1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910163926003321

Autore

Cheyfitz Eric

Titolo

The disinformation age : the collapse of liberal democracy in the United States / / Eric Cheyfitz

Pubbl/distr/stampa

New York : , : Routledge, , 2017

ISBN

1-351-83907-1

1-315-22283-3

1-351-83908-X

Edizione

[1st ed.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (320 pages) : illustrations

Collana

Routledge Advances in American History

Disciplina

320.97301/4

Soggetti

Communication in politics - United States

United States Politics and government

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

1. Disinformation : the end of ideology -- 2. Narratives of the nation -- 3. The palimpsest of history : William Apess's anti-Jeremiad Jeremiad -- 4. The end of innocence : Jeremiah Wright's anti-Jeremiad Jeremiad -- 5. Barack Obama and the erasure of race -- 6. The confidence state : the limits of capitalism's imagination -- 7. Melville's The confidence-man : his masquerade -- 8. Thinking from a different place : what is just society? : a brief manifesto.

Sommario/riassunto

The Disinformation Age, beginning in the present and going back to the American colonial period, constructs an original historical explanation for the current political crisis and the reasons the two major political parties cannot address it effectively. Commentators inside and outside academia have described this crisis with various terms -- income inequality, the disappearance of the middle-class, the collapse of the two-party system, and the emergence of a corporate oligarchy. While this book uses such terminology, it uniquely provides a unifying explanation for the current state of the union by analyzing the seismic rupture of political rhetoric from political reality used within discussion of these issues. In advancing this analysis, the book provides a term for this rupture, Disinformation , which it defines not as planned propaganda but as the inevitable failure of the language of



American Exceptionalism to correspond to actual history, even as the two major political parties continue to deploy this language. Further, in its final chapter this book provides a way out of this political cul-de-sac, what it terms "the limits of capitalism's imagination," by "thinking from a different place" that is located in the theory and practice of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas.