The propaganda tools that the 21st century authoritarians have are a lot greater than that of the 20th century regimes. Goebbels would have loved social media and YouTube. Just an easy way to lead people down the rabbit hole.
"So here’s where we get to my bill of indictment, based on my own lived experience (ahem) of these debates way back in the 1990s. In those days, when I was in college and grad school at Berkeley, a standard normie liberal critique of poststructuralism was that the anti-Enlightenment epistemic radicalism of the left, while overtly trained against the complacencies of small-l liberalism, would eventually “make space” for right wing critiques of liberalism.
This was a point that Jurgen Habermas made over and over again in his many debates with the likes of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Niklas Luhmann, and others. Having been raised in Hitler’s Germany, Habermas understood very well the risks associated with abandoning discourse ethics and embracing epistemic relativism, cynicism, or even nihilism. Habermas argued that the ideas these men were promoting, allegedly “from the left,” were sapping the epistemic foundations of democratic practice, which depended on the “regulative ideal” of reasoned, good faith discourse as a mechanism for achieving a “fusion of horizons.”
A lot of theories that originated in the Ivory Tower managed to escape it thanks to the power of the Internet. Now you have people who really don't have much background or training in those theories lecturing other normies about the inherent racism of whiteness.
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The propaganda tools that the 21st century authoritarians have are a lot greater than that of the 20th century regimes. Goebbels would have loved social media and YouTube. Just an easy way to lead people down the rabbit hole.
The money quote from the essay:
"So here’s where we get to my bill of indictment, based on my own lived experience (ahem) of these debates way back in the 1990s. In those days, when I was in college and grad school at Berkeley, a standard normie liberal critique of poststructuralism was that the anti-Enlightenment epistemic radicalism of the left, while overtly trained against the complacencies of small-l liberalism, would eventually “make space” for right wing critiques of liberalism.
This was a point that Jurgen Habermas made over and over again in his many debates with the likes of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Niklas Luhmann, and others. Having been raised in Hitler’s Germany, Habermas understood very well the risks associated with abandoning discourse ethics and embracing epistemic relativism, cynicism, or even nihilism. Habermas argued that the ideas these men were promoting, allegedly “from the left,” were sapping the epistemic foundations of democratic practice, which depended on the “regulative ideal” of reasoned, good faith discourse as a mechanism for achieving a “fusion of horizons.”
A lot of theories that originated in the Ivory Tower managed to escape it thanks to the power of the Internet. Now you have people who really don't have much background or training in those theories lecturing other normies about the inherent racism of whiteness.