HITLER: "The Era of Rational Discourse Is Over!"

MONDAY, MAY 4, 2026

What have they done with Bill Maher: In this country, in this era, the late Jürgen Haberman—he died in March, at age 96—wasn't a household name.  

Given the poverty of the times, there's no way he would have been. In truth, we can't even swear that he should have been—but here's a smattering from the very lengthy obituary which appeared in the New York Times:   

Jürgen Habermas Dies at 96; One of Postwar Germany’s Most Influential Thinkers 

Jürgen Habermas, a philosopher and public intellectual who was one of the most influential and cited thinkers in postwar Germany, died on Saturday in Starnberg, Germany, southwest of Munich. He was 96.

His publisher, Suhrkamp, confirmed the death.

For over a half-century and in dozens of books, Dr. Habermas bucked the prevailing trend of postmodern cynicism about truth and reason, offering a staunch defense of Enlightenment ideals and the possibility of individual and societal freedom.

He was best known for introducing in the early 1960s the notion of a “public sphere.” He theorized that democracy emerged and could continue to exist in a healthy form only if there was a space that was outside the control of the state, where deliberation and the exchange of ideas could freely occur. That concept has since swept through a number of academic fields, from political science and history to media studies, spawning thousands of papers and books.   

We need a space where the exchanges of ideas can freely occur! According to the Times, this notion "spawned thousands of papers and books." We offer a further smattering:

Though a disciple and eventual leader of the famed Frankfurt School of critical social theory, Dr. Habermas had more faith in the promise of modernity than mentors like Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, believing that the Enlightenment was an “unfinished project” that could be corrected through a focus on improved communication.   

Starting in the 1970s, he wrote about the “ideal speech situation,” one in which people would come together on equal footing and through a process of rational dialogue arrive at the truth—an idea he expanded on in his major work, “The Theory of Communicative Action” (1981).   

And so on, at length, from there.

For better or for worse, this is no country for such men. They may be influential in Germany, but they aren't likely to gain major purchase here.

Adam Kirsch, 50 years old, isn't a household name either. That said, Kirsch had us from hello in his new piece for The Atlantic, which appeared yesterday at the magazine's web site.

A bit of background:

In the latest stop in an impressive career, Kirsch is currently a senior editor at The Atlantic. He's a highly regarded poet and literary critic, but he's also the author of such books as On Settler Colonialism and The Revolt Against Humanity: Imagining a Future Without Us.  

For better or worse, such titles may not propel a writer to fame in this land. We'll let the leading authority on Kirsch's life and (impressive) career give you a bit of a thumbnail:   

Adam Kirsch     

[...]

Kirsch was born in Los Angeles in 1976. He is the son of lawyer, author, and biblical scholar Jonathan Kirsch. He started writing poetry around the age of 14, after encountering the work of T.S. Eliot: "Eliot showed me the possibility of finding in poetry a source of complex intellectual and moral interest." He graduated from Harvard University with a B.A. in English in 1997 and began his career as assistant literary editor for The New Republic.   

[...]   

Over the course of his career, he has written reviews and feature articles on a diverse array of poets and novelists, including T.S. Eliot, Thomas Hardy, H.G. Wells, Richard Wilbur, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Dylan Thomas, John Keats, Saul Bellow, John Updike, Hart Crane, and David Foster Wallace. He has also written articles on assorted cultural issues, including rap music, America and the Roman Empire, the relationship between conservative politics in America and the writings of Ayn Rand, and the importance of literary criticism.

Kirsch has published two books of poems, The Thousand Wells and Invasions, as well as nonfiction books on Benjamin Disraeli and Lionel Trilling. The Thousand Wells won The New Criterion Poetry Prize in 2002. His poems have also appeared in many magazines, including The Paris Review, Partisan Review, The Formalist, Harvard Review, and The New Criterion.  

And so on from there. Borrowing from Yevtushenko (in translation), "And if a man lived in obscurity / making his friends in that obscurity / obscurity is not uninteresting."    

For better or worse, this is no country for people like Kirsch—but he had us from right from the jump in his portrait of Habermas for The Atlantic.  More precisely, he had us right from the principal headline which sits above his piece:

IDEAS
The Era of Rational Discourse Is Over
For Jürgen Habermas, who died in March, the essence of democracy was thoughtful back-and-forth argument.    

"The era of rational discourse is over?" We've been floating that suggestion for a very long time! "It's all anthropology now," we've sometimes prophetically said.

The era of rational discourse is over? In a realm within which that era is so plainly over, ruminations about decline aren't likely to turn many heads. Nor are they likely to affect the imitations of discourse being offered to millions of good, decent people, around the clock, on their TV screens, or possibly right on their phones.

Yesterday, when it appeared, Kirsch's essay about Habermas was the featured report at the web site of The Atlantic.  By this morning, it has already been hurled down the seven levels of the world—dropped deep down on the list of articles a visitor might want to examine. 

As for the New York Times, the paper published that long obituary when Habermas died in March. A quick attempt at a search suggests that, despite his status as one of postwar Germany’s most influential thinkers, his name had very rarely appeared in the Times before that.  

This is no country for such men! (We'll add "for better or worse.") Instead, our country has descended into the transplendently post-Enlightenment realm in which the sitting president, the head of state, still insists on promulgating such embarrassing madness as this: 

Trump Boasts About Cognitive Exam Scores: ‘ACED IT ALL THREE TIMES’   

President Donald Trump boasted about his repeat “Cognitive Examination” scores, claiming he “ACED IT ALL THREE TIMES!” in a new Truth Social post.

Trump took to social media Thursday afternoon to declare that all presidential and vice presidential candidates should be forced to take a cognitive exam, slamming former presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, while also bragging about his own mental acuity.

“Anybody running for President or Vice President should be forced to take a Cognitive Examination prior to entering the Race!” he wrote. “By doing so, we wouldn’t be surprised at people like Barack ‘Hussein’ Obama, or Sleepy Joe Biden, getting ‘ELECTED.’ Our Country would be a much better place! I took the Exam three times during my (‘THREE!’) Terms as President, and ACED IT ALL THREE TIMES — An Achievement that, even on a single Exam, according to the Doctors, has rarely been done before!”   

He repeated this ludicrous claim last Thursday. This is barely a country for sane men, as we've noted in recent weeks.

For the record, we're inclined to believe that the sitting president really believes it—that he really believes that he keeps acing a difficult set of cognitive tests in a way few others have ever done. 

We say that in part because we've read the thumbnails about the technical medical diagnosis known as "Delusional disorder." That said, we have no idea if the diagnosis might actually seem to apply in this case, and high-end orgs like The Atlantic have agreed that such questions must never be posed to actual medical specialists:

So much for the existence of "a space that's outside the control of the state, where deliberation and the exchange of ideas could freely occur."

We also know that the sitting president has created a public culture in which childish nicknames are routinely handed out to former presidents or to other political rivals—in which a middle name like "Hussein" is routinely doled as a way of exciting a herd.  

No modern president has ever behaved this way. Last Friday night, on Real Time with Bill Maher, an influential British journalist offered this relatively pointless speculation about this destructive conduct:

TETT (5/1/26): But here's the thing, Bret. I mean, you know, so I'm trained as a cultural anthropologist. And anthropologists pointed out that a lot of what—

STEPHENS: That's your first mistake.

TETT: My first mistake, apparently, yeah. But there's a lot of the rhetoric and stylistic, you know, performative approach that Trump has borrowed from the wrestling ring, if you look at how he's actually presenting himself politically. And an awful lot of it is about calling each other names and stage managing this fake conflict like it's a game. And so, in a wrestling ring, it's fine. You can shout violence against each other, but then you take it to real life.

Has the silly, brain-dead behavior really been cadged from the world of professional wrestling, where it's said to be fine?  We don't have the slightest idea—and neither, we'll guess, does Gillian Tett (the Financial Times). 

But the president's stylistic performative approach is dumb enough to have come from there—though it's also strange enough to lead us back toward the always profoundly unfortunate world of mental disorder (formerly, "mental illness").

As everyone must have noticed by now, this is no country for rational discourse—for some version of "the ideal speech situation, in which people come together on equal footing and through a process of rational dialogue arrive at the truth." 

In fairness, the sitting president didn't come along and destroy some such realm all by himself. But after fifteen years of his disordered conduct, "little beside remains."

Tett joined the New York Times' Bret Stephens on last Friday's Real Time broadcast. They joined Bill Maher for the panel discussion—a discussion which started like this:

MAHER (5/1/26): He is a Pulitzer Prize winning opinion columnist for the New York Times. Bret Stephens is over here. A bearded Bret Stephens. 

And she's the head of King's College, Cambridge, and a columnist for the Financial Times. Gillian Tett.

Okay. Well, let's get the ugly news about the political violence out of the way first, because we have to talk about it. I'm just going to vomit my take on it, and then you can argue.

He wanted to get it out of the way—this talk about last weekend's attempt at an assassination attempt.  He wanted to get it out of the way, but as the panel discussion unfolded, the trio ended up speaking about nothing else.

At this site, we've long hugely admired Bill Maher, but we think he's been losing his way of late. Last Friday night, he kept insisting on a pair of basic points:

The sitting president, President Trump, isn't Adolf Hitler. Also, people should stop saying he is.

Our questions would be these:

Except around-the-clock on the Fox News Channel, where in the world, at this point, does such a claim even exist?  (Maher and his guests never said.) 

Also, what have they done with the real Bill Maher, but also with Stephens and Tett? 

We were stunned by the emptiness of the discussion. Tomorrow, we'll start to explain.

Tomorrow: As (constantly) heard on Fox