And maybe politics will kill us.

First off, it's clear that our refusal to discuss politics has left our ability to discuss politics at a very rudimentary level.

One important symptom of our refusal to discuss politics is the domination of "hot-button words." Words are what make up arguments which, in friendly competition, decide the best course of action. Words also constitute the internal conversation, the conversation between what the philosopher George Herbert Mead called the "I," the experiential self, and the "me," the self of previous experience. Most fundamentally, though, words are emotional reflexes. So in what is left of political discussion today you have hot-button words, in which the emotional reflex drowns out any meaningful argument by its domination of the "I" and the "me." What follows close behind such a state of affairs are hot-button actions, typically including lots of violence. For instance you have words like "genocide," which can be difficult in case of actual genocide:

Last year the Dems put themselves in a position to deny the importance of an actual genocide taking place under their tenure, and thus stripped themselves of any possibility of moral credibility, basically forever. Hot behind such efforts was censorship as a doubling-down, to be continued by Trump or by whomever is in power afterward. Stupidly enough, the censors have so far used AI algorithms to censor, much less clever than the efforts of the KGB in Soviet society.

Another symptom of the attack on argument is that of word fetishes. The fetish du jour of today's politics is corruption. Trump thinks he's rooting out corruption; Trump is himself corrupt. Here it must be pointed out that corruption is built into the Keynesian model of the economy. The real problem is one of whether or not corruption promotes circulation, and of who benefits from circulation. It's part of this question of will I survive under capitalism. You have a political class full of careerists and a set of Zionist billionaires running everything, and you have the political economy described by Riley and Brenner:

Under political capitalism, raw political power, rather than productive investment, is the key determinant of the rate of return. This new form of accumulation is associated with a series of novel mechanisms of ‘politically constituted rip-off’. These include an escalating series of tax breaks, the privatization of public assets at bargain-basement prices, quantitative easing plus ultra-low interest rates, to promote stock-market speculation—and, crucially, massive state spending aimed directly at private industry, with trickledown effects for the broader population: Bush’s Prescription Drug legislation, Obama’s Affordable Care Act, Trump’s cares Act, Biden’s American Rescue Plan, the Infrastructure and chips Acts and the Inflation Reduction Act. All these mechanisms of surplus extraction are openly and obviously political. They allow for returns, not on the basis of investment in plant, equipment, labour and inputs to produce use values, but rather on the basis of investments in politics.

So there is no "corruption" because it is all corruption, and the question we failed to ask was one of who benefits from what actions. There was no original, pristine, state which the politicians corrupted; there is no remedy within the parameters set by the system except in the promotion of different types of corruption, in hopes of more effective transfers of government money-printing to the benefit of the American masses. The obvious remedy to such a state of affairs is, basically, a different state of affairs. But, instead, they will probably destroy the ability to communicate such a state of affairs anyway, all sides of the Establishment conspiring to produce a high-tech Fahrenheit 451.

Today you have the establishment devouring itself at a cellular level. The NYT author likes calling it "the left," but what they are discussing is a dismantling of the Democratic Party "Veal Pen," people who couldn't bother to go outside the Democratic Party in their criticisms of Republicans back in the days of relative democracy and who have long since been neutered by the Democrats themselves. (Note: any serious reference to the "Veal Pen" in American politics has long since disappeared from the Internet, so we are talking in disappearing vocabularies here.) We will soon reach a point where you will be sent to prison if a Republican calls you a bad name.

The political disintegration of America will of course be accompanied by an economic disintegration, though a fair reading of Riley and Brenner should have told you that. Note that the Democrats paved the way for this one too, since under their tenure the official statistics misrepresented decreasing shares of the surplus going to the working class. "Oooh unemployment is low!" they all said, when nobody in their ranks asked if the ostensibly-plentiful jobs in that day actually covered the rent due. This is why the Democrats do not typically criticize Republican garbage in its main weakness -- that the Republicans will crash the national economy. Already we are in recession.

In conclusion: the basis for argument is more fragile than we think. It was mostly gone when Trump was crowned king. And the forces opposing argument are more powerful than they were previously. They aren't to be opposed rationally in any simple, straightforward way, since the words themselves have been weaponized as emotional responses. As a result, what has been naturalized in the world of action is war, genocide, the general destruction of human welfare across America and in other parts of the world, and the general contempt of the elites for mass publics whose collective self-interest has been manipulated by relentless propaganda efforts. A lot of people will die.

People like to call this state of affairs "fascism," though the term has become so abused as to have lost all of this meaning through the methods I outlined above. So here I would like to distinguish between fascism-in-scare-quotes, what William I. Robinson called "21st century fascism," and actual Fascism, the phenomenon of Mussolini, Hitler, and Franco in the 20th century. One thing to remember in this regard is that actual Fascism took place under conditions of a growing capitalist world-system, whereas the present-day world-system is not growing in the places where fascism-in-scare-quotes remains supreme, and fascism-in-scare-quotes will not make it grow. So what we are probably talking about, here, is a failed attempt at Fascism that will merely produce catastrophe instead.

The obvious solution to this state of affairs is what I am calling "creative politics." Since all of our talk about politics has merely resulted in clever stupidity, we need a more inventive politics, one which will employ actual wisdom and open people up to actual discussions of the situation.

(Side note: if you are attacking me as "helping the Republicans" through creative politics, please keep in mind that the Democratic Party rhetoric of last year was pervaded through-and-through by a completely false picture of political reality, in which (in the voice of the attackers) iit so desperately mattered that you vote for the (D), when in fact if your vote had had any chance of changing the election's outcome, the election would not have been in dispute anyway.)