Политическая теория и философия (Political theory and philosophy)

John Abromeit - Jürgen Habermas’s Image Of The United States As A Model Of “Modernity”: From Attachment To Melancholy To return now to Habermas’s idealized image of the U.S. as the beacon of liberal democracy, it is perhaps not surprising that Donald Trump’s election in 2016 and re-election in 2024 seemed to put Habermas in a pessimistic mood. Habermas was certainly not alone in that sentiment, but his consternation must have been compounded by the fact that Donald Trump’s authoritarian political movement is so egregiously at odds with his own “normative” image of U.S. liberal democracy. Here, the contrast with the early Critical Theorists, who lived in the United States for over a decade, and carried out extensive empirical studies of authoritarianism here, was quite clear. The empirical studies conducted by the Institute in the 1940s led them to the conclusion that the U.S. was by no means immune to the powerful subjective and objective tendencies towards authoritarianism and fascism, which existed in all modern capitalist societies. In fact, Adorno came to view the U.S. as a “radical bourgeois society,”which provide perhaps the best possible laboratory for the study of such tendencies. Adorno and – to an even greater degree – Horkheimer developed a greater appreciation of U.S. democracy thanks to their “American experience,”but it did not lead them to forget the dangerous tendencies towards authoritarianism that continued to exist in modern capitalist societies, even after the military defeat of fascism. https://logosjournal.com/article/jurgen-habermass-image-of-the-united-states-as-a-model-of-modernity-from-attachment-to-melancholy/