دانلود کتاب پوپولیسم آمریکایی و جهان‌گرایی توحیدی

This is a challenging book for a challenging time. As I write this foreword, elected autocrats have made racist bullying into public policy in the world’s two largest democracies and a growing list of other nations. Yet those who deplore the reign of cruelty are ourselves deeply divided, with younger generations doubtful that their elders will stand firm against climate change and corporate power.
In such times, it is easy to imagine that we stand at the brink of disaster—or that the time is ripe for a new birth of freedom.
In this moment, Colin Bossen offers a healthy dose of historical perspective, intended for all who have been dismayed by the resurgence of right-wing populism, and especially for those who might describe ourselves as progressive, liberal, and/or Unitarian Universalist. By placing our current moment against the backdrop of two hundred years of populist and progressive history, Bossen has two messages for us.
The first message is simple: things are as bad as they seem. Populist politics very similar to those of Donald Trump brought about the Trail of Tears during Andrew Jackson’s presidency and inspired the Ku Klux Klan’s reign of terror one hundred years ago. We shouldn’t imagine that the “rule of law,” or the separation of powers, or well-crafted legislation can insulate the United States from a recurrence of racist violence. If you are a citizen of the United States, you must be alert to the danger of populism.
The second message is more challenging: we are part of the problem too. Again and again, religious liberals failed in their resistance to populist violence because they too were white supremacist, just in a different key. Native American boarding schools, eugenics, and—more recently—well-endowed universities that cater primarily to upper-income students have reinforced White power as surely as Klan violence. These things cannot be blamed on populists; they are the work of the educated and the open-minded. So, if you identify as a progressive or a liberal or a Unitarian Universalist, you should not imagine that you can uproot white supremacy without taking a long look in the mirror.
Bossen shows that the polarized politics of the twenty-first century are the latest round in a multigenerational struggle between two political “ontologies,” or ways of being. Populists, according to Bossen, put their faith in an imagined “people” whose triumph over diabolical forces will usher in a reign of justice and prosperity. Progressives abhor the apocalyptic dreams of populists, but they have their own eschatology, or vision of the end of history. They hope to bring about human betterment gradually, through the expert use of state power. They imagine that this can be done without violence and, to be honest, without democracy. If you’ve ever disdained neighbors who refuse to “follow the science” of climate change or epidemiology, you are at least a bit invested in progressive respect for experts.
Part of Bossen’s agenda is to show that both populism and progressivism can be white supremacist. In fact, the most influential expressions of each ontology in the United States have been white supremacist. Populism is white supremacist when the “people” it imagines are all White, and especially when Black and Indigenous communities are cast as adversaries of the true people. Progressivism, on the other hand, is white supremacist when the “expertise” it promotes is deeply shaped by White experiences and perspectives.
From the White populist perspective, Black and Indigenous people are a menace to be eliminated, which is exactly what Andrew Jackson and the Ku Klux Klan tried to do. From the White progressive perspective, Black and Indigenous people are a problem to be solved by assimilation and accommodation. When W. E. B. Du Bois said that White people were always implicitly asking him, “How does it feel to be a problem?” he was talking about progressives, not populists (Du Bois 1903/1996). He was talking about people who were just as shocked and dismayed by the Klan as many of us are shocked and dismayed by Trump today. And yet the White progressives of DuBois’s day were unable to grasp what Anthony Pinn has called the “complex subjectivity” of Black and Indigenous people and unwilling to partner with those people in building a truly multicultural society (Pinn 2012).