Politics as a business and the logic of capitalist liberalism

When everyone wants to win every argument rather than take it as an opportunity to think about a matter, than the combatants become unprincipled.

To an unprincipled political combatant, opponents are wrong on whatever issue they speak about if their virtue is besmirched. So they are attacked personally, and all political disagreements must be settled in this way.

When political factions are unprincipled, they are like competing businesses. Then government may as well be a business, and the competing factions will seek donations from interested parties. This way they stay in business, and can even pursue their Great Cause.

Along come liberal Democrats; they say that population subgroups are the interested parties, and being right or wrong is belonging to a favored or disfavored one. With some shallow theories of justice that also remove from it principles and values, leaving only constituencies. Injustice is what one faction says harms its constituency because of another. Members of the good (represented) constituency can be sold claim tickets for their own advantage. That's what they are supposed to want.

Why? Because in a business society everyone wants to succeed by getting ahead and winning a race. Social injustice is negative handicappping on the starting line, to be remedied by a positive handicapping.

Capitalist morality treats persons like commodities. Instead of mapping people’s character or identity onto what they say or make or do, it treats what they do as expression of a set of dispositions that define them. Everyone wants to succeed, and the market and the state manage people by giving them what they seem to deserve. Statements express the actuality of persons, not the potentiality of the world as shared form of life that is in construction. The resulting democracy is distributive without being participatory. It is in the interest of management that morality be displaced beyond reason and imagination onto what people are putatively disposed to do, and hence onto psychologies that are understood in expert discourses and that may as well be based on biological attributions. The potentialities of individuals are no longer in their control, though they are also responsible for managing themselves. This responsibility is insurance against risk and loss, and promises individuals no gain that is independent of their opportunities on the market. To the fear of loss correlates the potentiality of crime, and also mental illness, which is disposition to crime or personal failure sans moral judgment and responsibility. This means that thinking tends to be tolerated or encouraged only either as part of a profession tied to demands of production or management, and sustained by ethically empty problem-solving pragmatisms, or else it is therapeutic, a correctional procedure for ‘dysfunctional’ thoughts and affects. Therapy is voluntary policing. The pseudo-Buddhism that has long been part of the dominant ideology amounts to little more than ‘Abandon all your own thinking, affects, and attitudes at the factory or office gate, ye who enter here,’ where there is ‘zero tolerance’ and one must ‘just do it.’ Or, to put it differently: ‘Hier ist kein Vernunft’ (“There is no ‘why’ here”), as Holocaust writer Primo Levi was told at Auschwitz. This may also be a world of the absolute triumph of “common sense,” understood as prejudice, or what is obvious, what people ‘know’ automatically, without having to think. The most typical mark of such thinking is the utterance of predictable clichés that are available for pronouncing on every matter that might appear to call for a judgment, such as otherwise would need to be based on thought. No sense in thinking when you simply know. Knowledge, which is information composed of data or facts, is everywhere desired because it is serviceable for projects of the management and control of persons and things, based on their dispositions or tendencies. Communication is valued as the transmission or sharing of these knowledges, and individuals are supposed to communicate about their problems so that they can be effectively managed. This knowledge and communicate, not being creative, require neither imagination nor thought. They are certain to be true in representing and stating facts about what is there, and useful, in making things, persons, and knowledge about them available for the relevant purposes. It could be hoped that outside this regime lie creativity, the imagination, the interesting, or some revelatory illumination about the meaning of this kind of world and what its denizens are doing. It could be hoped that beyond people being controlled by systems, there are worlds constituted or created by people. Potentiality and hope as such may lie outside the actual and given.

The most telling sign of the achievement of such dystopian possibilities will be the eclipse of art, the last refuge of the care for the public matters (that defines republics) as a shared concern of citizens. Such shared concerns may define the democracy to come.