A remark about philosophers is not the same thing as a philosophical remark, and considering it philosophically is different from considering it in terms of, say, intellectual history.
The testimony of the experts has actually already been given. They identified this problem as a matter of theory, and correctly suggested that it could be solved in practice, if never securely. That remainder or gap is the same one that appears in the “discursive” problem that Dan describes, and that we are currently observing as a conflict bordering on crisis within and of the presidential nomination process primarily in the Republican Party, but increasingly enveloping the Democratic Party and perceptions of its legitimacy and therefore of the entire two-party political system as we know it.
We seem to have – or our polity or pseudo-polity in this period appears to be constituted as – an ignorocracy: rule by an ignorant majority ignorantly insisting on its own peculiarly ignorant concept, resulting in a system among whose defining characteristics is the imperviousness to criticism of the ignorocrats’ own self-serving but mostly sincere self-concept.
Here is where German intellectuals come into the story. Journalists and academics have had a hard time understanding why the Pegida movement emerged when it did and why it has attracted so many people in Germany; there are branches of…
Would-be proponents of a liberal society would cease being liberals at all at the moment they ceased their opposition to “shutting down” discussion, and to the precise extent they did so.
It is perfectly normal, and beyond that it is natural and altogether archetypical, for human communities in times of crisis to look for and seek to rally behind a commanding figure. The American electoral process is in many ways already the institutionalization of crisis even in the normal course of events, and this year, with one of the two major parties struggling to fight off a hostile takeover by a crypto-fascist and his movement, has had more of that character than usual.