Benjamin Studebaker: The Chronic Crisis of American Democracy

07/25/23 • 64 min

American democracy is in crisis. The economic system is slowly subjecting Americans of nearly all income levels and backgrounds to enormous amounts of stress. The United States lacks the state capacity required to alleviate this stress, and politicians increasingly find that if they promise to solve economic problems, they are likely to disappoint voters. Instead, they encourage voters to blame each other.

The crisis cannot be solved, the economy cannot be set right, and democracy cannot be saved. But American democracy cannot be killed, either. Americans can’t imagine any compelling alternative political systems. And so, American democracy continues on, in a deeply unsatisfying way. Americans invent ever-more elaborate coping mechanisms in a desperate bid to go on. But it becomes increasingly clear that the way is shut. The American political system was made by those who are dead, and the dead keep it.

Benjamin Studebaker speaks to Pierre d’Alancaisez about the runaway effects of globalisation, the false hope industry, cultural non-politics, and the very unlikely get-out scenarios.

Benjamin Studebaker is a political theorist whose work focuses on notions of legitimacy. He hosts the podcasts Political Theory 101.

The equality/equity meme
The 1619 Project
No Labels, the ‘commonsense majority’ party

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The Chronic Crisis of American Democracy
Benjamin StudebakerThe Way is Shut

Published by Palgrave Macmillan, 2023
ISBN 9783031282096

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Benjamin Studebaker speaks to Pierre d’Alancaisez about the runaway effects of globalisation, the false hope industry, cultural non-politics, and the very unlikely get-out scenarios.

Benjamin Studebaker is a political theorist whose work focuses on notions of legitimacy. He hosts the podcasts Political Theory 101.

The equality/equity meme
The 1619 Project
No Labels, the ‘commonsense majority’ party

*************

The Chronic Crisis of American Democracy
Benjamin StudebakerThe Way is Shut

Published by Palgrave Macmillan, 2023
ISBN 9783031282096

*************

Find many more interviews, projects, and my writing at ⁠⁠⁠https://petitpoi.net/⁠⁠⁠

You can sign up for my newsletter at ⁠⁠⁠https://petitpoi.net/newsletter/⁠⁠⁠

Support my work: ⁠⁠⁠https://petitpoi.net/support/

Previous Episode

Adrian Rifkin: Future Imperfect

Then let the story really begin in 1968, though it has little to do with May. By chance it opens in January of that year, and it really concerns me rather than the world of political events, though these are always on my mind, as they were always on my mind.

Future Imperfect, Adrian Rifkin’s short Bildungsroman sets beside each other the fault lines of events and moments recalled without a diary with the verification and sometimes undermining effects of new research of materials, the recovery of what was known, what might have been known, and what was merely probable, as if this were a history of the history of art.

Adrian Rifkin speaks to Pierre d’Alancaisez about the uses of radical pedagogy, dreams, art history, and the economy of memory. Wagner and the Teletubbies also feature.

Adrain’s performance Hypotheses and Loving Contradictions at Haus der Kunst, 2017
The White Pube 🎨🖌️🐀
Jeffrey Steele
Robert Motherwell
Artangel
Afterall
Allan Sekula’s Fish Story
Elizabeth Price
Anne Tallentire
Hanne Darboven
Hans Eysenck

Adrian Rifkin is a writer and art historian engaged in contemporary art, film, classical and popular music, canonical and mass imagery, literature and pornography. Until recently he was Professor of Art Writing at Goldsmiths. He is the author of Street Noises: Studies in Parisian Pleasure, 1900-40, and Ingres Then, and Now. His collected essays appeared as Communards and Other Cultural Histories and his work was the subject of the anthology Inter-disciplinary Encounters.

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Future Imperfect, The Past Between My Fingers

Adrian Rifkin

Published by Ma Bibliothèque, 2022
ISBN 9781910055885

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Find many more interviews, projects, and my writing at ⁠⁠⁠https://petitpoi.net/⁠⁠⁠

You can sign up for my newsletter at ⁠⁠⁠https://petitpoi.net/newsletter/⁠⁠⁠

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Next Episode

Vid Simoniti: Artists Remake the World

Artists Remake the World puts forward an account of contemporary art’s political ambitions and potential. Surveying such innovations as evidence-driven art, socially engaged art, and ecological art, the book explores how artists have attempted to offer bold solutions to the world’s problems.

Simoniti systematises the perspectives of contemporary art as a force for political and social change. At its best, he argues, contemporary art allows us to imagine utopias and presents us with hard truths, which mainstream political discourse cannot yet articulate. Covering subjects such as climate change, social justice, and global inequality, Artists Remake the World offers a philosophy of contemporary art as an experimental branch of politics.

Vid Simoniti is a Lecturer in Philosophy of Art at the University of Liverpool. He is the co-editor, with James Fox, of Art and knowledge after 1900.

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Artists Remake the World
A Contemporary Art ManifestoVid Simoniti

Published by Yale University Press, 2023
ISBN 9780300266290

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Find many more interviews, projects, and my writing at ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://petitpoi.net/⁠⁠⁠⁠

You can sign up for my newsletter at ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://petitpoi.net/newsletter/⁠⁠⁠⁠

Support my work: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://petitpoi.net/support/