There are no issues in the 2016 Presidential race.

Maybe there were issues when Bernie Sanders was running. Sanders made an issue of honesty, of whether or not any of the political rhetoric you hear coming from the mouths of the politicians had any relation to what the politicians were going to do. And then Sanders endorsed Clinton, and, lo and behold, it didn't, again. And the issue disappeared.

Politics for the masses is about tribes. Either you belong to the (D) tribe, or the (R) tribe, or maybe you are stuck in the middle trying to decide which tribe merits your vote, and that's what determines your place in the political demographics of any particular election. Political arguments, then, are all about one, and only one, thing: "my tribe is better than your tribe."

Oh, sure, you may believe in political stuff. But your belief in political stuff is part of a realm called the "social imaginary." The social imaginary is that part of social reality which has to be imagined, and re-imagined, all the time. Social reality cannot just be buildings and roads and social organizations; it must also exist in the heads of its participants. In law, for instance, the social imaginary is jurisprudence, in science it's the "scientific method," in politics it's your "political positions," and so on.

Reality and fantasy are not entirely separate realms, because human belief in fantasy must seem real if reality is to take a particular shape. Thus for instance the collective fantasy about what money will buy is real, and the evidence of this is that we all act as if money were real.

However, because the collective fantasy is real, there is no physical need for it to "be real." People believe in all sorts of things without demonstrable physical existence (God, for instance), yet nonetheless the beliefs are themselves real things existing in real heads. This is what "political positions" are about. People might, for instance, believe that Hillary Clinton is a "progressive," and in so doing, such people place Hillary Clinton under no compulsion whatsoever to behave like a progressive in any physically-recognizable sense.

We can make fun of the political collective fantasy all we want. But the political collective fantasy, like all the other collective fantasies, is necessary, because without collective fantasies (and thus without the social imaginary) there would be no society at all.

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The social imaginary, then, is composed of beliefs which are real as beliefs, without necessarily being beliefs about real things. The most real thing about the social imaginary, however, is the tribe. The tribe is the agglomeration of social imaginaries which bring together each tribe's cultural expressions, each tribe's founding myth of social existence, and each tribe's ideas about foreign relations (i.e. what to do about other people who don't belong to the tribe).

If you want to read about the foreign-relations part of it in interesting detail, check out Kees van der Pijl's book The Foreign Encounter in Myth and Religion. Van der Pijl goes through world history to identify some important tribes, their myths and religions, and their foreign relations. What every tribe has in common, for van der Pijl, is ethnogenesis -- the process of coming together as a people. Ethnogenesis is what we need; thus my insistence that we have a political party and that this party be a party of the masses rather than a party which brings "nice people" to the table so that the masses can be deprived of any say-so about policy. In the world of the social imaginary, what we can do is to insist upon a better collective fantasy, and a better political fantasy. And if we are stuck endorsing people who (on the physical plane) don't believe anything of what we believe, then we need a better tribe, and thus a better party.

In the physical world, what the politicians do is completely beyond our control. They all cater to a single tribe, the elites, with a general orientation to policy which is mostly about preserving their elite status. The elites are (D) or (R) only insofar as they must play particular roles in the drama performed daily to captivate the masses. And the drama is believed by at least some of the masses, otherwise why would it be performed? Thus we can observe the ridiculous specter of people who claim that they are going to "hold politicians accountable" after having pledged their votes to specific politicians.

The physical world, however, is what is at stake with the collective fantasy. So we can go on with the pretense that the current social formations, with their current tribes, will somehow magically produce an improvement in the physical world, or we can try to change the collective fantasy, begin a new project of ethnogenesis, and create a new tribe. Ideally this would be a tribe to unite the masses, with foreign relations being what to do about the elites. But we shall see.