What is at stake is the possibility of thinking beyond (perhaps below) its ideological and, nowadays, media pressure, unfortunately dominant in the television space. The overwhelming majority of “analyses” that we follow on the small screen apply the “right/left” formula, not to try to understand the dynamics of political ideas, just to evaluate whether or not such ideas satisfy the dichotomous formula stated before the actual knowledge of the facts and their not always predictable dialectics.
In one of the interviews in this issue of the magazine, Roger Berkowitz, philosopher and professor at Bard College (New York), talks, in particular, about what it means to “defend a certain idea of America” in the face of Donald Trump’s presidency. In this regard, it analyzes the prolonged effects of the action of the “new elite” which, following the upheavals of the 1960s against the conservative elites, presented itself as an entity that knows “everything about everything”, trying to impose “new norms for everyone”.
Berkowitz recalls that such a dictatorship of the new (the expression is just mine) “is what Hannah Arendt criticizes, for example, in the desire of civil rights activists to forcefully impose school buses to be open to racial diversity, burdening children with repairing the burden of segregation inherited from the past” — without forgetting, I repeat, that all this must be cited in terms of an American situation experienced 60 years ago. years.
In any case, Berkowitz also reflects on the present of a certain “liberal” political culture (the quotation marks are his), extending his reasoning with a very personal allusion: “I’m in favor of abortion, but I don’t want to impose my views on those who don’t think so. I’m in favor of gender change, but I don’t want to impose on everyone the idea that gender doesn’t exist. Above all, I’m not assert that those who disagree with me are sexist, transphobic racists who should be excluded from public debate.”
Hannah Arendt’s legacy cannot be separated from this mix of agility and forcefulness — and, to that extent, from the concept (and, above all, the practices) of what we call public space. Remembering Thomas Jefferson, she wrote in 1967, in her Essay on the revolution: “What, according to him, constituted the mortal danger for the republic was that the Constitution had conferred all power on the citizens without providing them with the possibility of being republicans and of acting as citizens.”
Which leads us to a question that haunts our democracies: why did the only active public space, active on a daily basis, become the television space? Beyond the funneling of thoughts, isn’t the same space promoting a merely virtual notion of political consciousness, sustained by the daily flow of unimaginative images? It remains to be seen whether there is any politician with the courage to think without submitting to the rules of this space, but also without giving up on their democratic potential.
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