Performative Politics

Politics is dead. Politics is no longer about politics, it is about identity. Late-stage Capitalism has taken it over and commodified it. Politics is a product, a performative, consumptive act; an act of identity affirmation. It’s no different than shopping at Hot Topic, and I highly recommend that you divest yourself of both.

Let’s consider what exactly is going on here; afterwards you can yell, “Jane! Get me off this crazy thing!”

Begin with the Hegelian dialectic. Since this is the Current Year, it’s going to be a particularly stupid dialectic. So let’s look around for an argument that’s both gauche and irrelevant, but which nonetheless gripped all the major headlines in recent memories… aha! I’ve got one: the transgender bathrooms debate. A topic that absolutely nobody cared about, until one day everybody cared about it. Where did this thing come from?

This is why we’re looking at Hegel, incidentally; there’s no better proof of his thesis-antithesis-synthesis than this fiasco; there’s also no greater disproof of his belief that history is marching towards Christ. The transgender bathroom debate wasn’t manufactured – it wasn’t planned – it arose organically out of the sea of stupidity which is the post-Christian West. Random ideologies floating about, making power grabs, tussling with one another, and in some cases the fight gains enough momentum to officially go mainstream. The belligerents in this dialectic? The Tranners and the TERFs.

The TERFs – Trans-Exclusive Radical Feminists – stand for replacing the natural patriarchy for a totalitarian matriarchy. They’ve got a perfectly logical, rigid, and coherent worldview (or at least they believe so, Gödel would argue otherwise), which boils down to the axiom of: “Boys have a penis, girls have a vagina – and boys are evil!” The Tranners, meanwhile, just stand around >existing< which drives the TERFs madder than a True Believer of Euclid’s Fifth Postulate.

Tensions had been growing between these two groups, as both cemented their foothold within academia, and then one day – presumably – a Tranner passed wind next to a TERF while in a public rest room (possibly while the TERF was menstruating), and their fight became our problem.

So what happened next?

Immediately, as with all political arguments, it became a Red Team/Blue Team debate. Red Team took the TERF side (unsurprising, they do this about 70% of the time, despite the TERFs explicitly hating them) while Blue Team took the Tranner side (they just love to engender chaos; even though they’re more closely aligned with the TERFs, all of their battle cries are about tearing down the establishment). The stuffed shirts were paraded out on stage, and had heated, vitriolic arguments about the matter, all of which were utterly predictable. The people at home watched, and then at the water cooler they regurgitated a ‘reasonable’ opinion. And then Helen Lovejoy screamed “Won’t somebody think of the children???”

Meanwhile:

With the public and pundits distracted, some smart bureaucrats saw an opportunity to expand their departments by rewriting all of their official documents to include Xe/Xir. A couple of politicians made toothless, empty gestures to appeal to this demographic or that. Those with an enterprising spirit sold coffee mugs that said “Filled with TERF Tears” or something more vulgar about what the Tranner could do with their genitals.

And then the public moved on to the next topic. Nothing changed, no meaningful insight was achieved, the Hegelian Synthesis was just the latest piece of political fashion to accoutre oneself with. The 0.1% of the population who are trans continued to use whatever washrooms they wanted, the TERFs continued to seethe at penises for existing, and the conservatives shook their heads, wondering where the world was going, while failing to provide anything even resembling a solution, a vision, or a direction for society to go in.

Politics is no longer the realm of the possible. It’s a distraction engine. Power conflicts between elite groups manifest into pundits debating tangentially related subjects. Those who follow the news embrace the ideologies as identities. Other power-seeking actors use the situation to advance their own interests – but make no mistake, there’s nobody in charge of any of this. This stuff comes up accidentally, inevitably. The cunning people take advantage of it, but they don’t cause it. Nor do the groups who start the argument choose to start the argument – it was inevitable that they’d eventually come to blows over something stupid.

There is no leadership in our societies. Nobody wants leaders. They just want the latest fashion from Hot Topic.

Ideologies are just a cloak to hide yourself in. Sell your cloak, and buy a sword.