When democracy appears as both the condition of politics and the solution to the political condition, neoliberalism can't appear as the violence it is. Yet under communicative capitalism, this is precisely what has occurred. Right and left share the same rhetoric of democracy, a rhetoric merging ethics and economics, discussion and competition so that each is a version of the other. In the absence of distinctions, conviction is indistinguishable from knowledge and certainty triumphs over evidence. (Can we ever really know the truth ? What is verification, anyway?) So preemptive war is fought in the name of spreading democracy even as critics of the same war use the same terms to voice, to imagine, their opposition. The contemporary left is in a position of true victory, of victory in defeat. Our enemy speaks our language. And because our enemy has adopted our language, our ideals, we lack the ability to say what we want. Our present values thus become horrifc realizations of their opposites, entrapping us in psychotic politics.
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INTRODUCTION