SOC433H5 Chapter Notes - Chapter 1: The American Prospect, Perspectivism, Unapologetic
1
Paul Waldman. 2016. “How Donald Trump Is Turning the GOP into a Postmodernist Party.” The
American Prospect. December 5
• Trump was unapologetic when he told his lies
• Continued to tell lies even after it was debunked
• Not only would they accept anything Trump told them, they seemed to delight in believing the
most lunatic conspiracy theories they could find.
• When trying to defend Trump’s statements there are two things that can be done
o One way to handle it is to say that his lies are actually true.
o another way is to undermine the very idea of truth, to claim that reality is unknowable,
there's no such thing as fact,
• Donald Trump can make up anything he wants, because "he's going to say what he believes to be
true"
• Trump said it so it must be true
• The fact that he says anything on his mind, people later think that what he is saying is true
because he isn’t scared of anything so why would he lie
• The eagerness of his supporters to believe whatever ridiculous thing he tells them helps assure
Trump that he can get away with anything.
• But as his aides and allies continue to insist that there's no such thing as truth and nothing wrong
with lying when Trump does it
• another way is to undermine the very idea of truth, to claim that reality is unknowable
• So it is that conservatives are on their way to becoming the ultimate postmodernists, convinced
that there's no such thing as objective truth and each one of us exists in our own subjective reality.
Andrew Perrin. 2017. “Stop Blaming Postmodernism for Post Truth Politics.” Chronicle of Higher
Education. Aug. 4.
• Argues that postmodernism is wrongly blamed for post truth politics
• Scholars have over exaggerated its significance in causing post truth politics
• Postmodernism emerged in the wake of the global, political, social and technological turmoil of
the 1960s
• The postmodernist movement rode that rapid technological and social change, capturing the sense
that it might be uncontrollable and perhaps even unknowable.
• In the postmodern historical moment, signs are ripped free of what they signify; symbols are
manipulated separately from their material foundations.
• No representations are neutral; all claims, beliefs, and symbols are tied up with the structures of
power and representation that give rise to them.
• All claims rest on configurations of power; power rests on the manipulation of symbols; and
people can manipulate symbols more or less successfully based in part on how those symbols are
related to other symbols.
• The insight that principles and observations depend on the particular historical and cultural
currents that feed them evokes the unease that many people feel when discussing postmodernism
• This insight is hardly an assault on truth.
• It’s a sober reckoning with the empirical realities of truth creation in our times.
• Radical perspectivism: a related but distinct political/intellectual movement
that also became fashionable in the 1980s and ’90s.
• In radical perspectivism, ideas are shaped by the demographic identities of the people holding the
ideas; the worth of those ideas becomes the social worth of the groups holding them
• The idea that the experience of oppression gives rise to a distinct understanding of the world far
predates postmodernism.
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