Paul Gottfried is a professor and polemicist associated with the German “New Right.” Similarly to the US and other places, they are rightwingers who spin out theories dressed up with “highbrow” pretensions.
German New Right ideologue Paul Gottfried, 2017 (Photo: Gage Skidmore)
Tony Senatore recently wrote a piece for the Times of Israel giving Gottfried credit for recognizing that William Buckley was a squish when it came to defending True Conservatism. Buckley gained some measure of respectability even among liberals when he explicitly broke with the paranoid conspiracism of the John Birch Society, in particular. He scolds Buckley for watering down True Conservatism to be respectable to “the establishment, [by] prioritizing respectability over foundational principles.” (1)
In a drearily familiar rightwing conversion narrative, Senatore recalls how Gottfried’s perspective allowed him to see the True Light of Pure Conservatism:
I discovered that the early conservative movement was once composed of a diverse and brilliant array of figures, including Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard, Frank Chodorov, John T. Flynn, and the John Birch Society. [Rightwing cranks all.] Over time, Buckley’s leadership became dominant. Importantly, Buckley was essentially a libertarian, heavily influenced by Albert J. Nock. Some anticipated the 1960s communist threat would only temporarily override Buckley’s libertarian inclinations, but this proved untrue. Ultimately, Buckley removed anyone unwilling to support the welfare-warfare state, the Cold War, and the neoconservative economics underpinning it.
The Wikipedia entry for Gottfried notes:
Gottfried helped coin the term alternative right with a speech to the H.L. Mencken Club in 2008 envisioning a nationalist and populist right-wing movement; it was published by Richard Spencer in [the flaming rightwing] Taki's Magazine with the title "The Decline and Rise of the Alternative Right". Gottfried has been described as a former intellectual mentor to [the American neo-Nazi Richard] Spencer. As of 2010, according to the SPLC, Gottfried was a senior contributing editor at Alternative Right, a website edited by Spencer. He and Spencer co-edited a book in 2015. [italics in original] (2)
Now the paleocon American Conservative has published a piece by Gottfried on Jürgen Habermas, the recently deceased German political and legal philosopher who had a major influence on how the German “memory culture” (Vergangenheitspolitik) treats the history of the Third Reich and the Holocaust. (3)
I’m commenting here on Gottfried’s obituary of Habermas not because it’s worth reading but because The American Conservative picked a guy like this to write an obituary on one of the world’s most famous philosophers, who as a part of the “Second Generation” of the Frankfurt School trend of “critical theory,” was also an important advocate for a politics of militant democracy and a critical of Trumpism and its European soulmates.
The American Conservative is part of the nationalist-unilateralist foreign policy perspective that Trump practices. And so it does sometimes publish articles by foreign policy “restrainers” who are not rightwing crackpots. It’s just a shady digital neighborhood to hang out to find such material. As of this writing, it is running an article (which I’m not going to bother to link) warning about the imminent danger of something called “moderate lib terrorism” in the United States. When the entire premise of your article is an oxymoron, you might as well give up trying to convince anyone not high on oxycontin.
Gottfried’s article is “highbrow” rightwing nonsense. He expresses his regret that Habermas, who did a dissertation in 1954 on the philosopher F.W.J. Schelling (1775-1854). As a young student in Tubingen, he was close friends with Hegel and the poet Friedrich Hölderlin, and all three was passionate admirers of the French Revolution. Hegel and Hölderlin maintained their progressive political orientation later in life, but Schiller became a Catholic reactionary. When Hegel passed away, Schelling was called by the conservative Prussian educational ministry to take Hegel’s place so that he could undo the effects of what then-Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm IV reportedly called the “dragon’s seed” of progressive religious and political thought that Hegel represented to conservatives.
Gottfried in his ridiculous article mourns the fact that Habermas didn’t adopt some version of what Gottfried seems to regard as the healthy conservative/reactionary-Romantic perspective of the later Schelling. He also tries in his article to imply that Habermas may have been an aspiring Nazi at that time. (4)
(4) Philipp Felsch provides a sober account of Habermas’ early philosophical work including the Schelling dissertation in Der Philosoph. Habermas und Wir (2025).
The celebrated philosopher Jürgen Habermas passed away in March at age 96. There are many obituaries for him because he was one of the world’s best-known philosophers at the time of his death. (1)
Thomas Gregersen has a blog about Habermas and the liberal political philosopher John Rawls, and he has complied a long list of Habermas obituary links, many but not all in German. He includes pieces by the current German President Frank Walter Steinmeier, French President Emmanuel Macron, former Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou, and UN General Secretary António Guterres. (2)
For Americans, let’s pause just a moment to try to imagine President Donald Trump writing an informed obituary for a political philosopher who wrote books like The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Theory of Communicative Action, and The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. It would come out something like: “Yes, a German guy named Habermas just died. I don’t know much about him, but I heard he suffered from Trump derangement syndrome and was a very low IQ guy.”
Others in Gregersen’s list of Habermas obituary authors include: Eric Alterman, Seyla Benhabib, Micha Brumlik, Rainer Forst, Nancy Fraser, Norbert Frei, Axel Honneth, Martin Jay, Alexander Kluge, Robert Misik, Jan-Werner Müller, Herfried Münkler, Raimund Löw, Thomas Nagel, and Thomas Piketty.
Habermas and democracy
The eminent legal scholar Cass Sunstein did an obituary reflection on Habermas' work on his Substack. He writes:
Jurgen Habermas is one of the most important political philosophers of the 20th century; he has been preoccupied for much of his life with the problem of political legitimacy. Under what circumstances is it legitimate for political authorities, mere human beings, to exercise power over other human beings? It is unsurprising that a German philosopher - in his teens during the Nazi period and a witness to countless other atrocities since - should direct his attention to this question. Mr. Habermas thinks that the question is especially urgent in an era that is “postmetaphysical,” in the sense that it has lost the sense that we have wholly external foundations by which to ground our judgments and choices. Whether or not we believe that God exists, it seems clear that as citizens in a heterogeneous society we must proceed on the understanding that our choices are our own. But even as he insists on this point, Mr. Habermas draws a line against modern irrationalists, many of them - like Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida - influential within the modern academy. Mr. Habermas says, tellingly, that those who oppose reason and the Enlightenment can give no account of the basis for their own rhetoric, which seems inspired by the Enlightenment commitment to human liberation. [my emphasis] (3)
Habermas wrote a lot about the philosophy of law. He stressed the connection between democracy and the rule of law, i.e., each is essential to the other. The rule of law in democratic theory means not only that the laws apply to everyone equally but also that the laws are legitimate only when there is valid democratic representation in their making. And likewise the laws are essential to establishing and maintain democracy. The Trump and Orbáns of the world want to do away with both, because democracy and the rule of law are inextricably intertwined concepts and systems of governance. His work fits into the field of “critical legal studies.”
Habermas and history
Habermas was often called Germany’s most famous philosopher during the last several decades, and that’s likely true. He was a prolific writer and often addressed current political concerns. He was even famous enough that his name has its own adjective, “Habermasian.” He is rightly given credit for initiating the Historikerstreit (Historians’ Debate) of the 1980s, a dispute over attempts be rightwing historians to minimize the significance of the Holocaust. Briefly put, the dispute initially was over a claim by a rightwing historian that actually Joe Stalin and the Soviet Communists were responsible for the Holocaust. Yes, that argument was as crackpot as it sounded. And now, you were pretty much have to seek out people with Nazi tattoos to find someone making that same claim.
But a lasting feature of that controversy was a new focus for both scholars and politicians on the most sensible and appropriate ways to compare the Holocaust in particular with other historical events. Genocide scholar Omer Bartov, who was one of the many genocide scholars who called out the Netanyahu government’s acts of genocide in the 1923-2026 (and continuing) Gaza War, wrote a retrospective piece on the Historikerstreit, in which he describes the implications for politics and history of that dispute. (4) When present-day figures like TechBro oligarch Elon Musk or our Opus Dei Vice President (and Viktor Orbán fan) J.D. Vance tell Germans it’s time for them to get over all this here reflecting on the evils of Nazism, you’re hearing similar themes to those promoted by de facto Nazi apologists during the Historikerstreit.
The Frankfurt School and Politics
Habermas was the most famous figure of what is called the Second Generation of the Frankfurt School. It actually had and still has its own academic institution, the Institute for Social Research. This is the description of some of its leading figures from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
Some of the most prominent figures of the first generation of Critical Theorists were Max Horkheimer (1895-1973), Theodor Adorno (1903-1969), Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979), Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), Friedrich Pollock (1894-1970), Leo Lowenthal (1900-1993), and Eric Fromm (1900-1980). Since the 1970s, a second generation began with Jürgen Habermas, who, among other merits, contributed to the opening of a dialogue between so-called continental and the analytic traditions. With Habermas, the Frankfurt School turned global, influencing methodological approaches in other European academic contexts and disciplines. It was during this phase that Richard Bernstein, a philosopher and contemporary of Habermas, embraced the research agenda of Critical Theory and significantly helped its development in American universities starting from the New School for Social Research in New York. (5)
The Frankfurt School is often described, accurately enough, as working on social theory with particular emphasis on the theories of Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Max Weber. The became especially known for their sociological studies on the “authoritarian personality” to try to understand the social and psychological characteristics of people who are attracted to authoritarian movements, including work in the United States directed by Max Horkheimer known as the Studies in Prejudice series. Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse later started using the term Critical Theory for their perspective, a label that has endured for a while, i.e., since 1937. (6)
During the first six decades of the 20th century, there were two dominant schools of left theory in European politics, most notably those associated with the Social Democratic Parties and the Soviet-line Communist Parties. Pretty much since the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, those two broad schools of thought and politics considered themselves Marxist socialists. The polemics between the Social Democrats and Communists over who represented the true and pure version of Marxism and socialism. Although not nearly as significant as those two in actual political participation, Trotskyism was a split-off from Communist that also considered itself Marxist and socialist (and Communist) that has influenced a lot of historical accounts in particular. Not having much actual political power after Trotsky left the Soviet Union, Trotskyists became famous for their hair-splitting polemics against other who claimed to be Marxists. The best working definition I’ve ever heard of that trend is: Trotskyists are the people who support revolutions everywhere except where there is one going on. Actual revolutions are never pure enough for them.
It was disputes like that over the purest version of Marxism that promoted Karl Marx himself to write to his friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels that he was happy that “I, at least, am not a Marxist.”
That context is important for the Frankfurt School’s history. Their political positioning was more-or-less militant left social-democracy, though their militance was more intellectual and theoretical. They didn’t personally play major roles in political parties and didn’t plot sabotage attacks against arms manufacturers, or whatever. But they were very concerned with politics and were generally committed to a Marxist model of social revolution that was not focused on promoting violent uprisings but was also not pacifist.
Skipping over a few rabbit-holes that could be explored here, it’s also notable that another well-known Frankfurt School adherent, legal theorist Franz Neumann, who authored on of the best early studies of the German Nazi system, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism 1933-1944 (1944). Neumann came to the United States and worked for the US Board of Economic Warfare and the Intelligence Division of the US Chief of Staff, joining the now-legendary Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the major predecessor organization of the CIA. Herbert Marcuse was one of the analysts he brought to work in the OSS, and Marcuse later worked with the State Department Intelligence.
After Marcuse became an icon of the “student revolution” in the 1960s, he was wrongly reported to have worked for the CIA, which he didn’t. Tim Müller wrote a detailed account of Marcuse's intelligence career, Krieger und Gelehrte: Herbert Marcuse und die Denksysteme im Kalten Krieg. (7) It was a chronic problem for US intelligence during the 1950s that they wanted and needed good intelligence information on the Communist world. But the atmosphere of the McCarthy period made anyone who was extremely familiar with Marxism almost automatically suspicious. That lack of expertise contributed significantly to misunderstanding of events in Vietnam and even of the Soviet-China splits, which actually began in the mid-1950s but wasn’t understood by US intelligence dominated by an assumption of a World Communist Conspiracy centered in Moscow. Müller observes that Marcuse’s 1958 book Soviet Marxism: A Critical Analysis was reflective of the kind of intelligence evaluations he provided to the State Department. Among other things, he rightly predicted that a post-Stalin Soviet Union would likely be opening to moving to a position of peaceful coexistence with the US. Something that the State Department was reluctant to believe given its ideological assumptions about Soviet Communism.
Habermas and Politics
That was the political and philosophical environment of the school of thought in which Habermas was educated and which he himself developed further. As part of the Frankfurt School tradition, he identified with the left of the German Social Democratic Party of the 1960s, which had in 1959 adopted what was called the Godesberg Program, which adopted reform proposals that retreated from such classical Marxist goals as the eventual nationalizing of the means of production. The left of the party and later the larger student movement viewed it as a conservative capitulation to the right and an abandonment of desirable ideals.
Habermas had a particular vision of radical democratization that focused on encouraging broad engagement by ordinary citizens. But he also rejected what he saw as something like disruption for the sake of disruption by student activists. Because he wanted to promote grassroots dialogue and real discussion among ordinary citizens, not disruption in the hope that it would produce some kind of radical social transformation for the better. But that didn’t mean he was shy about debating. On the contrary. He saw sharp and intense arguments as necessary processes in a dialectical process of democratization. In one argument that became famous, he accused radical students of “left fascism” for some of their approaches to confrontation. But he took the mobilization of students in The Sixties and their increased engagement in political action as basically a healthy sign for democracy, which he articulated in his books on Structural Transformation and Communicative Action.
Habermas and another 2nd generation Frankfurt School figure, Claus Offe, publicized the concept of “late capitalism” to characterize the period from 1970 or so on with its new priorities like grappling with ecological challenges, in which the “legitimation problems” of capitalist democracies appeared to be growing.
One of the stranger rightwing crackpot theories of recent decades is one that starts from the authoritarian right’s resentment of Horkheimer’s Studies in Prejudice series. It goes like this: The Frankfurt School was a group of German Jewish Marxists who begat Postmodernism which begat Political Correctness which begot Critical Race Theory which begat Wokeism. Far right stars like Christopher Rufo have pimped this silly narrative.
Because it refers to things that most rightwing podcast fans are never going to read, most of them won’t know or care that this is vapid nonsense. The Frankfurt School figures were Marxists, or at least significantly influenced by Marxism. Marxism is a theory based on a materialist philosophical outlook and a materialist theory of history. Postmodernism is “a late 20th-century movement characterized by broad skepticism, subjectivism, or relativism; a general suspicion of reason; and an acute sensitivity to the role of ideology in asserting and maintaining political and economic power.” (8)
Quick Check: Frankfurt School thought is based or “broad skepticism”? In the philosophical sense, no, although Critical Theory relies on, well, critical analysis which involves methodological skepticism. Subjectivism? Well, their Freudian perspective does recognize that people are motivated by subjective feelings and impressions, but assumes they are based on material processes, both individual and social. Relativism? “Relativists characteristically insist, furthermore, that if something is only relatively so, then there can be no framework-independent vantage point from which the matter of whether the thing in question is so can be established.” (9) Nope, that’s not Frankfurt School. Critical Theory. either. Sensitivity to ideology in power relations? Well, yes, but not in the reductionist and rather fuzzy-headed way postmodernism approaches it. Also, good grief? How could any social theory of politics ignore the role of ideology? General suspicion of reason? Not even close to a fit. Habermas warned in a 2006 essay, “A ‘post-truth democracy’, such as the New York Times saw on the horizon during the last Presidential elections [of 2004], would no longer be a democracy” - another sharp difference from the postmodern conceptions. (10)
Habermas’ book The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity takes a highly critical view of tthe postmodernists’ approach. In it he writes, “Postmodernism is characterized by the withering away of every form of unifying, principle-led interpretation of the world; it carries the anarchistic features of a polycentric world that has lost its previous categorical differentiations.” (11)
Crackpot theories are par for the course on the radical right. But that bizarre theory is just goofy.
Habermas is also known for promoting the concept of constitutional patriotism, which originated with Dolf Sternberger, a conservative thinker, in 1979. Habermas expanded this concept and held it up as a constructive alternative to the traditional patriotism founded on a more narrow nationalism. Which also fit well with his enthusiastic advocacy for the European Union and a post-national project.
He was a member of the publishing board of the German journal on politics and history Blätter für deutsche und international Politik from 1998 until his passing. The April 2026 issue of Blätter includes an obituary essay for him titled “World Spirit on Paper” by Hauke Brunkhorst – a play on Hegel’s famous description of Napoleon as the World Spirit on a Horse, after seeing himself ride through Hegel’s then city of residence, Jena. (12)
Habermas and Religion
Habermas’ last major work, published in 2019, was a large (over 1700 pages) two-volume work about the relationship of religion and philosophy in Western philosophy. It deals with the interaction of the two ways of viewing the world, such as his analysis of the evolution of the concept of universal human rights from that of John Locke’s religion-based concept of natural law to the secularized social forms it took with David Hume and Emmanuel Kant.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a long article on Habermas by James Godron Finlayson and Dafydd Huw Rees.
This is a German-language retrospective on Habermas and his impact: (13)
(4) Bartov, Omer (1992): Time Present and Time Past: The Historikerstreit and German Reunification. New German Critique 55, 173-190. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/488296?seq=1>
(10) Habermas, Jürgen (2006): Religion in the Public Sphere. European Journal of Philosophy 14:1, 18.
(11) Habermas, Jürgen (1988): Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne. Zwölf Vorlesungen. Chapter VI.II. Frankfurt am Main. My translation into English.
(12) Brunkhorst, Hauke (2026): Weltgeist auf Papier. Zum Tode von Jürgen Habermas. Blätter 4:2026, 49-58.
Jeet Heer has a column from two weeks ago in which he makes an important point about when refuting a crackpot conspiracy theory like the "critical race theory" scare that Republicans have taken up, be careful about giving it more credibility than it deserves by focusing on refuting bad-faith claims: Critical Race Theory as a BogeymanSubstack 06/02/2021.
As he puts it on Twitter:
If someone is saying "A bunch of Jews created CRT to stir up race war in America & kill white people" you don't respond by saying, "Well, I have a much more modulated criticism of Adorno & Horkheimer's's Dialectic of Enlightenment." You say "that's an anti-Semitic myth."
His basic point is correct. The Republican bogeyman of "critical race theory" is actually a dogwhistle phrase meaning, "Scary Jews! Scary black people!"
It's actually a variation/continuation/mutation of the longer-standing far-right conspiracy theory about "Cultural Marxism." And it really does boil down to what Heer summarizes in that tweet. The basic narrative is: the Frankfurt School of the 1930s (Jewish Marxists) begat postmodernism (not even close to accurate) which begat Critical Race Theory. In other words: Scary Jews! Scary black people!
But, as with all conspiracy theories, refuting or debunking it can contribute to actually spreading the conspiracy theory. Debunkers need to be aware of that and be careful. But it's a risk that can't entirley be avoided. Jeet's column itself is an attempt to manage that risk while recognizing that people trying to counter the conspiracy claim need to have some understanding of what is being said in the conspiracy narrative, even if it's more-or-less nuts.
Jeet's column has a link to a disturbing argument from Ruy Teixeira on how the Democrats should respond to this propaganda claim by resorting to a stock Democratic response, which typically does not provide impressive results:
But Jeet does miss something on the brief summary of the claim that he provides:
Fact checking is a necessary but tedious affair. One could go through Woolery’s comments and note that there is no Frankfort school (unless there is a stronghold of Marxism in Frankfort, Kentucky that I’m not aware of. In which case, apologies). The critical theory of the Frankfurt school isn’t to be confused, despite similar names, with critical race theory. The Frankfurt theorists are no longer alive, let alone ruling the roost in Columbia. And Frankfurt school social theories, with the exception of Herbert Marcuse, had little truck with anti-racism. In fact, if the Frankfurt school is to be taxed with anything, it is a tendency towards apolitical quietism and alienation from activism. [my emphasis]
Axel Honneth, one of the leading contemporary philosophers, was head of the present-day Frankfurt School (ISR) until 2018. And he's current a professor of philosophy and Frankfurt (Germany, not Kentucky) and at Columbia University.
Other living philosophers associated with the Frankfurt School critical theory" perspective include:
Jürgen Habermas, who is considered Second Generation Frankfurt School, is generally considered Germany's most important public intellectual. At age 90, he published a two-volume history, 1700-page history of (mostly Western) philosophy with a focus on faith and knowledge.
Oscar Negt, who is currently publishing a multi-volume history of political philosophy
Wendy Brown, author of Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution (2015)
Seyla Benhabib, author of Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political (2021)
Rainer Forst, author of Tolerance in Conflict (2016)
There are a lot of essays that appear in journals like The Atlantic and sometimes in more academic venues that I find intriguing but frustrating. If the writer bends over backwards to sound non-partisan, the reader is left with a feeling that there is some important point about understanding a political moment but it's not quite obvious what it is.
If she wants to talk about something as grand and interesting as the Zeitgiest, using a lot of statistics would spoil the mood; but then the audience is stuck wondering if the grand generalizations about the Meta-Mood actually make sense.
And if he tries to jam too many clever historical observations together in a big agglomeration, the reader can feel a little like being lost in a cave like in a thousand thriller shows.
I still like to read such Big Think essays, despite the almost inevitable disappointment and the novelty of their insights.
Marilynne Robinson and unhappyAmerica 2020
The New York Review of Books is a specialist in Big Think essays. And I'm a big fan of NYR. I quote it all the time on this blog, including this post. Marilynne Robinson writes a Big Think take on What Kind of Country Do We Want?, "we" being Americans (O6/11/2020 issue).
She starts off in the Meta-Mood mode, which always gives me a bit of the feeling of being a college freshman wondering if I'll ever be able to grasp, much less imitate, such penetrating cultural insights. After decades of experience, I'm reconciled to the fact that the answer is, "No." But she does make an observation about the dominant neoliberal outlook inn the US and much of the world that is indeed well-founded:
Much American unhappiness has arisen from the cordoning-off of low-income workers from the reasonable hope that they and their children will be fairly compensated for their work, their contribution to the vast wealth that is rather inexactly associated with this country, as if everyone had a share in it. Their earnings should be sufficient to allow them to be adequate providers and to shape some part of their lives around their interests. Yet workers’ real wages have fallen for decades in America. This is rationalized by the notion that their wages are a burden on the economy, a burden in our supposed competition with China, which was previously our competition with Japan. The latter country has gone into economic and demographic eclipse, and more or less the same anxieties that drove American opinion were then transferred to China, and with good reason, because there was also a transfer of American investment to China.
The terrible joke is that American workers have been competing against expatriated American capital, a flow that has influenced, and has been influenced by, the supposed deficiencies of American labor. New factories are always more efficient than those they displace, and new factories tend to be built elsewhere. And as the former presidential candidate Mitt Romney remarked, workers in China sleep in factory dormitories. Employing them in preference to American workers would sidestep the old expectation that a working man or woman would be able to rent a house or buy a car. The message being communicated to our workers is that we need poverty in order to compete with countries for whom poverty is a major competitive asset. The global economic order has meant that the poor will remain poor. There will be enough flashy architecture and middle-class affluence to appear to justify the word “developing” in other parts of the world, a designation that suggests that the tide of modernization and industrialization is lifting all boats, as they did in Europe after World War II. [my emphasis]
In the American Democratic Party, the conservatives (aka, corporate Democrats) have developed a liberal "identity" rhetoric that valorizes and even actually supports measures to establish formal equality for minorites and women. But at the same time stigmatizes not just "socialist" but any serious pro-labor policy analysis that emphasizes the far-reaching importance of those economic trends. Yes, the "intersectionality" of personal identities can be very complicated. And there are various kind of social pathologies that intersect with each other in contradictory ways. None of which means we have to bury our heads in the sand and just accept that "the best we can do" is to have something slightly better than the politics of a sociopathic and incompentent Orange Clown and of the party that made him President and supports him idolatrously.
Then she drifts back into Big Think, explaining that in American education "a narrative has emerged over time that capitalism is the single defining trait of American civilization," one based on a "quaint adherence to Marxian categories." Karl Marx as the godfather of Anglo-American neoliberalism? Whatever his shortcomings, the old guy doesn't deserve to have that criticism hung around his neck!
Jennifer Mercieca on the "outrage Presidency" of Trump
An academic article by Jennifer Mercieca offers some observations from her forthcoming book on Trump's brand of demagoguery, The Emergence of the Outrage PresidencyNCA Spectra March 2020. This particular Big Think piece thankfully didn't give me uncomfortable freshman flashbacks, but a much more pleasant feeling of, hey, this gives me a new way to think about something that's important. In this case, she analyzes the evolution of political communication in the digital age at the Presidential level. And in the article, she keeps her eye on the ball, i.e., "Trump has continued in the tradition of rightwing media figures such as Rush Limbaugh, Drudge, and Fox News commentators."
That continuity is a key element in the continuing radicalization of the Republican Party that the corporate media and way too many Democrats find it convenient to overlook. The media are addicted to the dogma of Both Sides Do It. And the Democrats have gotten so use to chasing the fantasy of "persuadable" Republican voters that they continually rewrite political history to make previous Republicans Administrations responsible and respectable. She refers to earlier work:
In 2007, Stephen Hartnett and I described in Presidential Studies Quarterly the “post-rhetorical presidency” of George W. Bush. We thought that Bush’s presidential communication was characterized less by the rhetorical presidency’s model of “eloquence, logic, pathos, or narrative storytelling,” and more by the public relations techniques of “ubiquitous public chatter, waves of disinformation, and cascades of confusion-causing misdirection.”
The Cheney-Bush version of what Steve Bannon famously described as "flood the zone with s**t," in other words.
I'm curious to read her new book, which probably provides better context on one point that strikes me about the article, which is that it gives the impression that polarization is in itself a bad thing. But one of the most dysfunctional aspects of today's American political system is the asymmetric partisan polarization of the two major parties, in which the Republicans become more fanatically rightwing while the Democrats try more and more to sound like some milder version of Republicans. I'm still a big fan of the Madisonian classical liberal concept that politics is about conflict among various interests. (Federalist #10) Which of course has more recent elaborations from theorists like Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe.
Kurt Anderson from 2017 on America as Fantasyland (and not in a good way!)
Kurt Andersen gives us a kind of greatest-hits rundown on the road to American mass delusion, or what he calls "our national lurch toward fantasy," in (the loo-ong) How America Lost Its MindThe Atlantic Sept 2017. Included are Stephen Colbert and truthiness, Karl Rove and the reality-based community, the Sixties as "a national nervous breakdown," the Enlightenment and American Christianity, UFOs and quack medicine, Puritans and hedonistic individualism, the Internet, American exceptionalism, Joseph Smith and Walt Disney, Ken Kesey and LSD, San Francisco and Big Sur, JFK assassination theories, well, you get the idea. "America has mutated into Fantasyland."
Anderson provides a pleasantly dizzy intellectual buzz. And it's fun to see largely forgotten one-time cultural icons like Charles Reich pop up. (He was the Greening of America guy, not to be confused with Wilhelm Reich, the sexual-revolution and orgone-energy guy). He makes some useful observations like, "Religion aside, America simply has many more fervid conspiracists on the right, as research about belief in particular
conspiracies confirms again and again. Only the American right has had a large and organized faction based on paranoid conspiracism for the past six decades." Again an important factor in the political crisis of asymmetric partisan polarization in American politics.
This Big Think article, too, is taken from a book How America Went Haywire-A 500-Year History (2017), so there's surely some nuance lost in the shorter article version. And he offers some practical, everyday advice for navigating our ecosystem of mis- and dis-information:
It will require a struggle to make America reality-based again. Fight the good fight in your private life. You needn’t get into an argument with the stranger at Chipotle who claims that George Soros and Uber are plotting to make his muscle car illegal—but do not give acquaintances and friends and family members free passes. If you have children or grandchildren, teach them to distinguish between true and untrue as fiercely as you do between right and wrong and between wise and foolish.
We need to adopt new protocols for information-media hygiene. Would you feed your kids a half-eaten casserole a stranger handed you on the bus, or give them medicine you got from some lady at the gym?
And fight the good fight in the public sphere. One main task, of course, is to contain the worst tendencies of Trumpism, and cut off its political-economic fuel supply, so that fantasy and lies don’t turn it into something much worse than just nasty, oafish, reality-show pseudo-conservatism. Progress is not inevitable, but it’s not impossible, either.
But after the article's blitz of pessimistic history of the popularity of what we now call Alternative Facts, his advice there on how to combat it seems like pretty weak tea, homespun wisdom as an antidote to a epistemological crisis affected a whole civilization. And I think part of what limits his search for solutions is what seems to be a positivist bias, which is popular among many scientists who also do an excellent job of debunking pseudoscience and popular delusions. He criticizes the conservative bogeyman of "relativism," naming several figures he regards as villains of this erroneous thinking: Peter Berger, Paul Feyerabend, Thomas Luckmann, Charles Tart, and, of course, Michel Foucault:
Even the social critic Paul Goodman, beloved by young leftists in the ’60s, was flabbergasted by his own students by 1969. “There was no knowledge,” he wrote, “only the sociology of knowledge. They had so well learned that … research is subsidized and conducted for the benefit of the ruling class that they did not believe there was such a thing as simple truth.”
Ever since, the American right has insistently decried the spread of relativism, the idea that nothing is any more correct or true than anything else. Conservatives hated how relativism undercut various venerable and comfortable ruling ideas - certain notions of entitlement (according to race and gender) and aesthetic beauty and metaphysical and moral certainty. Yet once the intellectual mainstream thoroughly accepted that there are many equally valid realities and truths, once the idea of gates and gatekeeping was discredited not just on campuses but throughout the culture, all American barbarians could have their claims taken seriously. Conservatives are correct that the anything-goes relativism of college campuses wasn’t sequestered there, but when it flowed out across America it helped enable extreme Christianities and lunacies on the right - gun-rights hysteria, black-helicopter conspiracism, climate-change denial, and more. The term useful idiot was originally deployed to accuse liberals of serving the interests of true believers further on the left. In this instance, however, postmodern intellectuals - post-positivists, poststructuralists, social constructivists, post-empiricists, epistemic relativists, cognitive relativists, descriptive relativists - turned out to be useful idiots most consequentially for the American right. “Reality has a well-known liberal bias,” Stephen Colbert once said, in character, mocking the beliefs-trump-facts impulse of today’s right. Neither side has noticed, but large factions of the elite left and the populist right have been on the same team. [my emphasis]
Having recently worked through Jürgen Habermas' account of how the Young Hegelians and the pragmatists built on the traditions of Kant's transcendentalism and Hegel's metaphysical construction of Reason to establish a materialist, social-theory-based explanation of how reason is established in human society, this strikes me as inadequate. Habermas himself has critiqued postmodernism at length in his The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1985).
But he also has used the work of what is known as the "linguistic turn" in philosophy (Sprachphilosophie) identified with figures like Frege, Wittgenstein, John Austin, Donald Davidson and Robert Brandom, building on earlier ideas from John Locke, Johann Gottfried Herder, and Wilhelm von Humboldt, to look at the social processes in which knowledge is actually developed and communicated. A positivist notion of what-you-see-is-what-you-get empiricism is appealing. And focusing on empirical findings is extremely important in refuting pseudoscience and conspiracy theories. But it's not the whole story of how human knowledge functions.
Jürgen Habermas in his monumental new history of Western philosophy (Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie, 2019) makes the following observation about the current deterioration of democratic institutions in various places in the world including the United States, Europe, and Brazil:
It is no historical coincidence that, since the 18th century, a liberal [bourgeois] public has developed at the same time as liberal democracy. Even under the changed conditions of mass democracy, parliamentary legislation, party competition and free political elections had to take root in a vibrant political public, an egalitarian civil society and a liberal political culture. The social inequality that politically unregulated markets regularly generate, and the repressive equating of national majority cultures with a political culture in which even citizens of other cultural origins can recognize themselves, are among the most tangible causes of a factual erosion of formal democratic institutions.
Without the mutual accommodation of an empowering culture and an empowering social infrastructure, the prerequisites for deliberation that are essential to the democratic legitimation of government cannot find a foothold in reality. Today we are witnessing the disintegration of this infrastructure, even in the oldest democracies on the continents that are economically and politically receding [i.e., Europe and North America]. The various causes are not easy to reconcile. But the fragility of a form of government that is based on the free floating of fundamental convictions is not a mystery. (p. 766. vo. 2)
(The translation from the German, the paragraph break, and the bolding are mine.)
What he is saying is that without some adequate threshold of actual democratic interchange of ideas among the broad public that can create substantive outcomes in actual government policies and actions, a constitutional democracy loses it legitimation and becomes "especially susceptible to interference."
Habermas is famous for his (aspirational) concept of "constitutional patriotism." He interprets what he calls the 18th century European "constitutional revolutions" - the American and French ones - as events in in which a continuing process began in which a process of establishing an initial democratic consensus on a form of government which then allowed democracy to function as a form of government and to deepen and expand itself. And he stresses that substantial democracy (the actual power of ordinary citizens to effectively demand changes in government policy) also requires the equal rule of law:
The constitutions of democratic-constitutional states are intended to ensure the uniform autonomy of the united citizens through the medium of mandatory laws and subjective rights: they combine the principle of popular sovereignty with the principle of the rule of law in such a way that citizens are only subject to laws of which they can understand themselves as being the authors. (p. 763-4; emphasis in original; my translation)
Habermas, who will turn 91 90 in a couple of weeks, is often described as Germany's leading public intellectual. He's a passionate pro-European who has nevertheless been very critical of the EU's "democratic deficits" and it terrible handling of the last euro crisis and the refugees crisis of 2015-6. (The latter is also a chronic crisis which will continue to have flair-ups until the EU can come to grips with the basic problem that the "Dublin system" regulating immigration was flawed to begin with and now hopelessly obsolete, and the next euro crisis is likely just around the corner.)
He is also the best known-living representative of the "second generation" of the Frankfurt School of philosophy and social theory, having studied under the "first generation" figure, Theodor Adorno. The Frankfurt School's distinctive set of outlooks was intensely influenced by the experience of the rise of Hitler's National Socialism to power in Germany. Germany's post-First World War "Weimar Constitution" was widely regarded as a model democracy in Europe. But the Nazis came to power within the structures of that Constitution. That process continues to be intensely studied by historians and political scientists.
Hitler never bothered to formally abolish the Weimar Constitution after he first came to power in 1933. Technically, it was still in effect right up until the end of the Second World War in 1945. Even the best-constructed government can fail from internal causes if its opponents are determined enough to overcome it and its supporters are unwilling and/or unable to defend it effectively. That process of a democratic government and a state enforcing the rule of law just ceasing to exist still casts its shadow on Habermas' analysis quoted above.
Democracy requires some basic level of political equality - "one person, one vote" in the famous concept - and of social equality as well. If votes can be suppressed in the way that was the standard practice in the post-Reconstruction South in the US and is becoming standard now in Republican-doinated states, that limits the degree to which one-person-one-vote can actually operate. If oligarchs have such disproportionate wealth that they can effectively dominated political campaigns and news media, that puts severe limits on the degree which to actual democratic deliberation can take place, or to become policy reality even when the public supports policies that elected representatives normally share but which oligarchs oppose.
And, of course, the rule of law is also critical for democracy to function. If public officials can just break the law at will, even getting desirable laws passed loses its meaning. If the national executive can use emergency powers to dismiss the elected legislature, which Hungary's Viktor Orbán is doing right now, it doesn't really matter which representatives are in Parliament or what the Constitution actually requires. Eliminating an independence of the judiciary and allowing it to be subject to an authoritarian executive gets to the same result.
That also means that the political system, i.e., the political parties and civil society, have to function effectively. And in the United States in May of 2020, it can feel a lot like the political system is seriously failing, even collapsing. That Donald Trump is in the White House operating with amazing corruption and eagerly working to dismantle Executive accountability and to annul the rule of law is in itself pretty dramatic evidence that the political system is failing badly.
Since it is May of 2020, I should add that nothing I'm saying here show be understood as in any way encouraging passivity or cynicism about the stakes of this year's election. For all his weaknesses, electing Joe Biden as President is an urgent matter for people who seriously want to preserve democracy and the rule of law. So is electing members of Congress, governors, mayors, and state legislators who are responsible democratic representatives, not just placeholders owned and operating by lobbyists and billionaire donors.
Still, even though it may turn out to be an effective Presidential campaign strategy, having the all-but-official Democratic nominee Joe Biden literally campaigning from his basement in a weird, digital-era version of William McKinley's "front-porch" campaign strategy of 1896, in which he demonstrably met supporters on his front porch and preached the virtues of the Gold Standard. He won, and governed as a Gilded Age Republican conservative.
McKinley was arguably some kind of improvement over his Democratic predecessor Grover Cleveland, who (in)famously vetoed a bill to provide federal relief to drought-stricken Texas farmers, declaring "that the lesson should be constantly enforced that, though the people support the Government, the Government should not support the people."
It took a vigorous Progressive movement, militant labor unions, an active Socialist Party, and a successful women's-suffrage movement to pull the American system of that downward spiral.
And despite the obvious superiority of Biden to Trump in the Presidential race, the resolution of the Democratic Presidential nomination is remarkably similar to the "smoke-filled room" selection process selection by party bosses in the old days. The convergence of effectively unlimited campaign spending and oligopoly media has erased much of the substance of the inner-party democracy that was ascendant since 1972. The fight for internal democracy in the Democratic Party will go on, of course.
The COVID-19 pandemic is also the start of what will almost certainly be a serious depression affecting much of the world. The pandemic is making even more clear the failure of the neoliberal project since the late 1970s with its fatal combination of austerity economics and privatization of even the most essential services.
Habermas also alludes to how the erosion of the public base of what we used to call the reality-based community is also eroding democracy, when he notes that without a broad and solid consensus on how the governments should work and confidence that it can work in the genuine interests of ordinary voters, the political system is operating on "the free floating of fundamental convictions." A democracy that tries to run itself on the basis of FOX News fantasies and QAnon conspiracy theories will fail in serious ways.
Congresswoman Ilhan Omar attracted criticism even from some of her admirers (of which I'm one) on the left with her decision to vote "Present" on a House resolution recognizing the Armenian genocide of 1915-1923.
Omar said that while she believes that accountability for human rights abuses is "paramount," she also believes that "accountability and recognition of genocide should not be used as a cudgel in a political fight. It should be done based on academic consensus outside the push and pull of geopolitics."
If Congress truly wishes to acknowledge historic crimes against humanity, Omar added, it should look closer to home.
She argued that such a step "must include both the heinous genocides of the 20th century, along with earlier mass slaughters like the transatlantic slave trade and the Native American genocide, which took the lives of hundreds of millions of people in this country." For this reason, Omar said she voted "present" on the bill. [my emphasis]
This tweet by Michael Brooks retweeting a criticism by TYT reporter Ken Klippenstein is an example of criticism of her from the left:
Trash vote and trash statement. She’s really good and there are geopolitical reasons behind the vote. She should hear from everyone how absolutely awful this is https://t.co/aUo5eXQOdT
That doesn‘t mean we can‘t argue for a broader definition. The attorney Raphael Lemkin (1900–1959) who is credited with inventing the term genocide (in the 1944 book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe) did employ a wider definition himself. This short video from the US Holocaust Museum remembers Lemkin, Eyewitness Testimony: Raphael Lemkin:
But the wider the definition, the more examples people have to accuse countries of hypocrisy when they single out a genocide for condemnation. Jeffrey Ostler, an actual scholar of genocide, discusses at some length the challenges in applying the concept to one of the examples Congresswoman Omar used in his book, Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas (2019).
Comparing genocides to one another unfortunately can lead to some frivolous political rhetoric along the lines of my-genocide-is-worse-than-your-genocide. It can be a real rhetorical minefield.
I spent some time in the 1990s trying to learn about the Nazi Holocaust and to understand how it is treated in various historical narratives. That included learning about some of the polemical arguments made by people who want to minimize the seriousness of the Holocaust in some way.
One example of that produced a public discussion in Germany in the 1980s that became known as the Historikerstreit (historians' dispute). This was an argument among scholars that was conducted in the popular press. (Matthias von Hellfeld, Vor 25 Jahren: Der HistorikerstreitDeutsche Welle 20.07.2011) It was kicked it off by a 1986 editorial column by Ernst Nolte, a German historian who (at least until then!) was a respected one. Nolte's earlier work on fascism, particularly his 1963 book published in English in 1965 as The Three Faces of Fascism; Action Francaise, Italian Fascism, National Socialism, is still regarded as an important work.
But in 1986, Nolte made the bizarre argument that I will summarize this way: because the Soviet Union had set up concentration camps, this inspired Hitler's idea of exterminating the Jews. So Stalin was responsible for the Holocaust. Other historians and the well-known Frankfurt School philosopher Jürgen Habermas criticized Nolte's piece, though there were prominent historians who were at least partly supportive of Nolte.
Nolte and his partisans didn't put it that crassly. But his argument served to shift part of the blame and responsibility for the Holocaust away from Hitler and Germany. "Did the [Soviet] 'Gulag Archipelago' not exist prior to Auschwitz?" asked Nolte, who referred to the Holocaust as an "Asiatic" act, i.e., not genuinely German or European. In other words, he used the comparison as a deflection from the historical seriousness of the Holocaust. He also wrote, "Auschwitz does not result primarily from traditional anti-Semitism and was not at its core a mere 'genocide', but rather the reaction to the extermination processes of the Russian Revolution born of fear," i.e. German fear of the Russians. In other words, the Holocaust wasn't really a "genocide", and the Commies were to blame anyway.
The Allied bombing of Dresden in 1945 also plays a role in Holocaust denier polemics. The argument is, look at how savagely the Allies bombed and killed Germans in Dresden and that shows what murderous intentions they had against all Germans, so the Holocaust was a response to those evil intentions. The decision against the far-right historian David Irving in Irving v. Penguin Books Limited, Deborah E. Lipstat (2000) has an excellent discussion of Irving's own revisionist and inaccurate historical accounts of the bombing of Dresden. And it describes how this can be used in a narrative that tries to minimize the Holocaust:
Irving has also made broader claims which tend to minimise the Holocaust. For example he has claimed that the Jews in the East were shot by individual gangsters and criminals and that there was no direction or policy in place for mass extermination to be carried out. I do, however, accept that Irving expressed himself in more measured language on this topic than in the case of the gas chambers. But he has also minimised the number of those killed by means other than gas at Auschwitz and elsewhere. Having grossly underestimated the number who lost their lives in the camps, Irving is prone to claim that a greater number than that were killed in Allied bombing raids on Dresden and elsewhere. He has, moreover, repeatedly claimed that the British Psychological War Executive ingeniously invented the lie that the Nazis were killing Jews in gas chambers in order to use it as propaganda. (p. 176) [my emphasis]
So comparing genocides can be tricky.
And this is a big reason why I currently tend toward a more conservative definition of what constitutes genocide and try to orient my view around the international law version enshrined in the Genocide Convention.
Particularly as historical awareness of the Holocaust in the US and Europe has grown over recent decades, the term "genocide" has understandably taken on an implication of the worst of all possible crimes. So there is a temptation to apply it as a superlative to more and more situations. So people talk about a genocidal war in Vietnam, a genocidal war in Yemen, the slave trade as genocide, settler colonialism in the Western Hemisphere as genocide. But the Genocide Convention established genocide as a distinct type of crime, not as something that applies to all wars or all famines or all discrimination.
And there are reasons for that. Criminal law discriminates between different degrees of illegal killing. In the US, manslaughter is distinguished from second degree murder and both are distinguished from first degree murder. There is also a category of murder "with special circumstances," i.e., killing involving unusual cruelty. These don't mean that society considers any of these kinds of killings okay. It does mean that it does make distinctions based among other things on motive and intentions.
In terms of popular polemics involving genocide, it's important to keep in mind that the more broadly a particular term is applied, the greater the risk that its meaning will become blurred, or that it will lose some of its intellectually and emotionally evocative power. To put it in a more exaggerated way, if every kind of collective violence is genocide, genocide becomes just another word for collective violence.
I've always remembered the line used by Richard Nixon's Vice President Spiro Agnew in dismissing contemporary criticisms from antiwar activists that the Vietnam War was immoral. He brushed it off by saying, "All wars are immoral." Which meant in practice, no wars are immoral. On its face, it was a radical pacifist position, though no sentient being took Agnew or Nixon to be radical pacifists. Actually, Agnew's position was also directly sneering at over a millennium of Christian religious traditions on the Just War, as well as similar traditions in other religions. And, however imperfectly the religious doctrines or international law have functioned in limiting violence, it is illegal in international law to invade another country that is not threatening the invader. The defendants in the Nuremberg Trials were accused and convicted of waging "aggressive war," the legal term used there for an illegal invasion. A secular version of the Just War doctrine, in other words.
Telford Taylor, the chief American chief prosecutor at Nuremberg, wrote in Nuremberg and Vietnam: An American Tragedy (1970):
The lack of a satisfactory definition of "aggressive war" ... should not be taken as a sufficient argument against its use as a description of unlawful international conduct. In fact, as the discussion and application of the standard since it came into common parlance reveals, it is not significantly different from the tests for the lawful use of defensive force in our domestic criminal law. As we have already seen, the parallelism is of long standing. There is remarkable similarity between the criteria stated by Suarez and Grotius for distinguishing the just from the unjust war, and the provision of the New York Penal Law specifying. the circumstances under which force may rightfully be used: to defend one's sell, one's property or to assist other persons engaged in defending themselves or their property. [my emphasis]
Agnew, in other words, watered down the concept of a war being immoral to the point of rendering it meaningless. Political speech can have that effect on the meaning of words and phrases. Actual experts on the subject, like Taylor in that case, have a more substantive take.
And here's where Ilhan Omar's position calls attention to some important considerations, though I do wish she had voted for the resolution. If we actually consider the fate of native populations in the Western Hemisphere after European colonization as genocide, people have a substantive point in arguing that the US - and every Latin American country, for that matter - are acting hypocritically in criticizing other countries for genocide if they haven't condemned their own genocides against native peoples.
I'm going to put on my Reluctant Realist hat for a couple of minutes here and say that foreign policy, unfortunately, runs to a large degree on hypocrisy. If the US waits to condemn wrongs and injustices abroad until it has formally condemned and made just restitution for every domestic wrong, it will never condemn any foreign wrong whatsoever. And that would not be a good outcome, either.
Yes, of course, these condemnations have political considerations involved with them. That doesn't mean we shouldn't ever do them. It does mean, though, that it's legitimate for Members of Congress to criticize the political considerations being applied in individual cases.
I just happen to disagree with Ilhan Omar's vote on this one.
