Crisis of Liberalism
From the Series: Cultural Anthropology Responds to Trump
Is liberalism in crisis? The surge of populist politics—challenging both representation and reason—around the world demands that we pose the question. 2016 has already seen, among other things, the success of the Brexit campaign in the United Kingdom, a new president in the Philippines who openly supports extrajudicial killings, and the perverse spectacle of Donald Trump. For this election-season edition of Hot Spots, we have invited several distinguished scholars to comment on the idea of liberalism in crisis and on the implications of what Douglas Holmes has termed “integralist” movements within many political cultures across the global North and South. Speaking from different vantage points around the world, some of our contributors see crisis as part of liberalism’s standard operating procedure, whereas others see integralism mainstreaming in ways that may augur a time of monsters. We invite you to take advantage of our site’s underutilized Comments feature to continue and extend the conversation.
Posts in This Series
Introduction: Crisis of Liberalism
This Hot Spots series reflects on our present and recent seasons of political discontent. The rise of nationalist, populist—or what Douglas Holmes (2000) has te... More
Losing Our Manners: The Current Crisis and Possible Durability of Liberal Discourse
Liberalism was first Europe’s, and then much of the world’s answer to the problem of conflict rooted in human difference—an effort to build politics on the agre... More
We Have Never Been Liberal: Occidentalist Myths and the Impending Fascist Apocalypse
The steady rise of neofascist ideologies in the mainstream of European and American political discourse has caused grave concern among the intelligentsia of cou... More
Budapest 2016: A Novel Kind of Fascism
In late September I was in Budapest to participate in the defense of a doctoral dissertation by Kristóf Szombati. Its title, “The Revolt of the Provinces: Anti-... More
Time of Monsters
When Hans Fallada’s Little Man, What Now? was published during the last days of the Weimar Republic, his tale of economic depression and shattered petit-bourgeo... More
A Liberalism of Fear
For more than a decade, I have been doing research with Venezuelan community media activists who were aligned with the late Hugo Chávez and his Bolivarian revol... More
Elections and Crisis: The Case of Colombia’s Peace Referendum
Contemporary narratives of political crisis portray rational liberal systems falling prey to dangerous populist leaders. Think of Trumpism in the United States,... More
Crisis and Identity in Contemporary Papua New Guinea
Despite decades of research to the contrary, Papua New Guinea (PNG) is often viewed by outsiders as either a world of Stone Age cannibals (West 2016) or, if you... More
#cripthevote: What’s the Crisis of Liberalism Got to Do With It?
More than a quarter-century after the 1990 passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), the landscape of U.S. public culture is being reconfigured. Des... More
Campaign Watching from Stockholm
Every four years the suggestion comes up, here and there in the world: as everybody on the planet is affected by the outcome of U.S. presidential elections, eve... More
Curtis on the Bay: Failed Development and the Mythology of Trump
There’s a mythology around Donald Trump in late industrial Baltimore. Angel, a thirty-six-year-old white woman, was the first to bring it up. As we sat on her c... More