Category: Miscellaneous

Ideology Critique and Its Limits

I have a new article out in New Political Science. You can read it here. Here’s the abstract:

Legitimacy and ideology both involve explaining controversial action. Discourses of legitimacy emphasize the sense in which these explanations can be genuinely meaningful, while discourses of ideology emphasize the sense in which these explanations are insufficient. It follows that discourses of legitimacy and ideology can be too one sided. In periods of social fragmentation, it becomes harder to successfully legitimate controversial action, and ideology critique proliferates. The existing order is disgraced, but this does not necessarily cause a viable alternative to emerge. Writing in the 1970s, Jürgen Habermas proposed to overcome social fracturing through forms of management. But instead of uniting subjects around a legitimate alternative, management has tended to reinforce and contribute to the fracturing that generates ideology critique. It has also produced subjects whose horizons are always already managerial, who tend to make demands in exclusively managerial terms. Rather than provide an alternative to ideology critique and managerial horizons, political science has internalized these features, becoming merely another instantiation of this problem. Instead of engaging in discourse management or ideology critique, radical political scientists need to take a sincere interest in discovering, articulating, and operating with the diverse plurality of legitimation stories that do in fact persuade the people they live among to accept controversial action. This has become particularly pressing at a time when the humanities and social sciences are struggling to legitimate themselves to the public and have consequently become perennial targets for the Trump administration. Without a capacity for legitimation, political science is susceptible to ideology critique.

Some of you may have heard that S. Matisko and I have gotten married. There will be a major post on Substack this coming Sunday discussing the modernization of my life, including the enlarged role that Substack is going to play going forward.

Liberal Hypocrisies and the Alternatives to Them

All social orders are supported by “legitimation stories”. These are the reasons orders give us to support them, or at least to stay out of their way. Legitimation stories don’t have to be true, but they have to be persuasive. The social order has to create a set of conditions that are similar enough to the stories that we mistake what we have for what we were promised. Legitimation stories are chiefly about “good order”. Order is straightforward–social orders promise to protect us from violence, starvation, instability, and precarity. They promise to make us feel secure. “Good” is less obvious, because “good” tends to mean different things to different people in different contexts. Liberal legitimation stories understand “good” in three senses:

  1. A good order is one in which the subjects of the order are “free” or have “liberty” in some relevant sense.
  2. A good order is one in which the subjects of the order are treated as “equal” to one another in some relevant sense.
  3. A good order is one in which the order “represents” the subjects in some relevant way.
  4. A good order is “dynamic”, it is capable of delivering real change.

The trouble is that terms like “free”, “equal”, and “representative” don’t have stable social meanings. Our understandings of these terms can easily slide out of alignment with the understandings we need to have for legitimation stories to work. If we understand “equality” to mean “a fair distribution of resources” but the liberal order wants us to understand “equality” as “everyone gets to have their say”, the order has to convince us that we’ve misunderstood the meaning of equality. It has to get us to think about it in a whole different way. When gaps open up between the conditions the order produces and our expectations, it is often because the order has lost control over how we understand the words it uses to tell its stories. When this happens, the order appears “hypocritical”–it appears to say one thing and do another, to tell stories it has no intention of realising. That’s what today’s post is about–the liberal order’s hypocrisies.

Continue reading “Liberal Hypocrisies and the Alternatives to Them” →

The Left Press is Failing Bernie Sanders

This week, Elizabeth Warren overtook Bernie Sanders on the Morning Consult poll. This is the first time she’s placed second on Morning Consult. She’s now up a full point on the RealClear poll average, including 11-point advantages on Quinnipiac and YouGov. She’s up a point on Emerson too. Sanders hangs on to two-point leads on Harris and FOX News’ polls, but trails everywhere else.

Sanders led by 4 points as recently as June and 10 points as recently as May. He’s dropped from 23% in the average to 17%. In April, Warren’s campaign looked moribund. She polled at less than 6% and was getting obliterated in fundraising. We have screwed this up. But the good news is that we have time. Iowa isn’t until February. There’s four full months to turn this around. But if we’re going to do it, we need to take a hard look at ourselves and the role we’ve been playing in the race.

Continue reading “The Left Press is Failing Bernie Sanders” →

Dead Pundits Society Podcast

I’m on the Dead Pundits Society podcast with Adam Proctor and Aimee Terese this week. It’s one of my favourite interviews I’ve done–it’s theoretically rich, both in terms of depth and breadth. Adam and Aimee are sharp and witty and do terrific work. You can listen to it here:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/ep-56-meaning-of-20055873

There will be an additional hour-long “B side” released shortly for those who subscribe to the podcast. On the B side you can hear us discuss “The Left is Not a Church.”