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There is no such thing as "the people"
Mar. 1st, 2020 11:30 amOne of the greatest cliches out there in the land of political discourse is the idea that something called "the people" is a meaningful representation of anything that actually operates in the real world.
Let's try a little thought experiment and entertain the idea that there is in fact no such thing as "the people"....that perhaps such an utterance is silly, near-meaningless abstraction; and more often that not, this utterance that is little more than a emotional slogan; one that has for a long time been a favorite of agitation propagandists and rabble-rousers.
On the contrary, We could say that in actuality (empirically), people and peoples are sorted into factions, tribes, ethnic groups, religious sects, priesthoods, socio-economic classes, cultures, subcultures, ideological cults, professional societies, oligarch cliques, ect. Each of these groupings has their own collective interests and that "real politics" when shorn of all its bloviating, moralistic pretensions, is the process of negotiating and mediating the often-conflicting interests of these groups.
And by this, "the state" is nothing the enforcement arm of whatever coalition of the above type of groups happen to exert the most control over it at any given time. "The state" itself is just an administrative abstraction.
Let's try a little thought experiment and entertain the idea that there is in fact no such thing as "the people"....that perhaps such an utterance is silly, near-meaningless abstraction; and more often that not, this utterance that is little more than a emotional slogan; one that has for a long time been a favorite of agitation propagandists and rabble-rousers.
On the contrary, We could say that in actuality (empirically), people and peoples are sorted into factions, tribes, ethnic groups, religious sects, priesthoods, socio-economic classes, cultures, subcultures, ideological cults, professional societies, oligarch cliques, ect. Each of these groupings has their own collective interests and that "real politics" when shorn of all its bloviating, moralistic pretensions, is the process of negotiating and mediating the often-conflicting interests of these groups.
And by this, "the state" is nothing the enforcement arm of whatever coalition of the above type of groups happen to exert the most control over it at any given time. "The state" itself is just an administrative abstraction.
