Fear, Death, and the Collapse of the American Political Space

In a recent interview, Noam Chomsky said, "fear, along with the breakdown of society" is responsible for the ascendency of Donald Trump's political influence. In this episode we investigate Chomsky's claim by locating fear in a broader historical and philosophical context, and we discuss how fear is both constitutive of the Modern, Liberal political-philosophical experiment and a mechanism for the unraveling of it. We conclude by trying to measure the extent of Chomsky's claim that we are witnessing the collapse of the American political experiment.