Misconceptions in American Politics

I must apologize in advance for my reluctance to write recently. A lot of my 'professional' work (that is, content produced to be considered and thought about, such as books, novels, essay at cetera) has been centered on fiction rather than participating in political discourse, simply because I deem the latter quite pointless. However, with the current state of affairs in both the United States and the United Kingdom, two countries where I have resided, pointing to:

• a bleak reality where the consumer is so immersed in a process of Fisherian 'Capitalist Realism' that he himself becomes the product of giant companies that sell one's data back to them
• a situation where inflation (particularly of the US dollar) has become completely normalized, and the Federal Reserve does not seem to matter
• it becomes illegal to criticize things being done by elected representatives upon both your class and demographic
• it is completely normal for government appointees and public servants to be participating in backroom deals and backhanded business dealings against the common good of the working class
• an omnipresent surveillance state using credit systems, face detection, fake image and video generation, health data and credit tracking along with a social credit system is in the works, and currently the newest obsession of government-economic monopolies around the world, seeking an arms race on how to 'outrace' one another on its development
• businesses are aggressively seeking to utilize technology involving brain implants to their advantages, in order to commercialize it like they did artificial intelligence tools
• and most of all, the value of human art becomes meaningless by comparison

...it becomes quite necessary to cover the topic.

My second apology is issued in advance to a very specific demographic. It is not those called out in this article explicitly, because I hope you are offended. It has always been my pleasure as a writer to incite and thoroughly encourage a reaction in my readers. But instead, it is issued to those who do not read well enough to understand what I say. You are blameless, and your brain has been fried by the digital bread and circuses of our age, of which I am guilty in participating in and propagating.

Like all good systems of capitalist 'innovation', you reinforce and feed into it regardless of whether you consent to participate, and whatever you make will be recycled by an automated system at some point in the future into consumable content-slop. It is only fair that you keep an eye out for it as well. Social media is a survival mechanism, and I'd hate to deprive you of the many interesting Instagram reels you may see today. It makes no sense to me to separate oneself from society and live in a hut in the forest if one has to pay taxes to a government that propagates itself and its systems upon future generations regardless of your niche political outlooks. Unless you're going for complete, outlaw-like, celibate isolation, at which point you risk doing mental harm to yourself and going crazy. One can only be Huxley's 'John the Savage' for so long.

I want to elaborate on all of the modern 'symptoms of the time' I mentioned in my bullet list above, and more specifically, how they apply in the United States, rather than the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, whose laws are a subject for another time (albeit I trust that Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor won't be of much help, seeing the recent events unfold). The most specific symptom of modernity I wish to embark upon explaining is the core misconception in American politics revealed when ordinary people discuss ICE and Donald J. Trump's deportation measures. Although I was never a Trump loyalist by any means, nor am I devoutly critical of the man, putting myself in the position of an 'astute observer' of the chaos.

I take this position as preferable, and would rather it than an attitude such as that of Sliwa's 'loyal opposition' approach towards the Democratic Party, for instance, or Alexandria-Ocasio Cortez's progressivist and rather non-conciliatory approach towards the Republicans, and particularly the MAGA Republicans, in of themselves, not because I don't think their ideas are worth exploring and extracting sense from, but because I see how alienating they may be to some Americans, who do not explore the political landscape dynamically, and merely rely on simple buzz-words and catchphrases (if this were a video, you'd see Biden's 'when we finally beat, uh, medi-care' gaff here, or anything George W. Bush has ever said in public, particularly while having a nice time golfing).

As an 'astute observer of the chaos', I must point out the obvious in the ICE discourse. The left and the right are confused among themselves. Why would it be the left, particularly the socialist and progressive left, out of all groups that could mistakenly ally themselves, that would be on the side of protecting due process for illegal immigrants? Every single socialist and progressive movement throughout recent modern history has been protectionist and isolationist. And indeed, up until the era of Donald J. Trump's 'Make America Great Again Movement', a movement that has notably failed to reduce the price of eggs or build any sort of wall that Mexico would theoretically pay for, it was considered ludicrous for a so-called 'conservative' or a 'nationalist' to be firstly secular, and secondly isolationist and deeply protectionist. Yet, Donald has become the 'visage' upon which the needs and beliefs of the American public are reflected. He has cemented himself, by sheer will, egoism and arrogance alone, as a national symbol, and even a controversial (yet seemingly beloved by some) topic of Thanksgiving table discussion.

Yet compare this to the German left's approach of seeking benefits for German-born workers rather than immigrant ones, or the efforts of the Conservative Party of Canada (and up until recently, the United Kingdom) to attract cheap labor to boost medium and big business by bringing in immigrants. Compare it to the policies of the broadly nationalist and left-wing governments of Southeast Asia and Central Europe that have halted illegal immigration in all forms primarily through labor-aligned and economic policy. Compare these seemingly uncontroversial approaches of the left around the world for protecting domestic workers with the socialist-progressive movement (and the broader left-liberal movement) within the Democratic Party and the United States, and you will see that the vast majority of anti-crackdown efforts and protests against organizations like ICE carry a similar sentiment to the Pro-Palestinian campus protests of our year 2024/25. Rather than confronting the core issue, it is the humanitarian root toward the center of the issue that is being explicitly focused on.

The Gazan refugees of yesteryear's upset become the Guatemalan refugees of today's most ferocious argument. The problem remains the same - unchanging, unchallenged, with no possible diplomatic or political solution to reach a compromise that could work for the country in question, or the world and the United Nations at large. I by no means claim to be a prophet when I claim now, towards the end of January, the first month of the new year, that no compromise will be reached regarding the mass, sometimes legally void, deportations being pursued by ICE under the second Trump administration, as well as the Democrat calls against Attorney-General Pam Bondi, and speaker-of-the-house Mike Johnson, among other prominent Republican politicians, in relation to it.

The immigration crisis in America becomes not a thorough understanding of immigrants and the injustices they face under U.S. law, but just another push issue to fight about, disguising the ongoing debate about DJT's (the President's) morality as some other matter of our period, in order to continue the relentless assaults over civil matters between the left and the right without a legislative compromise or even a diplomatic approach, resulting in an ongoing government stalemate that seems to reoccur in a shutdown every so often.

Let me embark upon my previous list now, and demonstrate how these societal symptoms tie together with the brawling currently going on around America's streets (over the proposed establishment of a police state, that has actually already been in force for over a century, unbeknownst to said protesters):

1. The common thread tying these symptoms together is not ideology but infrastructure. Each phenomenon is treated in public discourse as a moral aberration, a failure of character, or the excesses of a particular party, when in fact they are structural outcomes of systems that reward scale, abstraction, and depersonalization. Capitalist realism is not merely a cultural mood, but a practical constraint. When every social relation is mediated through markets, metrics, and platforms, the individual ceases to be a citizen or even a worker in the classical sense, and becomes instead a simple, exploited, and extremely sedated and spiritually meaningless data-producing node. The illusion of choice remains intact, yet the very range of outcomes narrows. You may choose what to consume, but you may not choose to stop being consumed. This is why resistance so often takes the form of symbolic outrage rather than material change. The system does not require your belief, only your participation.
2. Inflation’s normalization follows naturally from this abstraction. Currency, like labor, has been severed from tangible reference points. The dollar inflates not only because of monetary policy, but because it no longer represents a social contract grounded in production and reciprocity. It represents confidence in continuity. The Federal Reserve appears irrelevant not because it lacks power, but because its power is exercised in a closed loop that no longer meaningfully interfaces with ordinary life. Wages lag, assets soar, and the explanation is endlessly technical, shielding responsibility behind complexity. When inflation becomes background noise, so too does economic precarity. People adapt, not because conditions improve, but because instability is framed as normal adulthood.
3. From this follows the criminalization of criticism. When systems cannot justify themselves materially, they resort to procedural legitimacy and moral language. Dissent is not argued against but reclassified. It becomes misinformation, extremism, or social harm. This is not the abolition of free speech in the theatrical sense, but its containment. You may speak, but only within boundaries that do not threaten the reproduction of the system itself. Class critique becomes hate. Demographic analysis becomes discrimination. The language shifts just enough to preserve the appearance of liberal norms while hollowing out their substance.
4. Corruption, then, is not a deviation, but instead an expected behavior. When governance is treated as a managerial function rather than a public trust, backroom dealings are simply the most efficient means of coordination between aligned interests. They become good. They become ideal. The outrage cycle serves a real purpose here. It reassures the public that corruption is anomalous and scandalous, rather than routine. Individual resignations substitute for structural reform. The working class is invited to be angry, but never empowered to alter the incentives that make such behavior rational in the first place. They are the 'two minutes hate' of our time, if the reader can forgive the overused reference.
5. The surveillance state emerges as the main enterprising and logical solution to managing populations rendered unstable as a result of these self-perpetuating and restless conditions. Precarity requires monitoring. Debt requires tracking. Digital identity collapses the distance between behavior and consequence. Credit scores, biometric data, health metrics, and predictive analytics converge not out of malice, but out of administrative convenience. Once the technology exists, not using it is framed as irresponsible. Competition between states accelerates this process, each justifying expansion by pointing to the advancements of others. What begins as security ends as pure and simple compliance.
6. Neurotechnology and brain-computer interfaces represent the final and everlasting frontier of this logic. If attention, emotion, and cognition can be measured and influenced, they can be monetized. The rhetoric mirrors that of previous technological waves. Productivity, accessibility, enhancement. The reality is simpler. The last remaining private space, the interior of the mind, becomes legible, consumable, commercially available and effortlessly readable to private market forces. Consent becomes meaningless when participation is tied to employment, healthcare, or social inclusion. Opting out is rebranded as backwardness and primitivism. Privacy is branded as foolish and suspicious.
7. And in this environment, art loses its value not because creativity disappears, but because meaning is flattened. When cultural production is optimized for engagement metrics and automated reproduction alone, human intention becomes incidental rather than emotionally sufficient by itself or explainable through explicitly human terms, which neither the legal code nor the business apparatus of globalism even really cares for. Art becomes content, and content becomes filler, which is evaluated by how well it is monetized. The tragedy is not that machines create, but that humans are encouraged to create as machines do. Faster, louder, more legible. What cannot be quantified is discarded. What cannot be monetized is marginalized. Our art is being dumbed down to appeal to the dumbest possible demographic, only because it is already the largest possible demographic, and only because that is the demographic the system needed to breed and instill in powerful positions during the duration of the Industrial Revolution, and the demographic it has upheld to beat the intelligent members of the working class into relentless bureaucracy through schooling, economic suppression and force for literal generations across the world, for the gain of very few, and the theatre of public dismay.
8. These conditions feed into one another seamlessly. Surveillance requires data extraction. Data extraction requires commodified subjects. Commodified subjects require economic instability. Instability requires narrative distraction. Narrative distraction requires endless cultural production.

The ICE debate, the Gaza debate, the Ukrainian conflict, the culture wars, the moral panics, the pandemic discourse, the theatre of cruel political debate on national stages ending in political violence and widespread commercialization and meaningless condemnation of it, all function within this loop, all support it, all reinforce and help and build upon it, and all do so on purpose. They are not irrelevant, but they are displaced, like every marginalized political force within this country. Energy is expended where resolution is impossible, while the underlying machinery continues unchallenged. You cannot challenge it, and being aware of it emulates the Rocco's Basilisk, in itself being a theoretical curse. And yet, you must live it, and prevail as being truly 'human', and on top of that, a person of action, regardless of circumstance.

To observe this without illusion is not cynicism. It is the first step towards true and actionable clarity. The refusal to reduce every issue to partisan morality is not neutrality, but seriousness. Until these systems are confronted as systems, debates will continue to orbit symptoms, and politics will remain a theater of managed conflict and spectacle rather than a site of genuine change.

Have a nice Saturday night. Don't forget to drink some tea and meditate.