By Elham Manea · Monday, November 9, 2020 Elham Manea teaches Political Science at the University of Zurich. Her forthcoming book The Perils of Nonviolent Islamism will be published by Telos Press in the spring and can be pre-ordered today in our store. The following talk was delivered as a keynote speech in German at the Convention of the Schader Foundation in Darmstadt (online) on November 6, 2020.
It is becoming difficult lately to turn on the news. And I do not just mean the American presidential elections. The year 2020 was and still is a hard one. COVID-19 has dominated our lives with its limitations. But it has also welded people together in every corner of the world in the fight against a persistent and ultimately deadly virus. This struggle, this common challenge, has united us and yet divided us. We are still irritated by the lockdowns, afraid of their economic repercussions, and divided in our ideological fronts. Times like these are worrying and provide fertile ground for conspiracy theorists and right-wing and left-wing extremist groups.
In times like these, our societies can all too easily become polarized, and we run the risk of being trapped in a discourse of division, trapped in identity boxes. “Us” versus “Them.”
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By Saladdin Ahmed · Monday, November 2, 2020 As the world becomes increasingly more focused on the second coronavirus wave and the American elections, Erdoğan’s mercenaries and army will most likely invade Northern Syria again in the coming days and weeks.
Erdoğan knows that no regional or global power will seriously challenge him if he occupies the rest of Northern Syria, also known as Rojava. During the last four years, he has seized every opportunity to execute his neo-Ottoman enterprise. He has openly recruited jihadis and occupied three strategic areas in Rojava. As the Syrian Kurds remain the most stubborn obstacle to his regional expansion southward, he has made his intentions to eliminate the semiautonomous administration in Northern Syria abundantly clear.
The Trump administration has little concern for the situation in Syria. Dismissing the Pentagon officials’ strong advice, Trump has given in to Erdoğan’s demands in Northern Syria more than once. Erdoğan secured Trump’s implicit approval to attack the Syrian Kurds about a year ago, during a dubious phone call between the two leaders. Given that things might change under a Biden administration, it is safe to assume that the opportunistic Erdoğan has already planned a devastating strike to knock out this secular, semiautonomous, multiethnic entity in Rojava.
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By Norbert Bolz · Friday, October 30, 2020 There are conspiracies. Many learned of Catiline, the ideal type of a conspirator, in Latin lessons. But even the memory of Richard Nixon in the Watergate affair suffices. The secret agreements by the powerful in back rooms, the hidden workings of the intelligence services, and all forms of secret diplomacy stir in us the suspicion of conspiracy.
As a general rule, we only have knowledge of failed conspiracies. And their failure, as once noted by Machiavelli in his Discorsi, is highly probable, for when more than a handful of people conspire to commit a crime, the danger posed by whistleblowers grows exponentially. Yet it does not naturally follow that conspiracies cannot succeed. We just know nothing about them. The perfect conspiracy remains just as invisible as the perfect murder.
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By Tony Stigliano · Thursday, October 29, 2020 Isaac Lopez has argued in a commentary published recently on this site that Trump has a good chance of winning this November because the liberals have replaced “American values” with laws and norms that are foreign and enraging. In response, the “silent majority” (in fact, a minority) of Americans elected “a very stable genius.” This essay is about the nature of an aspect of Donald J. Trump’s governance that has been overlooked: his cult. None of the usual political arguments can explain the desperate stances taken by his followers. The explanation offered here is twofold: One is the need for reversing a feared path to secular “socialism.” The second is that Trump has asserted that reality is subject to his will and personality. Ancillary to this is the idea that Trump’s persona can unify America by subordinating “difference” to a mythic national identity.
Donald Trump has, for a large minority (possibly 40 percent of the electorate), the persona of a mythic Hero. A Hero who can overcome all obstacles by sheer will. Through a close reading of Trump’s angry language, one realizes that Trump has woven a recognizable myth for citizens bereft of purpose and power. This is Trump’s will-to-power. Trump has given meaning and purpose to people losing out to technology, urban wealth, science’s truth, and social helplessness exacerbated by the pandemic. He is a hero of revenge against regulators, the media, and modernity itself. Even the pandemic cannot overcome him; he overcomes the pandemic, until recently.
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By Florindo Volpacchio · Tuesday, October 27, 2020 Isaac Lopez’s comments in “Why Trump Will Win” anticipate Trump’s reelection as the result of a reactionary backlash by a conservative moderate public. This backlash is directed at a weak and failing leadership in the Republican Party and a Democratic Party that has abandoned the “silent majority” for the interests of minorities and women. Yet not only is it questionable whether this analysis of the backlash offers any insight, it is questionable whether the backlash is even representative of mainstream public opinion. There is more of a consensus for the progressive agenda than Lopez is willing to admit. The wealthy suburbs of New York are as much inclined to vote for a progressive Black gay candidate as a working-class district in Queens is inclined to elect a progressive Latinx. Most of all, let us not forget that even in the face of personal animosity, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by 3 million votes. So how does all of this square with the reactionary backlash of the “silent majority”?
As we all know, Trump won the presidency through the Electoral College by winning Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania with about 70 thousand votes. It is possible that the reactionary backlash in these states flipped them for Trump. But not only does this not make them representative of public opinion, given the fragmented, unverified, and biased sources that feed public opinion today; it is questionable whether the reactionary backlash is itself founded on serious grievances. With demographic inequalities shifting the balance of federal power to states less representative of the national consensus, the outcome of presidential elections is determined by a few states where local opinion, whether informed, uninformed, or dis-informed, can determine the long-term outcome of national politics.
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By Russell A. Berman · Monday, October 26, 2020 From the beginning of Donald Trump’s campaign for the presidency and throughout his administration, the most consistent point of orientation in his politics has been the priority of the nation. It informed the slogan “Make America Great Again,” which initially shocked political sensibilities, since it implied the accusation that previous bipartisan political leadership had stood by during a decline or even facilitated a loss of greatness. The priority of the nation similarly underpinned the formula of “America First,” as the designation of a foreign policy that would give greater attention to national interest and therefore break with established patterns of multilateralism. Trump himself has embraced the term “nationalist,” and this marks his difference from both the free trade internationalism that used to define the neoliberal Republicans as well as from the multiculturalism that dominates the identity-political Democrats.
Between those two alternatives, globalism and fragmentation, Trump has opted for the nation. With that choice, he put his finger on the forgotten category—class—in an era of growing inequality. “Nation” serves as the organizing principle for programs purporting to achieve vertical integration, the “whole nation,” i.e., a promise—whether fulfilled or not—of an inclusive nationalism. Trump’s nationalism therefore is better described as a national populism. This aspiration for inclusion outweighs a simultaneous function of exclusionary nationalism, the differentiation from other nations, although that aspect clearly plays a role as well, especially in immigration policies.
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