ASTK18323U Cancelled Between Extinction and Inequality: New Threats and Challenges to Political Engagement

What are the key issues for the study of political engagement today? This question is motivated by the fact that liberal democracy is in existential crisis. It was created to form robust political institutions and a vibrant civic culture capable of mixing concerns for pluralism and stability in modern society. However, it has proved unable to handle the profound challenges to democratic politics resulting from accelerating globalization, individualization, professionalization, mediatization and digitalization. First, liberal democracy was taken over by globalist neoliberalism, uncoupling actors inside political systems from ‘ordinary people’ in the social lifeworld to be able to ‘adapt’ to the needs of the emerging knowledge and risk society operating in ‘fast time’. Then nativist populism emerged as a response to the neoliberal takeover with its program for combating ‘the global elite conspiracy’ and make the nation and its ‘pure’ people great again. This hegemonic battle between neoliberalism and populism is squeezing all life out of liberal democracy. It is making it unable to deal both with the growing inequalities produced by neoliberalism’s political economy and populism’s discourse about global warming as invented by the global elite to preserve its hegemony.

Political participation today is also drifting away from liberal democracy’s original idea of virtuous citizenship as the road to keeping political institutions strong and responsible as well as to safeguarding a vibrant civil society and public sphere. Just as neoliberalism is making participation more individualistic and global in nature so populism is making it more collectivistic and national. Thus, they are undermining the conventional steering triad of state (‘hierarchy’), market (‘anarchy’) and civil society (‘solidarity’), rejecting that this is any longer ‘the mix that matters’. Key-focus is instead on the tension between networking knowledge elites mixing science and technology to shape and control objects and subjects, and strong, authentic leaders embodying the collective power and identity of ‘we the people’.

A tension is deepening between those who engage globally to combat climate change (for instance Extinction Rebellion) and those who struggle nationally for popular sovereignty (for example Podemos). This course is oriented towards discussing how these two grand narratives for saving the Earth and bringing ‘the People’ back in can – and should be - connected, and how new forms of political engagement can contribute to overcoming the global/national divide in terms of a new multilevel participatory approach to connecting system and lifeworld.  The course takes its starting point in the American dream which originally was about creating and shaping a democratic polis that could connect achievement and equality, technological and economic progress and ethical and social commonality. From here the course is divided into 4 sections:

Section I:  on liberal democracy; section II: on neoliberalism’s takeover; section III: on the populist counter-revolution; and section IV: reinventing the American dream - new approaches to connecting achievement and engagement.     

1 INTRODUCTION

The American Dream: Between Achievement and Equality (Bang 2018, Dalton 2017, Norris and Inglehart 2019)

Section I On Liberal Democracy:

Connecting the democratic Regime and the civic culture (Almond and Verba 1963, Dahl 1956, Habermas 2002)

Social capital and appropriate institutions (Putnam 1993, Putnam and Goss 2002, March and Olsen 1995)

The public sphere of state and civil society (Goode 2005, Habermas 1997)

Section II: on neoliberalism’s takeover:

Depoliticization and the professionalization of Parties and NGOs (Mair 2013)

Reflexive individuals and consumers in latemodernity (Hutton and Giddens, 1999, Stolle, Hooghe and Micheletti 2005, Sunstein 2017).

A New Public Management for nudging individuals to seek success and make the right choices. (Thaler and Sunstein 2011).

Section III: on the populist counter-revolution:

Repoliticization of politics and policy (Mouffe 2013)

A politics of conflict and emotions (Mouffe 2018)

The struggle for hegemony and collective identity, Mouffe 2018, Della Porta et al 2017 

Section IV: reinventing the American dream - new approaches to connecting achievement and engagement. 

Expert Citizens and Everyday Makers in the Lifeworld (Bang 2003, 2005, 2009, Occupy Wall Street Activists 2011)

Connective action in new political movements (Bang and Halupka 2017, Bennett and Segerberg 2013)

A new politics of truth founded on mutual acceptance and recognition of difference (Bang 2015 Thunberg 2019)