It does affirm that while the two parties used to both lean toward governance, and sometimes try their best, and include statesmen in each party, now one party seeks only to rule the other, or Other. And your final paragraph seems equally to apply to Putin's Russia. It also points toward Governance requiring a/the social contract, norms and redlines of sorts, agreement on some basic facts or rights and duties. That has been completely blown apart the past several years.
This is I think an answer to JVL’s anguished question, why party identification, which ought to be a subordinate affiliation preference within the ambit of the overarching general governance ideal, seems to have become not instrumental in service to a shared governance project but the very thing to be served at the expense of all.
I think it’s not really anything like what we used to call party identity at work. It’s that we don’t even want such parties any more because we’ve rejected governance itself— not even regretfully, as something we’d like to have as a desirable state of affairs, but as an inherently misguided and actually dangerous illusion, a lie and trick implacable enemies want to use to crush and enslave us. There can be no mutual governance with an existential menace. To save ourselves, we must contract the circle of compromise and law to apply only to those who truly belong within it, and the cast the others into the outer darkness.
Party ID is now not something you can choose to serve wider goals. Your party ID is just another word for which phylum you are— predator or prey, host or parasite— Protestant or catholic— Muslim or Hindu— Jew or Aryan.
Wow. Brilliant. Thank you for this.
It does affirm that while the two parties used to both lean toward governance, and sometimes try their best, and include statesmen in each party, now one party seeks only to rule the other, or Other. And your final paragraph seems equally to apply to Putin's Russia. It also points toward Governance requiring a/the social contract, norms and redlines of sorts, agreement on some basic facts or rights and duties. That has been completely blown apart the past several years.
Again, THANK you for this exposition.
This is I think an answer to JVL’s anguished question, why party identification, which ought to be a subordinate affiliation preference within the ambit of the overarching general governance ideal, seems to have become not instrumental in service to a shared governance project but the very thing to be served at the expense of all.
I think it’s not really anything like what we used to call party identity at work. It’s that we don’t even want such parties any more because we’ve rejected governance itself— not even regretfully, as something we’d like to have as a desirable state of affairs, but as an inherently misguided and actually dangerous illusion, a lie and trick implacable enemies want to use to crush and enslave us. There can be no mutual governance with an existential menace. To save ourselves, we must contract the circle of compromise and law to apply only to those who truly belong within it, and the cast the others into the outer darkness.
Party ID is now not something you can choose to serve wider goals. Your party ID is just another word for which phylum you are— predator or prey, host or parasite— Protestant or catholic— Muslim or Hindu— Jew or Aryan.