Politics of Meaning/Meaning of Politics

Jason L. Mast is a Research Fellow at the Normative Orders Excellence Cluster at Goethe-University Frankfurt am Main, Germany. He is the author of The Performative Presidency: Crisis and Resurrection During the Clinton Years.  Jeffrey C. Alexander is Lillian Chavenson Saden Professor of Sociology at Yale University, and a Director of the Center for Cultural Sociology. He is the author of The Performance of Politics: Obama’s Victory and the Democratic Struggle for Power and co-author of Obama Power.

• Introduction.- Chapter 1: Politics as a Vacation.- Chapter 2: When Voters Are Voting, What Are They Doing?: Symbolic Selection and the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election.- Chapter 3: Deep Stories, Nostalgia Narratives, and Fake News: Storytelling in the Trump Era.- Chapter 4: Journalism after Trump.- Chapter 5: On the Construction Sites of History: Where Did Donald Trump Come From?.- Chapter 6: Donald’s Dick: A Man Against the Institutions.- Chapter 7: A Period of “wild and fierce fanaticism”: Populism, Theo-Political Militarism, and the Crisis of US Hegemony.- Chapter 8: Raging Against the Enlightenment: Steven Bannon’s Anti-Democratic Ideology.- Chapter 9: The Flight 93-ization of American Politics.-  Chapter 10: Why Evangelicals Voted for Trump: A Critical Cultural Sociology.- Chapter 11: Muslims as Outsiders, Enemies, and Others: The 2016 Presidential Election and the Politics of Religious Exclusion.- Chapter 12: Populism’s Efforts to De-legitimize the Vital Center and the Implications for Liberal Democracy.- Chapter 13: The Fragmenting of the Civil Sphere: How Partisan Identity Shapes the Moral Evaluations of Candidates and Epistemology.- Chapter 14: Legitimacy Troubles and the Performance of Power in the 2016 US Presidential Election.- Afterword.