Americans have a long history of rushing to war under false pretenses. The “yellow press” fanned war fever in 1898 by blaming Spain for the sinking of the USS Maine, even though a Navy expert said it was caused by an accidental explosion. The George W. Bush administration justified the invasion of Iraq by claiming that Saddam Hussein was connected to the 9/11 attacks and was developing weapons of mass destruction, all of which were untrue.
But with the Iran war, as in many other ways, Donald Trump has broken new ground. He is the first president to start a war without even bothering to lie to the public, just because he didn’t care what the public thinks. The American people were not consulted about attacking Iran—neither formally, through their elected representatives in Congress, nor informally, by allowing analysts, activists, and civil society groups to express their opinions. As Trump said New York Times in January, his authority as commander-in-chief was limited by nothing but “my own morals. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, a brilliant analyst of world events, did not live to give his opinion on the Iran war. He died on March 14, at the age of 96, two weeks after the US-Israeli airstrikes began. But it revealed his worst fears about the fate of liberal democracy, which he spent a lifetime analyzing and defending. For Habermas, the essence of democracy was dialogue, back and forth arguments about ideas and values. In his landmark works of political and social theory, he wrote of the “public environment” where citizens gather to make judgments, and of the “communicative stage,” which turns language into a collaborative force. “All political power derives from the power of citizen communication,” he wrote, and in a good democracy “all important questions, issues, and contributions are brought up and addressed in debate and conversation.”
The end of a long and productive life like that of Habermas cannot be called a tragedy. But there was a special way about the tributes published around the world after his death, which seemed to indicate the dire state of democracy itself. In one of his last public appearances, in Munich in November, he gave a speech bemoaning “the now-irreversible dismantling of the veteran liberal-democratic regime,” the United States, due to Trump’s “arbitrary and totalitarian expansion” of executive powers.
America’s totalitarian turn darkened the end of what Habermas described in the speech as “the life of the politically privileged.” Perhaps it was favored in the sense that it started so low, there was nowhere to go but up. Habermas was born in Germany in 1929 and grew up under Nazism; he was a member of the Hitler Youth, and his father served as an officer in the Wehrmacht during World War II. He lived long enough to see democracy take root in West Germany, and then to see a unified Germany become the bulwark of a free Europe.
This happy ending was by no means guaranteed, and Habermas’ work as a theorist and politician made an important contribution to it. He began his career in West Germany in the 1950s, when the former Nazis still dominated the academic establishment. Turning against the influence of Martin Heidegger, then the icon of German philosophy despite his collaboration with the Nazi regime, the young Habermas found a mentor in Theodor Adorno, a radical social critic who spent the Nazi period in exile. Adorno was one of the founders of the Frankfurt School of critical theory, and Habermas took up his mantle as the leader of the school’s second generation, spending most of his career at the University of Frankfurt.
But while Adorno lost hope for modern civilization after the Holocaust, Habermas devoted his work to finding the resources of freedom in the Western intellectual tradition. That effort began with his first book, Changes in the Structure of the Public Spherepublished in 1962. It is still his most famous work, mainly because it is more literal and historical than his later, theoretical writings. Habermas traced the birth of the modern concept of “public opinion” to the coffee shops, salons, and newspapers of 18th century Europe, which gave ordinary people the opportunity to discuss current events and pass judgment on the decisions of kings.
This situation, which laid the foundation for the French Revolution, served as Habermas’ political inspiration. The public sphere, he wrote, meant “the abolition of governance,” so that ideas and policies “won for reasons other than the compelling understanding of public opinion.” But Habermas realized that this liberal-democratic idea could not be fully achieved—not in the 18th century, when the public sphere was open only to the wealthy, and not in the 20s, when public opinion was ignored and meaningless, something to be used by propaganda. “The world created by the media,” he lamented, “is only a public sphere in appearance.”
Habermas was not alone in making such observations. But while left-wing thinkers starting with Marx saw the liberal concept as completely rejected, just a disguise of capitalist power, Habermas put faith in the utopian potential of liberalism. It may be true that a true moral democracy has never existed, but he insisted that any good society must be based on its principles. “The Legitimacy of Law,” he wrote in his 1992 book, Between Truth and Principle“ultimately depends on a plan to communicate”: Citizens must be “participants in reasonable dialogue,” able to express their ideas freely and find mutually agreeable solutions to difficult problems.
His study of the dynamics of discourse took Habermas beyond the realm of political philosophy. His scholarship is based on sociology, linguistics, psychology, and cultural studies, collaborating with various other thinkers, past and present. Indeed, Habermas sometimes gives the impression of reading everything about everything. His prose is equally forbidding – dense and abstract, in the long tradition of German philosophy. Yet his work can also be seen as an example of what he called “conversational ethics” in action – sincere, back-and-forth engagement with other minds.
Ultimately, Habermas believed, language itself subjects humans to democratic reasoning. In Theory of Communicative Actionhis 1981 magnum opus, he rejected the scientific tendency to think about language in terms of propositions—statements about the world that can be true or false. The most important thing, Habermas maintained, is not what the information is about, but to whom it is directed. Whenever we say something, we say it to another human being in an obvious attempt to gain their approval. Different types of statements ask for different types of acceptance: A factual claim, such as “Earth is the third planet from the sun,” requires acceptance as true, while a moral claim, such as “Murder is wrong,” requires acceptance as correct.
But in each case, Habermas wrote, “one person’s speech act succeeds only if the other accepts the offer it contains.” And the decision to accept or reject a speech act always “depends on reason or probable reasons.” Whenever we say something, we make a tacit promise that we have good reasons for saying it, and we can give them if asked to do so. Habermas concluded that persuasion is not just one way of using language among many others; it is the basis of every use of language. “The original telos of human speech,” the purpose for which it is intended, is to “reach understanding” among men.
In real life, of course, we do not use language only for rational persuasion. We also use it to give orders and make threats, demanding obedience rather than agreement. But when we agree with someone because of the possibility of “loss” or “reward,” Habermas said, we don’t really agree, we just agree. By the same token, public discourse is only true when no participant is excluded, no opinion is forbidden, and no one is forced. These conditions are rarely found in real politics, but we can get close to the best or more from it.
When Habermas wrote Structural Changesin the mid-20th century, he believed that the main barriers to public discourse were technological. Radio, television, and mass-circulated newspapers made it possible to reach an audience that the coffee expert could never see. But this communication is one-way: The media speaks to the public but “denies the opportunity to say something and disagree.” And since the media agenda is set by the rich and powerful, it is almost impossible for dissenting voices to be heard.
By the end of Habermas’s life, ironically, technological progress had created an entirely different problem. Thanks to the internet and social networks, the barrier to entry to the market of ideas has never been lower. A single streamer can become an authority for millions, while major television networks and newspapers struggle to stay afloat. This should be an aid to communication, and in the early days of the Internet, many believers thought it would be. So why has too much talk turned out to be worse for democracy than the shortage was?
In one of his last books –New Structural Changes in the Public Sphere and Discursive Politicspublished in 2023—Habermas briefly explored this development. “Just as print made everyone a potential reader, today digitalization is turning everyone into a potential writer,” he observed. The problem is that when it comes to negotiation, quantity is often the enemy of quality. Reasonable public debate can only take place if participants agree to certain conditions—above all, the obligation to be honest and to listen to other points of view.
The Internet, to put it mildly, is not known for encouraging these qualities. The problem is not only that people deliberately lie, spreading misinformation for personal or political gain. It is that the public sphere has fragmented into competing publics, each able to ignore the others. If you’re a vaccine denier, your social media feed is full of other vaccine deniers, so your beliefs are constantly being validated, never challenged. This makes democratic deliberation impossible. “The point of the politics of dialogue is, after all, that it empowers us improve our beliefs in political conflicts and get more closely correct solutions to problems,” wrote Habermas, and that cannot happen if we are never challenged by arguments or faithful to stated claims.
Habermas was in his 90s when he wrote about social media, and if anything, he underestimated the challenge it posed—not just to liberal democracy, but to his own thinking and worldview. The internet’s worst effect on today’s politics isn’t just that it’s divisive. It’s just that the weightlessness of online existence breeds a kind of happy nihilism. Instead of conversation, social media encourages trolling—the principle that it doesn’t matter what you say, as long as people listen.
Habermas was right to call Trump a puppet, but what makes him a legend of the social media age is his astonishing absurdity—the way he doesn’t seem to know or care what he’s doing or what he’s going to do next. Because he doesn’t take anything seriously, he makes it hard to take him seriously, even if he causes great damage to people and institutions. This quality makes Trump an enigma to political theorists, but a star on social media—the way in which “everything that is solid melts into air,” to borrow a famous phrase from Karl Marx. While brutality and indifference can be a good political combination, it is clear that the era of rational discourse—the era of Jürgen Habermas—is over.
