The Political Nightmare
There was a time when politics at least pretended to justify itself. Facts were bent, interests disguised, motives cleaned for public use. But there was still a shared horizon. A common world that had to be addressed, even dishonestly. Persuasion mattered because something like reality was assumed to exist between opposing sides.
That horizon is gone.
Politics no longer argues with the world. It installs one. Whoever acts first defines the field. Whoever moves fastest creates the conditions to which everyone else must respond. Reality is no longer debated. It is promulgated. Political success is no longer tied to truth or coherence, but to speed, repetition, and institutional capture.
This is not a post-truth problem. It is an ontological shift. We have moved from a politics of justification to a politics of enactment.
Donald Trump did not invent this shift, but he understood it instinctively. His method was simple and effective: assert, repeat, move on.
Truth was not something to be demonstrated. It was something that emerged through persistence. A claim that survived long enough acquired weight. A claim backed by action acquired authority. Opposition did not refute it. Opposition confirmed that something real was happening. To argue against him on factual grounds was already to lose, because argument itself had been made irrelevant.
But this is not where the nightmare ends.
His opponents absorbed the same logic. Different language. Different aesthetics. Different moral posture. The same structure. They stopped justifying and began setting realities of their own. They invoked urgency, emergency, necessity. Hesitation became complicity. Debate became obstruction. Norms were suspended in the name of higher stakes. Action justified itself by the fact of having occurred.
The conflict is no longer truth versus lie.
It is set against set.
Each side pre-structures what counts as relevant, urgent, or discussable. Each manufactures necessity. Each treats speed as virtue and pause as weakness. Reality becomes something you occupy and defend, not something you examine. The result is the airless atmosphere of contemporary politics: no shared ground, no external standard, no court of appeal beyond momentum and moral pressure.
Seen this way, the crisis is not polarization. It is formal collapse.
The great philosophers of modernity would recognize fragments of their own ideas twisted beyond recognition.
Fichte would recognize the gesture and recoil from the result. He argued that reality is not passively received but actively produced through human action. But for him, action always involved self-binding. To posit the world was to bind oneself morally to what one had posited. What we see now is action without binding. Assertion without obligation. Freedom reduced to willfulness. Not the strong subject Fichte imagined, but an inflated one, incapable of self-limitation, mistaking domination for agency.
Hegel would be harsher. He would see a collapse into immediacy. For him, freedom and truth only exist through mediation: institutions, law, history, conflict worked through over time. What we have instead is a short-circuit. Opinion replaces concept. Emotion replaces form. Interests overwhelm institutions instead of flowing through them. Politics becomes raw power dressed in modern language. Not progress, but regression. Not vitality, but de-civilization.
Kant would likely say the most devastating thing of all: the boundaries have dissolved. When everything becomes political, nothing remains judgeable. When urgency replaces judgment, reason stops being critical and becomes instrumental. Politics ceases to be deliberation and turns into a theater of necessity.
The nightmare is not that leaders lie. They always have. It is that argument has become optional. That acting is treated as proof. That reality is no longer something to be understood, but something to be installed and defended at speed.
Trump exposed this condition. He did not create it. His opponents did not reverse it. They adapted to it.
What remains is a politics without pause. Without mediation. Without doubt. A perpetual motion machine of clashing certainties. Heat without light. Conflict without dialectic. Motion without direction.
The old philosophers expected conflict. They built their systems around it. What would have repelled them is the certainty. The velocity. The refusal to hesitate. The replacement of explanation with announcement.
This is not chaos.
It is efficiency without reflection. Power without self-binding. Action without judgment.
Once reality can be set, everyone learns to set it. Not because they are cynical, but because hesitation becomes fatal. Slowness looks like surrender. Restraint looks like weakness.
The space where judgment used to live collapses under pressure.
There is no return to the old politics. Systems do not reverse themselves. At best, they develop symptoms and adaptations.
For now, we are not curing the disease.
We are learning how it feels to live inside it.