Vlad Vexler Chat
Is Trumpism Too Far Gone to Save U.S. Democracy?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GoO3_EaoE6Y
Hello very beautiful community. I wanted to say a few important things that might help ground us as we witness Trump's authoritarian revolution, a kind of authoritarian consolidation against the background of there still being a lot of pluralistic political competition in the United States. So let's talk about this. Politics is very roughly when human relationships mediated by institutions human beings share transcend a state of war. Politics implies a certain degree of acceptance between political opponents of shared procedures that apply to everybody. And we have a crisis in the west. We have a crisis in particular in the United States about accepting shared procedure.
1:10
We have had a breakdown of the capacity
of most major political actors to say
whatever we disagree about, we have a
protective disposition. We feel sacredly
about the rules of the game. What we've
got in the United States is an
administration wants to break the rules
of the game. So that's politics. And so
what's most special about politics is
the very thing that people are losing
uh commitment to.
1:51
And when you lose a commitment to that
thing and when you lose that thing,
politics at least partly lapses into a
state of war against war of all against
all.
2:04
And when we think about
what the state is for,
we always start, we should always start
with Thomas Hobbes who fundamentally
understood what the modern state was all
about because the modern state for
Hobbes is about avoiding extreme kinds
of breakdown of order.
And if you can guarantee order, then you
can guarantee other things. It's the
political thing you need to guarantee
before anything else politically becomes
possible.
2:43
However, what we have to our benefit
learned in recent decades and in a
century or more is that when the
historical winds blow in the right
direction, we can get a lot better than
just order. We can get a situation where
we're aspiring to include all citizens
in the fruits of society.
3:10
We also aspire to bring it about that
we're at least in principle committed to
helping all citizens when they run into
contingent
kinds of uh misfortune that are not
their fault.
3:28
And that's roughly the story of the
development of the modern welfare state
over the last half century and more.
That too, funnily enough, needs a very
considerable degree of trust.
So what
we're talking about at the level of what
the state is for is a lapse from uh more
ambitious to a less ambitious
answer
uh to the question of what the state can do.
3:57
um the wave of post-truth authoritarians
um all over the west is going to take us
toward a more pessimistic a more minimal