Pseudo-Intellectual Posers
14th May 2024
ZMan is fed up.
An aspect of modern politics that does not get discussed is that it is less about the practical things politics is supposed to address and mostly about esoteric and abstract ideas that have meaning only because we pretend so. Look at the current crop of campaign ads and the candidates may as well be running against the bogeyman or in favor of the good juju. Without the party labels, it would be impossible to know anything about the candidates.
This was not always the case. The old joke about politics was that every candidate ran around promising two cars in every garage and a chicken in every pot. The point was they all had plans about how to increase material prosperity. Even though no politician speaks to anything specific these days, the economy remains the top issue with voters because the prevailing assumption inherited from the past is that politics is supposed to be about practical things like fixing potholes.
One reason for the shift in political rhetoric is that the public square has become the domain of clever midwits playing word games with one another. Public discourse is now controlled by credentialed experts who have no idea how anything works, other than the complex game of relationships that defines the managerial class. That means they are good at constructing complicated intellectual structures that are useful in rhetorical jousting but have no connection to reality.
Concur.