The Telos Student Seminars provide a forum for students around the world to engage with critical theory by discussing a common set of paired texts from Telos—one current essay and one pertinent essay from our archives. The following reports from our first Telos Student Seminars in Budapest, Hungary, and Haifa, Israel, compare Paul Kahn’s “Law and Representation: Observations from an American Constitutionalist” (Telos 195, Summer 2021) and Paul Piccone’s “The Crisis of Liberalism and the Emergence of Federal Populism” (Telos 89, Fall 1991). The Hungarian seminar turned its attention to the relevance of political theology in the context of Viktor Orbán’s dismantling of liberal democratic institutions, while the Haifa seminar explored whether the essays by Kahn and Piccone “suggest a liberal, populist, or conservative solution to the crisis of the liberal state.” For more details about the Telos Student Seminars, including summaries of the two essays under discussion, click here.
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The stunning end to the twenty-year war in Afghanistan with an unambiguous defeat has had little consequences in American domestic politics. To be sure, the final rout may have contributed to President Biden’s decline in public opinion polls, but there are plenty of other reasons for that. The end of the Afghanistan War, surely a matter of historical import, just disappeared into the news cycle. After the lives lost, the resources wasted, and the ideals betrayed, one might expect the political class to pay attention and to demand accountability. Yet no one seems to notice. Such an accounting could take the form, for example, of congressional hearings—but instead Congress prefers to rehash the sad political circus of the January 6 riot. It has no time for the two decades in Afghanistan, telling evidence of our legislators’ priorities. Instead of congressional hearings, a special commission might be convened, serious and bipartisan, such as the one that followed on 9/11. No one is taking this road either. Enormous expenditure of resources and a defeat clearer even than the exit from Vietnam, and Washington doesn’t care. Christophe Guilluy is a geographer and observer of French society. Christopher Caldwell comments on his work here. This interview appeared in Le Figaro on November 21, 2021 and is translated with permission by Russell A. Berman, whose comments are here. Q: Several months before the presidential election, how do you see the political situation in France? Christophe Guilluy: Fundamentally nothing much has changed since 2017. I did an interview about the duel between Macron and Le Pen, which I described as a chemically pure cleavage: the popular classes against the professional upper classes, the metropolis against the periphery. None of that has changed at all. The core of Macron’s electoral support is still made up of the bourgeoisies of the right and the left, the boomers, the retirees, people fully integrated into society. And for a good reason: he is the only candidate who defends the economic and cultural model of the past twenty years. Therefore, the electorate willing to follow him is the one that is integrated into this model, that benefits from it or is protected by it, such as the retirees for example. Starting from that, he can count on a hypersolid foundation of those 25%. This has not changed since his election. On the other hand, there are the disaffected, those no longer integrated economically, those we used to call the middle class. In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, David Pan talks with Matthias Schwartz about his article “Servants of the People: Populism, Nationalism, State-Building, and Virtual Reality in Contemporary Ukraine” from Telos 195 (Summer 2021). An excerpt of the article appears here. In their conversation they talked about the history of the Euromaidan and how it contributed to nationalism in Ukraine; the election of President Volodymyr Zelensky, who previously portrayed the president of Ukraine in the hit TV show Servant of the People; the way that Zelensky’s presidency undercut the nationalist form of politics by decoupling nationalism from populism; and the changes that Zelensky has (or has not) brought to Ukrainian politics. 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 195 are available for purchase in our online store. In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, David Pan talks with Adam K. Webb about his article “Supranational Governance and the Problem of the ‘Dignified Constitution,’” from Telos 195 (Summer 2021). An excerpt of the article appears here. Their discussion covers a range of topics, including the difference between the dignified constitution and the efficient constitution, the lack of a dignified constitution in supranational institutions like the EU and the UN, the domination of these institutions by the new class elite, the possibility of a global demos, the opposition of dignified constitutions to technocratic views of government, the insularity of some traditionalist arguments, and the current prospects for a broad global coalition. 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 195 are available for purchase in our online store. |
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