continue reading →
|
|
