le president des neo-'cons'

The American election is an embarrassingly vapid spectacle, and it is even more embarrassing when you are sitting on your couch watching it with your new German roommate who says stuff like 'this iz all just Hollywood'. I lazily read an article in the Atlantic Monthly about the intricacies of the primary debates and how it came down to the maneuvering of personalities and glib jokes, all of which were tirelessly analyzed and scrutinized as if salvageable as content in the face of the gaping abyss of capito-democratic political consensus. As though it’s not enough for the bourgeois conception of freedom to delimit discourse, it has to further whittle down the debate to the tone of voice (not just a limit on what can be side, but a reduction to merely how it is said). Eschatology be damned as marketing firms and their candidate branding take over as the engine of historical change.

Luckily, today I read this article about the deterioration of French politics into a similar Manichean game show of ‘la crainte vs. la crainte de la crainte’ and it makes me feel a little bit less of a transatlantic inferiority complex...

If we posit a definition of politics as ‘collective action, organized by certain principles, that aims to unfold the consequences of a new possibility which is currently repressed by the dominant order’, then we would have to conclude that the electoral mechanism is an essentially apolitical procedure. This can be seen in the gulf between the massive formal imperative to vote and the free-floating, if not non-existent nature of political or ideological convictions. It is good to vote, to give a form to my fears; but it is hard to believe that what I am voting for is a good thing in itself. This is not to say that the electoral-democratic system is repressive per se; rather, that the electoral process is incorporated into a state form, that of capitalo-parliamentarianism, appropriate for the maintenance of the established order, and consequently serves a conservative function.