Writing on Politics

Writing about contemporary politics, especially what is now unfolding globally and with particular intensity in the United States, has become an aesthetically risky and expressively constricted act. Insight itself is treated as partisan. Intelligence, systems thinking, and even basic factual literacy are read as “progressive” positions regardless of intent or content. This is not simply ideological drift but an emergent property of a media ecology that rewards identity over inference and salience over coherence. At some point, whether by design or by cumulative bias, a large population was cultivated that is poorly informed yet highly mobilisable, politically useful precisely because it is epistemically vulnerable. The paradox is that the dense, plural, high-bandwidth communicative environment that once made American democracy resilient now functions as an amplifier of fragmentation. Any attempt to analyse the structural flows of technologically mediated political communication is immediately sorted into a factional register, guaranteeing that half the audience will never listen. What should be recognised as the ordinary operation of scientific reason is recoded as ideological aggression, and even pointing out this asymmetry collapses into noise and shouting.