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.

One result of this is that mainstream politics rests on the false choice. The “sides” in any debate struggle with one another to see who can impose their false dichotomy on the debate in order to gain the moral high ground. One way this is done is to conjure a nightmare scenario from the other side’s proposal and then claim the choice is between that nightmare and present reality. Alternatively, they will conjure a glorious fantasy out of their ideas and compare that to present reality.

A good example of how this works is this post at the libertarian site Lawn & Liberty that wags the bony finger at people on the right who have praised the crime policies of Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele. Crime has plummeted in El Salvador since they began rounding up the gangs and putting them in isolation. The government has effectively cut the gangs out of society and placed them in a facility from which there is no communication to the outside world.

What the writer of that post is doing is pretending that it is possible to build a civil libertarian paradise in El Salvador. That is the ideal against which he is measuring the highly effective policies of Bukele. This is the false dichotomy. On the one hand we have the rough, but effective justice used by the government to address the crime problem and on the other hand we have this magical reality where there is no crime and no rough justice to deal with crime.

This line gets at the problem. “It’s easy to see why so many on the right have become enamored with Bukele. They too lack basic respect for rules and institutions. They, like him, are largely unanchored by any coherent set of ideas or philosophy.” It is the old joke about libertarians saying, “Sure, the policy works in the real world but does to work in theory?” The writer cares more about his precious abstractions than about the thousands of lives saved by these policies.

What is not so obvious is that his definition of “coherent set of ideas or philosophy” is normative one. Bukele has a coherent set of ideas. It starts with doing what works to solve the crime problem. He identified the problem, evaluated various ways to address the problem and settled on that which creates the best result. That is about as coherent as one can get from public policy, but because it violates the writers sense of moral justice, he flings his poo at the policies.

This false choice modeling of modern political rhetoric gets to another reality that lies at the heart of our politics. All of it is progressive. The various camps, conservative, libertarian, liberal, and so on are all operating within the larger progressive framework which is built on the assumption that the future must be a glorious one as we in the present are compelled to work toward that glorious future. G. Patrick Lynch, the author of that piece, is no different than Ocasio-Cortez in this regard.

The reason that many Americans, mostly those who used to identify as conservative or right-wing, admire what Bukele is doing is the practicality of it. Our political space is littered with discount preachers like G. Patrick Lynch, waving their bony fingers at us while listing off our sins. The stage is packed with dreamers who conjured creative visions of a glorious future that work only in the minds of the dreamer. What we lack are men willing to use the state to solve actual problems.

In the end, the reason that things seem to be coming apart is that our politics are dominated by bourgeois posers who have no practical knowledge, so they spend their days conjuring clever word games to play with one another. The point is never to solve a problem, but to establish one side or the other has the king of the moral high ground, which exists only in their imaginations. The moral high ground is just a place in the stands, far away from the action.

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