We must reinvent politics

We are not fed up with politics. We are fed up with politicians and this way of doing things that is spreading lies, recriminations, and a loss of direction. We are fed up with their degradation. We are tired of the public discourse of those in power, here and everywhere, right and left. This weariness does not express a rejection of collective life or democratic deliberation, but rather a clear intuition. Politics has been replaced by the management of power, by party logic, and by a technical administration of the present that has given up on thinking about the future as a shared project whose aim is the well-being of societies.

In classical Greece, engaging in politics was not synonymous with governing or managing interests; it was a practice of committed and responsible discourse within society, a clear demonstration of the logical argumentation of conflict. As Aristotle reminds us, human beings are... zoon politikon because it possesses the capacity that the logos (The word), to deliberate collectively on what is just and unjust, on what is beneficial and harmful to the community. Politics was not a technique reserved for a professional class, but an activity constitutive of citizenship (without forgetting something as serious as the fact that women and slaves could not participate). Without active participation there was no police and the city descended into chaos, disorder...

This original core shifts radically in late modernity. Politics becomes representation, a representation that fossilizes in party structures that tend to conflate their own interests with the general interest. The result is a paradox, since, in the name of democracy, democracy is emptied of content. Citizens are no longer political subjects, but rather electoral subjects; they no longer decide, but rather their capacity for reasoning is nullified; they no longer build the common good, but rather choose among pre-packaged options.

This process has been lucidly analyzed by Hannah Arendt when she distinguishes between the space of political action and the sphere of mere administration. When politics is reduced to the management of needs or the optimization of processes, the space in which citizens can appear as equals within a plurality disappears. Without this space of appearance, politics loses its truly human dimension.

In this context, bipartisanship is not only an institutional problem but also a conceptual one. It assumes that society is binary, that conflicts can be reduced to two stable, antagonistic positions. But contemporary society is radically more complex because it is permeated by multiple voices, heterogeneous demands, and conflicts that cannot be absorbed by a single dualistic logic. As Jacques Rancière points out, politics must be born precisely when those who do not use critical and constructive thinking burst into the public sphere and, with their perspective, disregard the distribution of what is necessary and useful in the daily lives of the majority of the population. Where social order determines everything, there is no politics, only policing; that is, there is no possibility of dissent.

Given this, the call for a tabula trench This should not be interpreted as a nihilistic, Nietzschean gesture, but rather as a critical operation. It involves reinventing exhausted categories such as party, blog, and loyalty, in order to recover the original meaning of politics as a collective practice of thought. This does not imply denying conflict, but rather embracing it as a constitutive condition of democracy. As Chantal Mouffe argues, a living democracy does not eliminate antagonism, but transforms it into a healthy confrontation between adversaries, instead of turning it into an agonizing and unhealthy clash between enemies.

Doing politics today, therefore, demands relearning to listen from a structural perspective, one capable of embracing social polyphony. Society is neither univocal nor homogeneous; it is choral. The task of politics is not to impose an artificial unison, but to articulate difference without erasing it, inviting dialectics to endure. Only in this way can politics cease to be a practice of preserving power and return to what it was at its origin: a shared way of thinking about and building the world.

Perhaps, then, we are not fed up with politics. Perhaps we are fed up with a system that has forgotten its purpose. And perhaps the true political gesture today lies in daring, once again, to demand a fresh start and to do politics together.