The consensual form of politics in our time is a bi-polar system that offers the appearance of a choice where essentially there is none, since today poles converge on a single economic stance—the ‘tight fiscal policy’ that Clinton and Blair declare to be the key tenet of the modern Left, that sustains economic growth, that allows us to improve social security, education and health. In this uniform spectrum, political differences are more and more reduced to merely cultural attitudes: multicultural/sexual (etc.) ‘openness’ versus traditional/natural (etc.) ‘family values’. This choice—between Social Democrat or Christian Democrat in Germany, Democrat or Republican in the States—recalls nothing so much as the predicament of someone who wants an artifi cial sweetener in an American cafeteria, where the omnipresent alternatives are Nutra-Sweet Equal and High&Low, small bags of red and blue, and most consumers have a habitual preference (avoid the red ones, they contain cancerous substances, or vice versa) whose ridiculous persistence merely highlights the meaninglessness of the options themselves.
Posted October 22, 2008 at 12:38pm
