Politics & Power Quote by Jurgen Habermas

Habermas is putting his finger on a modern political magic trick: when one vocabulary gets discredited, another steps in to carry the same payload. The line is careful, almost clinical, but the accusation underneath is sharp. Nationalistic authoritarian projects have burned enough people that their banners and slogans no longer reliably seduce. So the work of mobilizing resentment, hierarchy, and exclusion migrates into religion, which can feel less like propaganda and more like meaning.

The phrasing matters. "Disappointment" is doing heavy lifting: it signals not just moral revulsion but failed expectations, a broken promise of order, pride, or coherence. That emotional wound creates demand for a language that sounds truer than politics. Habermas calls it "subjectively more convincing" because he is not granting religion objective superiority; he is describing its experiential advantage. Religious speech can offer transcendence, sacrifice, purity, and destiny - categories that politics, especially liberal-democratic politics, tends to treat with suspicion or procedural dryness.

The subtext is not that religion equals authoritarianism. It is that religion can be recruited as a rhetorical solvent, dissolving the embarrassing specifics of old ideologies and reconstituting them as moral imperatives. "Old political orientations" suggests continuity: the direction stays the same even if the map changes. In Habermas's broader postwar context - shaped by fascism's ruin and the fragility of democratic legitimation - the warning is about translation. If democratic publics cannot articulate shared purposes in a credible secular idiom, the most emotionally efficient idioms will fill the gap, and some of those will smuggle power back in under the cover of faith.