Is the Trump Administration the First Postmodern American Regime?

No matter how much I wish this were not so, I think there’s a very strong argument to made that it is. But at what a cost!

James Lindsay does just that in his article/podcast at New Discourse called Age of Narratives and The Postmodern Democratic Regime. He explains far better than I ever could what Modernity means in the creation and maintenance of liberal secular democracies by way of shared values and how Postmodern beliefs in action relentlessly attack those values with the effect of causing great harm to liberal secular democracies, harm to science, harm to reasonable discourse based on mutual respect for what’s true, harm to mutual respect for the rule of law, harm to the mutual respect for regulated capitalism, for free speech, and so on. The evolving result in which we find ourselves living , as postmodern ideology becomes ever more institutionalized as public values, is the Trump Administration. It’s not a Right wing/Left wing problem at all but a Postmodern problem under populist leadership. Because we know this Administration effortlessly uses and discards as needed the partisan political divide to its own disruptive ends to gain ever more political power over the narrative, while at the same time politicizing everything into narratives it can spin to its own support regardless of truth or facts, we have difficulty making sense of it. Why don’t facts matter? Where did the concern for respecting what’s true go? Why don’t good reasons and compelling evidence have any sway?

Casting the Trump Administration as an example of postmodernism in action, however, lifts this veil of confusion completely and we can see what’s really going on. As Lindsay says, “Modernity is built upon a few pillars: science, reason, rule of law, liberalism, capitalism. Postmodernism hates all of them.” As does the Trump Administration and it attacks all of these values constantly.

So the key to understanding what’s going on, I think, lies in understanding how the postmodern core value of narrative, of personal truth over knowledge, of lived experience over data, takes center stage, why and how truth and facts lose credibility to the point where they simply don’t matter. The resulting insanity that is postmodern ideology in action has come home to roost. And the disease isn’t Trump; it’s postmodernism as a political ideology. Lindsay’s article/podcast provides what I think is a very compelling case for you to consider. And it is timely.

Lindsay ends with what I think is a call to arms for all people who think what’s true matters, that facts matter, that reason matters, that rule of law matters. He says,

We figured out how to tell what’s true once in human history, during the Enlightenment that ended the premodern Dark Age of superstition that preceded it. We can figure out how to do it again, hopefully soon enough to stop postmodernism from turning the lights out on us all again. I think this is our project, and we’ve all got some work to do.