By Renaud Girard · Thursday, August 12, 2021 The following essay was published in Le Figaro on August 9, 2021, and appears here in translation with the permission of the author. Translated by Russell A. Berman, with comments here.
On Sunday, August 8, 2021, the Afghan Taliban took three provincial capitals, including Kunduz, the large city in the north of Afghanistan, close to the frontier with Tajikistan on the road that leads from Kabul to Dushanbe. Kunduz was previously the general quarter of the German forces intervening within the NATO framework. [First Quartermaster General Erich] Ludendorff once called August 8, 1918, a “day of mourning for the German army.” August 8, 2021, will certainly remain a “day of mourning” for the Afghan army that the Americans have been training and equipping for twenty years. As panic feeds panic, and debacle leads to debacle, one cannot see how the Afghan army will be able to prevent the imminent fall of Kandahar, Mezar, Herat, and Jalalabad, before facing definitive defeat at Kabul.
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By Telos Press · Thursday, July 29, 2021 In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, David Pan talks with Jay Gupta, Mark Kelly, and Tim Luke about the changing character of the public sphere. Their wide-ranging conversation covers a number of topics, including the ways that social media has fragmented the public sphere into separate echo chambers; how the internet has contributed to an insurgent populism around the world and the efforts by traditional stakeholders to shut it down; the atrophy of the value of truth and the dominance of “bullshit” in the Trump era; the extent to which moral earnestness preserves an aspiration to truthfulness; Trumpism and the critique of society as controlled by unaccountable New Class elites; the ongoing Trumpification of the Republican Party; and the conflation versus the interpenetration of elitism and expertise. Telos 195 (Summer 2021) features a forum on the public sphere with articles by Gupta, Kelly, and Luke, excerpts of which appear here. Read the full articles at the Telos Online website (subscription required). To learn how your university can subscribe to Telos, visit our library recommendation page. Print copies of Telos 195 are available for purchase in our online store.
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By Telos Press · Friday, July 16, 2021 In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, Camelia Raghinaru talks with Kiran Sridhar about his article “Russia’s Hybrid Warfare Strategy and How to Combat It,” from Telos 193 (Winter 2020). An excerpt of the article appears here. Their conversation addressed the ways in which Putin’s Russia, guided by the Gerasimov Doctrine, has mounted an effective asymmetrical challenge against the West through the spread of mendacious information online and in social media, thereby empowering elements of society distrustful of democracy and fomenting conspiratorial thinking; the launching of cyberattacks against the West’s technological infrastructure; and the use hybrid forces that operate at the behest of the Russian government without being directly controlled by it. If your university has an online subscription to Telos, you can read the full article at the Telos Online website. For non-subscribers, learn how your university can begin a subscription to Telos at our library recommendation page. Print copies of Telos 193 are available for purchase in our store.
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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 Telos Press · Thursday, May 13, 2021 In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, David Pan talks with Jay Gupta, Mark G.E. Kelly, and Timothy W. Luke about the U.S. Capitol riot on January 6, 2021. Their discussion covers a range of topics, including the main causes of the riot, the cultic character of Trump’s supporters, whether the breach of the Capitol was more about symbolism or substance, the declining legitimacy of U.S. political institutions and the loss of faith in the Constitution, the rhetoric of democracy, populism as a rebellion against the administrative deep state and managerial capitalism, the changing politics of race and racial divides, and the realignment of Democratic and Republican coalitions in the wake of Trump. Telos 194 (Spring 2021) features a group of essays on the U.S. Capitol riot, excerpts of which appear here. Click through to read the full articles at the Telos Online website (subscription required). To learn how your university can subscribe to Telos, visit our library recommendation page. Print copies of Telos 194 are available for purchase in our store.
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By Russell A. Berman · Wednesday, April 28, 2021 Criticism of identity politics is hardly new. The insistence on—or “celebration” of—fractional community identities rather than a common good was presented as an explanation for Hillary Clinton’s defeat in the 2016 presidential election. No coalition of separate groups will ever be able to muster the political magnetism of an inclusive rhetoric of national solidarity. That is the first problem: how identity politics divides, rather than unites.
However in addition to the problems of fragmentation and exclusion, the very focus on “identity,” a cultural and psychological concept, has always distracted from material issues of political economy, redirecting debate toward symbols and selfhood. Christopher Lasch labeled this a Culture of Narcissism as early as 1979. At stake is both a tendency toward subjectification within contemporary society and a transformation of the—often primarily academic—discussion about this society, as critical attention shifted toward subjective elements rather than discriminatory conditions and economic processes. If you want to hide class difference, identity politics is just what you need.
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