Analysis (and a primal scream)
Anyone who knows what will happen in 2028 probably doesn’t know much
This week at Public Seminar, David Plotke, James Miller, Forrest Deacon, Iman Sultan, and Phyllis Jeffrey unpack what we know and don't know about the political present. Uncertainties include: Turkey’s preview of authoritarianism, the revolutionary potential of DOGE, and the future of sex.
The Dictatorship of the Tech Bros—or, What Is to Be Done?
A conversation about DOGE, and Trump and Musk’s attempt to smash the state
Forrest Deacon and James Miller
Forrest Deacon: What’s the point in talking about radical, popular, revolutionary, or whatever kind of democracy in dark times? Are we not experiencing the full extent of what Jacques Rancière, Colin Crouch, Peter Mair, Chantal Mouffe, and the like have sometimes, in despair, called “post-democracy” or “post-politics”?
Are we really stuck with an alienated and utterly impotent citizenry (or “people,” or “mass,” or “demos,” or whatever you want to call it)? Do ordinary people in the current moment have an actionable claim to self-determination and social dignity? Are we as powerless as I feel?
In short, I neither know what to do nor how best to think about what is happening.
Trump Returns
Anyone who knows what will happen in 2028 probably doesn’t know much
David Plotke
When someone loses a relatively close election, there are many accounts of what happened and what should come next. With the vast mass of commentary on offer, we should be cautious of two things. First, beware of anyone who says that what happened confirms what they were saying all along. This stance is at best tedious. It is only a few steps away from a nearly conspiratorial claim that “I knew the truth, but powerful agents prevented Harris and other leaders from enacting my advice.”
Second, be cautious about a genre of commentary that I would call pseudo- or polemical self-criticism, the kind that says, “We must look carefully at why the Democrats lost. Via this introspection I have found that my adversaries were just as terrible as I always knew.”
No Sex With Men
The South Korean radical feminist movement 4B arrives in the United States
Iman Sultan
The night of the election, when it had become clear Donald Trump was winning the race, a call to action reverberated across the internet. “Ladies, I’m being so fr when I say this, it’s time to close off your wombs to males. this election proves now more than ever that they hate us & hate us proudly. do not reward them,” a viral post on X proclaimed (18 million views and counting). Other social media posts recommended that American women embrace the imperative of the South Korean radical feminist movement 4B, which stipulates no marriage (비혼, bihon), no childbirth (비출산, bichulsan), no dating men (비연애, biyeonae), and no sex with men (비섹스, bisekseu) in protest against widespread misogyny, sexual harassment, and intimate partner violence.
From Erdoğan’s Turkey to Trump’s America
What we can learn from a parallel history
Phyllis Jeffrey
In the mid-twentieth century, with European fascism fresh in the collective memory, economic historian Karl Polanyi theorized that when people are pushed to the edge of survival by free market policies, the political consequences are unpredictable. A contemporary political sociologist, Stephanie Mudge, calls such moments of instability and political openness “Polanyian moments”: when what is sayable, thinkable, and doable by a political party is blown wide open.
Turkey’s Polanyian moment took place in 2001, when the value of the lira collapsed overnight. In the United States—the third most unequal country according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development Turkey being the second-most unequal—the Polanyian moment arrived in 2008–2009, in the form of a financial crisis.
Combine a Polanyian moment with disarticulation, and you go a long way toward explaining current politics in both Turkey and the United States.