Andrew Sullivan Points Out that Plato.docx (original) (raw)
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Several political commentators have resorted to comparisons between Donald Trump and the tyrant of Plato's Republic in order to identify the causes of his election and to highlight the limits and dangers of the excess of democracy. In this paper I criticize this use of Plato's critique of tyranny on two accounts. First, I argue that Plato's critique of tyranny articulates a straightforward anti-democratic argument that should not be uncritically adopted by democratic commentators. Second, I show that Trump's election was characterized by both a conjunctural and a systemic deficit of democracy, rather than by its excess.
Ontology and Orange Hair: Reality and Reelity in Donald Trump's America
In December 2016 I hosted a Forum on the Open Anthropology Cooperative (www.openanthcoop.ning.com ), “Anthropologists on the Trump Election” that ran into April 2017. It was a lively discussion, and encouraged me to continue trying to frame an anthropological account of the phenomenon of Trump. The result is the essay now before you. Its genesis, what motivated me to host that OAC Forum, was my puzzlement, really bafflement, over the reaction to Trump’s election by my own community: American social-cultural anthropologists. In the section of the essay, “Anthropology Trumped” I discuss the circumstances of that bafflement. Very briefly, though, I fully expected that on learning the election results a great many of my disciplinary colleagues would react with disappointment, anger, even disbelief. They were fully entitled to those feelings. What I did not expect, however, was that these trained social scientists, supposedly dispassionate observers and analysts of events, would respond with an emotional disorientation bordering on psychological paralysis. Their shock and tears were essentially the same as those of Hillary’s strongest supporters, displayed for all cable news viewers to see at her “victory party.” To work through that disappointment and set the stage for what is to follow, I begin the essay’s topical sections with “Anthropology Trumped.”
How People Make Sense of Trump and Why It Matters for Racial Justice
Journal of Contemporary Rhetoric, 2018
Scholars, journalists, pundits and others have criticized the racist, anti-queer, anti-Semitic, Islamophobic, and xenophobic rhetoric that pervades the Trump campaign and presidency. At the same time, commentators have expended a vast number of words analyzing Trump’s character: why does he do the things he does? We ask, how do the latter (analyses of Trump’s character) help explain the former (Trump’s racist statements)? Through a close rhetorical analysis of 50 diverse examples of Trump criticism, we reveal four prevailing characterizations or “archetypes” of Trump: Trump the Acclaim-Seeker, Trump the Sick Man, Trump the Authoritarian, and Trump the Idiot. Each archetype explains Trump’s racism in a different way, with significant consequences for social critique. For example, the Trump the Idiot archetype dismisses his racist statements as a series of terrible gaffes, whereas Trump the Authoritarian explains them as an actualization of white supremacy. We trace the benefits and tradeoffs of each archetype for resisting white supremacy.