This began as a reflection upon a quote of the philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis:

One of the many reasons why it is laughable to call contemporary Western societies “democratic” is because the “public” sphere is in fact private – be it in France, the United States, or England. This is true, first of all, in that the real decisions are made behind closed doors, backstage, or in places where those who govern meet informally. It is well-known th.at they are not made in those official places where they are supposed to be made.

If we are to assume an arc toward democracy and away from kings and popes and such, which we call progress, then first of all it's absurd that they -- the people who decide which protests are acceptable and which ones aren't -- are holding "No Kings" marches and rallies. Didn't we dispense with kings in 1776? And now we're going back to having one? So Saturday, I guess, we had Moon of Alabama criticizing Trump for exercising powers he doesn't supposedly have. The rule of law, then, has been replaced by "if you can find enough damned fools to do what you tell them to do." Don't ask questions, just obey.

Today's political emotion is guilt. The podcasters are feeling guilty over their having been betrayed by Donald Trump, who broke all of his promises:

The rest of us can say "it's good you're coming around." Except of course for Simplicius, whose coverage of Ukraine is excellent but who can't be bothered to abandon his weird views of politics: at least, he argues, Trump is better than Biden. Key sentence:

Granted, what Trump is doing is still head and shoulders above the decrepit Biden regime’s lifeless pantomime. From the perspective of the US, Trump is at least attempting something radical, rather than the same old hyper-progressive Keynesian Malthusianism.

Sorry, Simplicius, but "Keynesian Malthusianism" is an oxymoron, Biden was not "hyper-progressive," and the words "Trump" and "better" do not belong in the same sentence. Y'all should have given up on Trump when he got into politics in 2015.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the sacred Two-Party System, the (D) political class is now railing against Trump's Gaza policies. These are people who should have figured out that they were supporting a genocide on 1 January 2024, if not earlier. So, yes, guilt. The expression of this guilt was and is more image-management. The problem, of course, is that for years on end the Democrats thought image-management could substitute for doing their jobs, and now they're still doing it.

Under smooth-talking Obama, the Democrats gave, to the Republicans, all branches of the Federal government, 13 governor's houses, and 900+ seats in state legislatures. And what was Hillary Clinton's cred? Oh, right, she was and is a warmonger. If the Dem rank and file didn't like that, they reasoned, let's image-manage her some more. That was what Peter Daou was about, no? And, if anything was wrong with running the least accessible President in modern history for re-election, why, we'll just do some more image-management and everything will turn out wonderfully. What could go wrong? The point, then, is that past garbage is now showing up in the form of guilt, and somehow all of this image-management is to keep people from asking this one critical question: "why didn't you reject BOTH political parties ages ago, knowing that they are impediments to genuine democracy? Why don't you do it now?" At least that's what Peter Daou did, in his own clumsy way.

Cornelius Castoriadis had a fundamental opposition in his political thought, very relevant to the discussion here. Here I'm quoting from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. On the one hand you had autonomy, which was the society's collective deciding of the laws it was going to follow. This, needless to say, was viewed by Castoriadis as a good thing. "Genuine politics is a way of life in which humans give the laws to themselves as they constantly re-engage in deliberation about what is good." Autonomy coincides with collective responsibility, in which a society takes responsibility for its own institutional forms. Autonomy is like genuine democracy, or like a realized anarchism.

On the other hand, for Castoriadis, there is heteronomy, in which people blame some external and imaginary force for exerting all power over what they do. "All societies are self-creative and yet most, he argued, are utterly incapable of calling into question their own established norms. In such societies, the instituted situation immediately coincides without remainder with what is good and valid in the minds of the people. Such a society, which does not or cannot question its own norms or considers its norms to be given by God, gods, nature, history, ancestors, and so forth, is heteronomous in opposition to autonomous societies." Heteronomy, then, coincides with irresponsibility, with the blaming of some imagined other thing for a society's institutional forms. Heteronomous societies are societies in which everyone says "God or money or the boss or my parents or the political parties or the brownshirts or organized crime made me do it. It wasn't my choice." The vast majority of societies throughout history were heteronomous.

The United States of today is, without doubt, rabidly heteronomous, and fully irresponsible. There is no sense in political deliberation in the present-day US because the institutional forms are decided by money or property or by some fantasy as concocted by the bullies in power. "I don't talk about politics" has become the mantra of those who fear what politics has actually brought them, which significantly preceded Trump and "his" ICE gestapo, the one the Democrats also voted to expand. Riley and Brenner's observation is the order of the day: the point of politics is stock buy-backs and other enshrinements of the royalty of money. The outer perimeter of this politics is a global police state, with its innumerable military bases, CIA installations, and pointless wars. They're really not wars -- as someone pointed out in one of the podcasts, they're really just hunting expeditions. An actual war would look more like what is going on today in Ukraine.

It would be fascism, except fascism primed itself for success whereas the current phenomenon primes itself for prolongation with defeat at the end. If anything, we ought to regard the Russians as moving in an exceptionally speedy fashion in Ukraine.

If we have a nuclear war with billions dead tomorrow because the President read something he didn't like on social media, future historians, assuming that there are some left, will no doubt blame us for this predicament. We didn't stand up for ourselves when we had the chance, instead blaming the "other" party for all that was wrong with America, so what did we think would happen? The whole of the political class is decrepit, yet what you see from America's most organized opinion leaders is stuff like Thom Hartmann's piece "This Is Not a Drill: Infiltrate Your Local Dems Before It’s Too Late."

Hartmann wants us to "similarly seize control of and radicalize the Democratic Party in the tradition of FDR and LBJ." Here one recalls that FDR and LBJ were both mild reformists, prodded in each case by actual communists, whereas today the actual communists are old people who remember those times, and if you were a Democrat for any length of time, the Party seized control of you, and you miss the good old days in which Blinken, Nuland, and Sullivan were planning an imagined victory over Russia. The vast likelihood is that anyone who follows Hartmann's advice is 1) over 50 and 2) making George Carlin look good:

So let me suggest an alternate strategy here. We live in a liberal oligarchy, not a democracy, to be sure. There are processes, though. We can interrupt them, insofar as they involve us. You have an Internet, but half of it is bots. You get to vote now and then. At some point you can intervene, because it's really only if they can keep the public divided between (D) and (R) that voting will cease to matter. So here's my new twist: form your own political party. It won't matter that, upon being formed, your party will be powerless: what will matter in the immediate term is that your party will reflect your political will, your taking responsibility for your own political beliefs, and you won't be giving up that political will just to be a (D) or an (R), so you can pretend to have power when in fact you were and are what in gaming they call a "non-player character." The power element in all this will come into play when the individual political parties come together for prospective mergers.

The ultimate idea of "form your own political party" is that if Jeremy Corbyn can do it in the UK and if AMLO can do it in Mexico, we can do it here. But, for now, stop leaning on some imaginary politics as an alibi for your powerlessness, take responsibility, and strike a blow for autonomy.