The Citizens United decision and its application joining together and heightening disgust with and alienation from multiple central institutions of republican democracy – Supreme Court, the “free” media, popular elections – with some prospect of contaminating the entire political-ideological superstructure < -> triumph of our self-consciously most ardent patriots.
All successful politicians must by definition adapt to the system which in its pure form – something to be feared – is the system of empty opportunism (we hold empty opportunism to be self-evident). The figure of Mitt represents its nothingness exquisitely, but the meaningfulness of its meaninglessness would have at least as much to do with us and where we are with poor rich Mitt.
West Wing becomes Veep. Obamessiah turns into the psychopathic janitor-in-chief. A figure like Mitt Romney – open fraud, an ambulatory non sequitur whose nonsensical emptiness is his main redeeming quality – becomes theoretically electable as Head of State and Government. The words “citizens united” come to mean “citizenship annihilated,” we wait for the economy to vote for or against itself to no known purpose, and at every crisis the mask slips away further, revealing nothing at all in the foreground, beyond it a coven of vampires (“them”) amidst a mass of zombies (“us”). To continue functioning at all, the system will have to finish discarding itself, likely to the applause of those few who even notice.
