“He’s morally unfit to be President.” “The environment is a moral issue.” “We should consume only those commodities produced by the highest moral standards.” We hear this kind of moralizing all the time, but these are not political positions, let alone critical ones, and to pretend that they are only makes us dumb to today’s actually-existing conditions.
Pretty much everything that goes under the name of politics today is not political at all, if by politics we mean, not the cartoon version we witness daily in the media but real contestation over the economic, cultural, psychological and spiritual institutions that shape what is possible and for whom - and that shape the very way by which we dream what might be possible in the future.
Anyone can argue against a system when it’s gone wrong, when a cop’s chokehold asphyxiates an innocent man or when we catch a politician with his pants down. The real test of critical thinking is to resist this temptation to knock on the open door and moralize against the liars and the cheats and the crooks (however much they deserve it), and instead attune ourselves to how, even if the system seems to be functioning crisis-free, it is still producing inequality and injustice.
