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When politicians rely on courts to advance their agendas, they weaponize a system designed for preservation, using a shield to bludgeon rather than defend—a clear impropriety.
Yes, use every tool at your disposal in war, but eroding trust in the system for expediency, rather than through the hard work of persuasion, risks losing the shield entirely. What will protect you—and the country—when the very abuse you encouraged grows beyond control?
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Think of a society as a ball of soft clay: When you press down firmly from above with your thumb the clay doesn’t simply compress. Instead, it squeezes outward in all directions.
The center, where most people initially resided, becomes thinner and flatter, while the edges bulge.
Societal pressure, corporate policy, cultural oppression or political polarization apply: excessive pressure from above doesn’t just suppress people – it actively pushes them toward the extremes, hollowing out the moderate middle where compromise and dialogue once flourished.
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The squeeze is on: the egalitarian equality we seek is the dwindling middle class.
The conservative elite wealthy do not want their autonomy and voting to jeopardize their wealth expansion, while the progressive socialist poor do not want the middle class’s self-reliance to jeopardize state subsidies.
Choked from both sides: fiscally and socially, the middle dissipates as everything moves to extremes.
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Direct democracy was never going to work, and the founders of the United States knew this.
Europeans believed only a monarchy could work, and direct democracy would lead to a fractured tribal unification and warfare constantly kicking out rulers. Still, if you mediate the populaces’ concerns with a fair checks and balances system, you could have a "representative democracy."
Alexis de Tocqueville remarks that because every citizen understood they had a role to play, they were quick to respond without waiting for governmental authority or interference.
However, as power aggregates institutionally politics, capitalism, and bureaucracy have increased authoritative reach. They have begun regulating everything, choking out civilian action. It is an oddly familiar regression to a monarchy or totalitarian state, leaving the citizens to feel more than abandoned without agency but actively thwarted.
Your role is no longer to be a good citizen but to mitigate your eventual punishment for exuding any communal spirit or participatory impulse.
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“All individualism harbors a strain of narcissism”
Tim Wu
Consider that identity politics leverages narcissism, a self-focused vanity. Perhaps, in an attention economy, narcissism is equivalent to greed in a capitalist society: a systemic vice harnessed as fuel.
The opposition to identitarian narcissism would be communal, national, and external identification.
However, nationalism is the very thing the Frankfurt school fought against philosophically: national socialism (Nazi) led to the Holocaust, so let’s deconstruct power and tradition to empower the individual. Hence, identity politics claims the importance of individual sovereignty, agency, and authenticity, focusing on the particular at the cost of coherence.
Fascinatingly, this identity imperative should stop wars through multitudinous disfunction, but the narcissistic need for attention loves escalation, prompting a collective drama in which they can all star.
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People love to take down power but do not want to take up power.
Michael Cuenco coined the term Cratophobia (fear of power) to describe those who are critical of power while avoiding taking on legitimate responsibility or authority. These people enjoy staying subaltern and avoid the fate they subject others to.
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Accessing capital finance (going into debt, being bought out) is considered normal for companies and individuals. Yet, when states, towns, or social support services access capital, the debt is paid back through public taxes, a version of plundering the citizens due to incompetent or unlucky government.
Instead of allowing collapse, like small or medium-sized businesses (the large ones are bailed out), the capitalist devil’s bargain allows rich citizens to capture the state’s taxing power. Once embedded, the rate is hiked, forcing the nation to cover the inflated costs. OR the shareholders remake and steer the social services to their enrichment.
It sounds more like a medieval oligarchy, legalized through lobbyists: we are all indebted serfs for sins we did not commit.
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There are moments in political history and even scientific thought when an “ideal” takes hold of a population, such as Reaganomics or identity politics. For 30 or 40 years, this ideal seems to explain who we are to ourselves, how strong or weak we are, and how we identify with the dream. Yet, eventually, the contradictions within it become increasingly unsustainable. A new ideal presents itself, forcing a break and allowing us to reestablish our identity with fresh attachment points.
Consider that this dispensation was always there; we were simply captured by an ideology that kept us blind to alternative options.
The process of disagreement to acceptance is a slow revelation, an enlightenment process of increased sight. And seeing is believing; thus, political action -symbolic warfare- begins until it too crumbles when our gleeful, shiny ideal impacts reality, becoming tarnished, used, and dingy.
From here, our alienation converts us back to seeking, looking for new words that align with our emotional vision of self. And magically, the cause was always there, merely waiting to be revealed and foisted high.
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Progress is always already happening: by definition, we are in the midst of progress, making it a bit oxymoronic to label yourself as being for something you can’t stop or start.
This pedantic insight reveals that Progressives are only for a specific type of movement in a singular direction, which must be spurred on or accelerated. This requires an ideology mapping out the future utopia, which can be used to direct the morally fervent. This type of religiosity is also on the right but progressing backward: they are applying the brakes for a return to known dangers/ills rather than theoretical expansive equality.
The problem with claiming that “the arc of history” bends progressively or that you need to be on “the right side of history” is that if progress is already progressive, why fight so hard? It is not happening fast enough, so we must accelerate, which creates the conditions for an ideological tug-of-war to slow down the change, burning energy and relationships at both ends.
(partially from Steven Pinker)
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The hard work is often tediously painful for both the personal and political.
Digging into ourselves for years in order to hold ourselves accountable and responsible for pains taken and inflicted is work we want to avoid, so we quickly displace our emotions into projection and transference: we blame someone else or fall in love with someone/something else.
Likewise, doing local election research is tedious, and filling out forms to sway a monolithic bureaucracy is soul-numbing. I would rather vent my feelings or develop insightful, pithy rejoinders to my opponents.
Yet, the hard work of both tasks (personal and political) examines reality over rationalizations and takes accountability: We damage others because we will not repair ourselves, and our state is a bureaucratic institution little swayed by communal catharsis.
It is not flashy; it doesn’t feel good, but this is how you make substantive change: patient accountability over decades.
