1st Edition

Dark Fantasy Regressive Movements and the Search for Meaning in Politics

By David P. Levine Copyright 2018
    132 Pages
    by Routledge

    132 Pages
    by Routledge

    Recent trends in politics culminating in the US with the election of Donald Trump both provoked and expressed a troubling intensification of emotion in the body politic. Heightened levels of anger, frustration, and distrust, the dismissal of the norms of politics and policy making, and the prevalence of intractable conflict indicated an increase in the power of regressive forces. The power of these forces takes the form of dark fantasies involving the loss, indeed the destruction, of safe space, the prevalence of existential threat, and the corrosion of the kinds of relationships that make living in the world tolerable.

    This book explores the emotional meaning of regressive movements in contemporary politics with special reference to Trump and his supporters. Its main hypothesis is that the primary goal of these movements is not to restore a lost world of safety and wellbeing as they claim it is, but to make their members' experience of the destruction and loss of that world universal.

      1. Complexity  2. Civil Society  3. Norms and institutions  4. Past, present and future  5. Change  6. Creativity and destruction  7. Legitimacy  8. Annihilation anxiety  9. The search for meaning  10. Making lives matter

      Biography

      David P Levine