The Problem that seems like a political problem but isn’t

Idea that the political problems of our time are of an essentially non-political nature, and that only people of the opposite faction are able to see the imbecility and inefficacy of our own faction’s political attempts to solve it.

That’s different from the Trump-Dylan-thought that conservatives are responding to a cultural problem through politics while liberals, not seeing a cultural problem, are responding to problems of politics through legislation.

(The Trump-Dylan-thought is that populism from the right is subverting political institutions while populism from the left is subverting cultural institutions — Dylan winning the Nobel prize.)

It is also a different thought from what seems straight-forwardly the case reading the news, that Republicans are to blame. This would be a truly both-sidist view, not to suggest such a thing is inherently desirable, which proposes the total impenetrability of seeing through a political lens what has created the problem in politics. The person on the left can easily see the imbecility of having Trump for a President, for example, but is totally incapable of seeing its own imbecility, whatever that might be, with respect to this most central problem.

As to what sort of problem this “most central problem” might be –a problem that creates the appearance of being political but admits of no direct political solution– it could be literally the drinking water, an environmental issue, a philosophical problem, race… the most likely suspect would be Technology, and all of its ramifications to trade and social media and income distribution … while an outside of the box example, not perhaps unrelated to that, would be infantilization: that we know for some reason we are lesser figures than our parents, lacking gravitas and stature and what have you; and they of their parents, and so on; and in some effort to arrest this progress of diminishment, we embrace politics, feel intensely we must “change the world..”

But maybe the fever has broken. And that period between Reagan and Trump, between the Republican Revolution and the storming of the capitol, so aggravating and incomprehensible to those who lived them, is finally over. Without having really resolved anything, we’ve just moved on.


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