The Disinformation Age: The Collapse of Liberal Democracy in the United States: 7 (Routledge Advances in American History) - Softcover

Cheyfitz, Eric

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1032402253 ISBN 13: 9781032402253

Publisher: Routledge, 2022

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Eric Cheyfitz is the Ernest I. White Professor of American Studies and Humane Letters at Cornell University.

Edition details

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1032402253
• ISBN 13: 9781032402253
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320