Whichever party is in power, policies tend to be similar
What bothers me about a lot of current political tactics is that the people engaged in them don&#x27;t appear to understand or even apprehend what the failure mode of politics is. Not if <i>you</i> fail, or <i>they</i> fail, but when the process of discourse itself fails. If there were a dynamic I could articulate with some hope of helping to give people some extra cognitive tools keep things on the rails it would be this.<p>Someone who self identifies as educated is untroubled by sustaining cognitive dissonance because from their perspective, the state and establishment is almost infinitely sophisticated and complex, so there is no reason to think you understand it, you just need to identify as it being <i>yours</i>, and by aligning to it by default and sustaining it, you are doing your part, and you get the rewards it offers. This is Pound&#x27;s hedgehog knowing one thing. The one thing they need to know is if you sustain the establishment narrative, it will sustain you. Its leviathan vastness means you can&#x27;t decide what about it is real or true, but you can find the hooks to align to it, and this is The Game people talk about. I have criticized the immoderate version of this in the past as &quot;banal nihilism,&quot; but more generally, and charitably, there is an establishment <i>We</i> who ask things like what is to be done, and use terms like oxygen-starving, problematic, extremists, and other meta-social managerial terms to discuss how <i>we</i> will manage society. However, their ontology reduces to an infinte attrition game of musical chairs to determine who this <i>We</i> will include.<p>At the other pole are those who are attached to the idea of Truth. We can criticize it as a need for concreteness and a lack of cognitive or educated  ability to engage The Game as an abstraction separate from their identities (like the from-somewhere and from-nowhere dichotomy), and so when a politician says something, we might take it at face value, and not as a signal of alignment to an abstraction. This ontology includes  principles, expectations, loyalties, immovable facts, laws of the universe, consequences, permanence, stability. These are Jonathan Haidt&#x27;s Righteous Mind tribes, but with a twist where it&#x27;s not right&#x2F;left.  Other criticisms I&#x27;ve heard is of relating &quot;transactionally,&quot; to people, where there is objectivity, truth, roles, state, and definition. What I would say is there is an underlying axiom that there is a truth that is objective, persistent, and independent of whether it&#x27;s observed, and when you align to it, it makes us <i>good</i>. Even if good for what is not always clear. The key piece is it both instinctively and competently rejects dissonance as a misalignment to truth. In this view, if something is untrue it <i>cannot</i> be relatively powerful or legitimate. This orientation to truth is what makes trust that would facilitate reconciliation or even an equillibrium increasingly impossible.<p>There are a lot of frameworks for this including Jungian animus&#x2F;anima, Marxist classes, Girardian memesis groups, etc. In the 90s when the so-called &quot;neocons&quot; arrived, they were a weird hybrid of these Game playing conservatives who appeared to support capitalistic ideas, but had an intellectual smarm and who looked down on others&#x27; inability to appreciate that this was just them playing this Game as an abstraction. The smarm was because they knew they were lying and didn&#x27;t care. Tucker Carlson was very famously destroyed by John Stewart over this, and that takedown marked a cultural turning point, where I think the neocons popularly legitimized into the establishment the tactics of what people self-identify now as the &quot;dirtbag left.&quot; (not an epithet, it&#x27;s their word)<p>But this idea of liar becomes the friction point, because from both the dynamic  <i>We</i> and the stable truth perspective, yes, Truth <i>is</i> Power, but it depends on the directionality of that equivalence. Are they equal, is one a superset or subset of the other, is there causation between them and in what direction does it flow? This is what someone means when they say, &quot;depends on what the meaning of <i>is</i>, is.&quot;<p>What makes this conflict over what <i>is</i> is so irreversible is that a politics moored to geography, language, physical resources, growth, and a positive-sum planet and economics was durable against being pulled too far from one direction or another. Even warfare was a temporary disequillibrium. The change was in the 20th century when a viral idea that power was independent of these landmarks took hold, and that political power came not from these things, but from pure narrative and belief. For the first time, politics became understood as the <i>totality</i> of human experience.<p>The immediate consequence of this newly moralized unmooring of power from truth was that from the perspective of power, all these things and even populations were liquid. Over a century downstream in time, the idea that politics is reserved to professional politicans is absurd. The political is the personal, everything is political, there is no separate private and public sphere. The individual is powerless, atomized, and the only real currency is the fluid affinity to group interests. Our societies are now post-totalitarian.<p>What the authors seem to miss is that this is a total failure of politics, and it is not only Hobbes&#x27; &quot;war of all against all,&quot; but the inherent violence in that failure mode is beyond what someone just going along to get along could possibly concieve of. The big secret of political science in a post-totalitarian world is that it is predicated on advocating unforgivable and irreconcilable deceptions without a great deal of thought about what the concrete consequences of that will be. Maybe my career in tech and risk has made me index on catastrophic outcomes, but this is not longer about my guy vs. your guy. The conversation we should be having is whether we prefer to reach an equillibrium using discourse moored to at least some of those landmarks, or, and I say this quite seriously, the failure mode of politics is cannibalism, and it would be constructive to consider this when we&#x27;re at each other.