The Ominous Politics Without Ideology

 

The Ominous Politics Without Ideology

Notes from the Ground

Dr. Lenin Torres Antonio

Politics is, or should be, the space for the debate of ideas. There is no politics without diversity, without the confrontation of projects, nor without the possibility of contrast. Where ideas disappear, politics also vanishes, even if its forms, its rituals, and its empty language persist.

Although the history of human life—rather than a history of ideas or goodness—has been predominantly a history of wars, violence, and contradictions, we continue to insist, not without self-deception, that the history of humankind is the history of a rational animal which, by virtue of that faculty, occupies the apex of the evolutionary pyramid.

As Hannah Arendt warned, the meaning of politics is freedom; yet such freedom exists only where there is thought, judgment, and debate. A politics without ideology does not liberate: it administers. It does not persuade: it manages. It does not convene citizens: it produces audiences.

Let us imagine a politics emptied of content, where principles and convictions no longer matter, and only strategies for the acquisition and preservation of power remain. A politics reduced to calculation, marketing, and permanent simulation. In this scenario, what Max Weber called ethical responsibility degenerates into blind pragmatism, where any means is justified by its effectiveness. We could well say that the idea of the rational human being has succumbed to narcissistic, violent, and sexual drives, since power is no longer sought merely as access to material goods, but as a source of jouissance that hypnotizes cognitive faculties and subjugates reason itself.

If we extend this logic to human life, the landscape becomes unsettling. An existence without imagination, without introspection, without doubt or guilt, without passion or critical thought, would amount to little more than a form of biological persistence. A body that functions but does not question. A subject that obeys but does not understand. Only in this way can the abysmal inequality between the few who possess everything and the many who survive on the bare minimum of daily life be understood.

The history of humanity has not been the history of triumphant reason, but rather that of violence, contradiction, and domination. Yet even in its darkest episodes, ideas functioned as horizons, as justifications, or as forms of resistance—as fictions capable of producing meaning and certainty. Today we face something different: a politics that no longer needs ideas in order to dominate, a social institution devoid of conceptual frameworks capable of containing the conglomeration of unconscious drives that emerge to dictate what “ought to be.”

In late modernity, as Zygmunt Bauman observed, power has emancipated itself from politics. Politics, stripped of ideology, no longer transforms reality: it administers it. It does not propose futures: it manages fears. It does not build citizenship: it produces conformity. Each day we move closer to a condition in which politics is reduced to a mere genealogy of power.

Ideology has not disappeared; it has become invisible. Slavoj Žižek expressed this bluntly: ideology functions most effectively when we believe it no longer exists. It presents itself as neutrality, as common sense, as simple realism, while canceling any genuine possibility of dissent. The debate of ideas thus becomes a legalistic simulacrum in the service of the dictatorship of majorities, never of consensus, truth, or common sense.

Thus, alternation in power is reduced to a rotation of elites, and politics turns into a technical spectacle in which everything changes so that nothing truly changes. As Herbert Marcuse warned, the result is an individual integrated into the system not by force, but through the progressive reduction of critical thought. Democracy legitimizes the genealogical replacement of power groups; hence even the most abject human being can come to govern.

A politics without ideology is not neutral: it is functional to power. Its apparent pragmatism is a sophisticated form of domination. When we are told that ideas are an obstacle, that criticism divides, or that ideology belongs to the past, what is demanded of us is not political maturity, but docile obedience. Where there are no ideas to dispute, power is exercised without resistance and without justification.

Recovering ideology does not mean returning to closed dogmas, but rather reinstating conflict, thought, and the real possibility of dissent. Thinking thus becomes an uncomfortable, even dangerous, political act, because it interrupts the automatic administration of domination.

A society that renounces thinking about its destiny not only loses its politics: it abdicates its dignity. Only in this way can we understand the state of decay characteristic of late modern or postmodern times, in which a ruffian turned ruler of the world terrorizes his fellow human beings and sweeps away more than two thousand years of civilizational construction.

January 2026.