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.

The Foreign Policy Borg

One of the most common criticisms of Obama from the left is that his foreign policy is not discernibly all that different from that of late period George W. Bush–Guantanamo was never closed, Obama employed a surge strategy in Afghanistan, drone attacks were used, troop numbers continued to decline in Iraq, it all felt, and perhaps it all feels, as though nothing has changed. At the same time, many on the left like to argue that, were Kerry or Gore elected, things would have been quite different, that Bush was discernibly distinct from Clinton. The historical record shows this to be false–Bush’s foreign policy amounted to a mere evolution of Clinton’s military interventionism and embrace of the democratic peace theory, the notion that democracies promote peace and prosperity and that, consequently, democracy should be spread to foreign lands. It’s not as if the interventions in Somalia and Yugoslavia during the nineties were motived in any way significantly differently from the reasoning eventually supplied for the occupation of Iraq–spreading freedom, ending tyranny, and so on down the line. Of course, when these people were running for office, they talked a different game. They tried to draw distinction from their predecessors and purported to offer a serious foreign policy alternative–Mitt Romney as we recall attempted this very line of argument. So why is it that our presidents get assimilated into the foreign policy borg and adopt policies that are, for the most part, quite similar to those adopted by their predecessors? That’s today’s topic of investigation.

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