Poor George Will:

Reflection on his Jan 21 column: Trumps Kinship with his Critics

O George, there you go again! Perhaps it is the nature of punditry to be over-simplistic.

You start making a good point about Trump’s nostalgic return to pre-enlightenment thinking and then you characterize it as “postmodernism” and so condemn thinkers that criticize the ideology of free-market “capitalism.”

Most of us in many ways have criticized and moved on from modernism which make us all “postmodern.” What was great about the period historians call the Enlightenment and the modern age is that it ushered in the scientific method or critical thinking including continued questioning of previously held beliefs, seeking new and reviewing old evidence, attempting to make those beliefs consistent, imagining new ways to conceive and conjecture in higher viewpoints verified by evidence and peer review.

To engage in my own punditry and oversimplify, there are various types of postmodernism. There is one that denies science and makes truth relativistic, individualistic, authoritarian, and nihilistic. There is another that wants to nostalgically return to certainty, the absoluteness of truth, beyond relativity and the cacophony of disorder. There is another which, adopting insights of many of the thinkers you name and blame, who understand objective truth (and reality) as neither absolute nor relative but relational — e.g. contextual, intersubjective, interactive.

I think you are right that Trump is prone to #1. You and most Trumpists are prone to #2. And those you call postmodernists (Marx, Nietzsche, Dewey, Merleau-Ponty, Rorty) are #3. Those are the ones with whom I want to pursue truth. I also believe they are the ones who best serve American democracy and are the best critics of Trump and perhaps yourself.