By Telos Press · Tuesday, December 28, 2021 Today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast features a panel discussion of Timothy W. Luke’s new book, The Travails of Trumpification, published earlier this month by Telos Press. The discussion, in which Tim is joined by David Pan, Fred Siegel, and Mark S. Weiner, covers a range of topics and questions, including the meaning and origins of “Trumpification”; Trump’s contempt for democratic liberal norms; the emergence of a progressive habitus in the early twentieth century; the critique of liberal managerialism; the rhetoric of the “forgotten little guy” (à la Rodney Dangerfield); the purposeful use of ignorance to send up the degreed classes; the extent to which Trump emerged out of “Nixonland”; Trump’s undermining of the claims of scientific truth; the relationship of science to political interest, and how each should inform the other; the populist attack on the New Class; Trump’s elevation of individual winning over larger collective interests and the public good; the weakening of a rationalist epistemology on which democracy depends in favor of an ethos of pure power; how the Afghanistan withdrawal and the coronavirus pandemic exacerbated the public’s disdain for expertise; and how power might be shifted from the administrative state to the local level as a way of integrating all members of the public in political decision-making and thereby revitalizing citizenship. Timothy W. Luke’s The Travails of Trumpification is now available in our online store, where you can save 20% off the list price by using the coupon code BOOKS20.
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By Telos Press · Wednesday, December 1, 2021 Now available from Telos Press: The Travails of Trumpification, by Timothy W. Luke. Order the paperback edition today in our online store and save 20% by using the coupon code BOOKS20. Also available in Kindle ebook format at Amazon.com.
The Travails of Trumpification
by Timothy W. Luke
 Telos Press Publishing is delighted to announce the release of Timothy W. Luke’s new book, The Travails of Trumpification. In this series of critical essays written over the course of Donald J. Trump’s presidency, from its chaotic early days to its calamitous end, Luke explores how the recent twists and turns in the civic life of the United States have precipitated a dangerous transformation of American political culture. Since 2016, Trump’s will to attain, and then retain, his office by whatever means necessary crossed red lines never before violated by any previous presidential administration. Even before his loss in the 2020 election, Trump sought to discredit America’s electoral process by challenging legal voting practices in key swing states on social media, in the courts, through executive agencies, and finally with violent riots, culminating in the disastrous attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Yet while Trump himself no longer remains president, the “Trumpification” of the American political system persists today, with the majority of Republican politicians as well as Trump’s millions of devoted followers still firmly in the grip of his influence. The goal of the critical probes collected in this volume is to evaluate the “travails,” or excessive tribulation, pain, hardship, anguish, and agony, that his dangerous demagoguery has inflicted—and continues to inflict—on the nation’s democratic institutions and processes.
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By Telos Press · Monday, November 22, 2021 Now available for pre-order: The Travails of Trumpification, by Timothy W. Luke. Pre-order today in our online store and save 30% off the list price. Release date: December 1, 2021. While supplies last, also save 30% on our other books by Timothy W. Luke, including Screens of Power: Ideology, Domination, and Resistance in Informational Society, Anthropocene Alerts: Critical Theory of the Contemporary as Ecocritique, and A Journal of No Illusions: Telos, Paul Piccone, and the Americanization of Critical Theory. Sale ends November 30, 2021.
The Travails of Trumpification
by Timothy W. Luke
Release date: December 1, 2021
In this series of critical essays written over the course of Donald J. Trump’s presidency, from its chaotic early days to its calamitous end, Timothy W. Luke explores how the recent twists and turns in the civic life of the United States have precipitated a dangerous transformation of American political culture. Since 2016, Trump’s will to attain, and then retain, his office by whatever means necessary crossed red lines never before violated by any previous presidential administration. Even before his loss in the 2020 election, Trump sought to discredit America’s electoral process by challenging legal voting practices in key swing states on social media, in the courts, through executive agencies, and finally with violent riots, culminating in the disastrous attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Yet while Trump himself no longer remains president, the “Trumpification” of the American political system persists today, with the majority of Republican politicians as well as Trump’s millions of devoted followers still firmly in the grip of his influence. The goal of the critical probes collected in this volume is to evaluate the “travails,” or excessive tribulation, pain, hardship, anguish, and agony, that his dangerous demagoguery has inflicted—and continues to inflict—on the nation’s democratic institutions and processes.
Continue reading →
By Russell A. Berman · Saturday, August 28, 2021 The following essay originally appeared at The Hill. It is republished here by permission of the author.
The Biden administration promised to return American foreign policy to reliability and international leadership after the disruptions of the Trump years. Yet its egregious mismanagement of the exit from Afghanistan has damaged America’s global standing and undercut the credibility of three of the administration’s foreign policy planks.
President Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken were supposed to repair transatlantic relations by reassuring our European allies, give priority to human rights in all decisions, and counter Chinese ambitions. The deeply flawed execution of the Afghanistan withdrawal undermines all those aspirations and leaves the Biden foreign policy vision in shambles. The diplomatic team that was supposed to bring professionalism has left America rudderless.
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By Russell A. Berman · Thursday, August 12, 2021 Renaud Girard is an American-born French journalist, the author of several books on world affairs, especially the Middle East. In this trenchant commentary on the Afghan debacle, he recognizes the defeat for what it is, bluntly invoking the collapse of the imperial German army at the end of the First World War. Is that an overstatement or an unflinching naming of the collapse of an order? Girard brings a realist eye to the factors that have contributed to the current situation, asking us to understand them and their consequences, as the Taliban proceed from city to city, heading toward 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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