In my view, the choices facing us in the next decades may be far starker than the optimists admit. There are three reasons why attempts to shore up living standards are unlikely to stem the populist threat: the right policies…
#liberal democracy
Israel at the Extremes
Blog version of Storified dialogue.
Posted in Philosophy, Politics Tagged with: Carl Schmitt, illiberalism, Israel, liberal democracy, Liberalism, Nationalism
On Perceiving the People and the Army as One Hand in America, Too
Why do people, according to this survey, separate so neatly that which the view of the system we’re commonly taught says is incorrect? Why do Americans ascribe such confidence to pigs & soldiers while withholding confidence from who tells pigs…
Posted in notes, Philosophy, Politics Tagged with: Americanism, anarchism, de Tocqueville, Democracy, democratism, liberal democracy
Climate Change vs Moderation
This is the problem with Crook’s brand of High Broderist faux-moderation. Crook says he supports some kind of carbon tax and public funding for research and mitigation, but he quite obviously hasn’t given the slightest thought as to whether that…
Posted in Neo-Imperialism, notes, Politics, Science Tagged with: Climate Change, liberal democracy, moderation
Libertarianism as Core-Extreme Ideology of the Liberal Democratic State
Libertarianism is infant liberal-democracy, the arrested development of the polity fixated at the level of the pre-socialized or socialization-resistant individual – the pre-dialogical, self-sufficient, natural “I-atheist.”
Posted in Featured, History, Philosophy, Political Philosophy, Politics, Religion Tagged with: atheism, individualism, Levinas, liberal democracy, Liberalism, libertarianism
Terror in Concept: Comment on “Panic Stains Tsarnaev’s Apprehension”
Because the idea of “terror” is a definitional and circumscribing topic for our “way of life,” perhaps for ways of life at all, we should not be surprised if it is not merely difficult to define, but ends up seeming to connect everything to everything – if every particular question explodes like a conceptual bomb striking ever other question in the vicinity.
Posted in Philosophy, Politics, The Exception, Torture Tagged with: Boston, Columbine, liberal democracy, Newtown, Terror, The Exception, Torture
Holder to Paul: “I point to my mask!”
As is typical for Administration critics among left-liberals and libertarians, Digby blames the the executive branch, here represented by its last two chiefs and its current top lawyer, for offering lawyerly locutions on a decisively legal matter, as though the answers to the underlying questions would and must be both non-legalistically simple as well as simply favorable to the ideological liberal legal position. As an ideologue, she is unwilling to imagine that the truth might be relatively simple, but unfavorable to her ideology or at least to the notion of its universality and completeness. The spokesperson for the executive branch is at such times embodying the foundational paradoxes of the liberal democratic order, at the classic exceptional moment in which liberalism encounters the coincidence of its own real-political and conceptual limits.
Posted in Drone as Symbol, The Exception, Torture Tagged with: Drones, foundational paradox, liberal democracy, Liberalism, The Exception, Torture
Torture as Individualized War, War as Socialized Torture
In an “objective” if not necessarily “morally clear” accounting, the thousands killed and thousands more disfigured and terrified would receive many thousands of times greater concern. The child dismembered by a bomb blast, the soldier buried alive in a bunker, the prisoner merely sent off to some conventional Hell, and on and on, precisely as they become multiplied by thousands or millions and turned into numbers, all seem to command less outrage and concern than the captive in manacles.
Posted in Featured, Philosophy, Politics, The Exception, Torture, War Tagged with: individualism, liberal democracy, Popular Sovereignty, terrorism, The Exception, Torture, War, War on Terror
Voegelin’s Gnosis, Part 2: Crossing
The eternal crosses infinitely all the way over to us on the finite cross. Even against the definitional and lethal disagreements within and between the Abrahamic faiths on instantiations of eternity, or finitizations of infinity, or mortalities of the immortal, the structure of the central question, as a dichotomy to be resolved into a unity, from incarnation to crucifixion to resurrection, survives all answering exclusions. We can even begin with the atheistic or heretical counter-narratives that insist that indispensable parts of the greatest story were merely story, that the humanly fallible texts amount to a pre-capitalist commodification for “franchising” purposes. Even the falsehood of the tale would precisely on its own level magnify it, as the greatest lie ever believed, in this the only world the closest a disenchanted perspective can approach to miracle.
Posted in Anismism, Featured, History, Philosophy, Religion Tagged with: Anismism, Christianity, crucifixion, Enlightenment, Eric Voegelin, Frederic Jameson, Hegel, Hermann Cohen, Islam, Judaism, Kojève, liberal democracy, Maimonides, Phenomenology of Spirit, Religion of Reason, Voegelin, Voegelin's Gnosis
Comments on “Islam is the rock on which the liberal order broke?”
History may instead record that what broke this latest “liberal order” (a typical contradiction in terms), as before and likely again, as inevitably, was the latest liberal order itself. Yet historians may alternatively – or also – someday record that it was liberalism that finally broke Islam or the Islamic Order, and, perhaps, in so doing repaired one or both – though it may always be too early to say so.