Trump, the Religious Right and a return to Universalism
Abstract
In recent years, many contemporary academics have encouraged us to celebrate our diversity. We have been advised by postmodernists, post-colonial theorists, political theorists, feminist epistemologists and others, to focus on our differences. To do otherwise, it is said, would be to produce false and partial pretences at universalism, that would serve only to disguise reality or to marginalise those groupings that would inevitably be left out of such grand theories. Indeed, as one writer put it: ‘Human universality as an idea, or as an ideal, might seem like an overweening Enlightenment conceit (Calder, 1998, p.140).
This piece will argue that the present period provides an opportune moment to re-think the ready dismissal of universalism.
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