One of the most striking phenomena of the present is the cluelessness about itself, as the period with simultaneously the most sophisticated networks of information and communication. Only the most assumptive would simply say that this is simply because of a lack of ability to parse this information, or because of an underdeveloped sense of this world, as any period in history before also had complexities in every day life beyond comprehension, and still developed various ideas of its own conception, whereas today, there is a big emptyness at the core of our political thinking. I don't think this is a coincidence, and actually believe that the openness of our political ideas is more important than any cover we could put over it. To put it bluntly: we don't know what's going on, neither individually nor societally, and all great political narratives only cover this confusion, while not at all covering up the pain felt having to go through it.
In this situation, the old notion of political theory does not make sense anymore. This idea was based on a relatively static world; you could understand the world you were in, then situate your abilities to act for various goals, develop moral sensibilities in your daily actions, and then stretch these principles out into political goals; in this way, moral principles as the invective to not harm others become political goals of a society without violence, for example. The problem though is, that unlike the abstract moral principle, they require a specific understanding of what the society is as a whole; and if that picture is missing, we address not the polity, but the void, shouting powerless into it for a better world than we know. In what sort of situation can politics address and structure an object of research that presents itself as empty of structure? Does this not show that with the old idea of rational politics, political theory too and the whole notion of "theory" in the politicized sense is inapplicable to our world?
I believe, that in contrast to this, political theory is actually a necessity, but in a different sense, namely as a theory that can create an idea, not necessarily of all society, but of this void that is the audience of political action; and I believe that the structure of it as a void we, like politicians, are talking into, is not something we can simply ciritcize as a lack of education about society, but a quality of this society that we need to understand through this appearance as a void or as an absence of society.
We must ask ourselves very bluntly: what do we actually understand under the notion of the political? It is not as simple with that as it might at first appear. Because, if we say it is about political institutions of society, we already presume a notion of the political we yet lack; and if we say it is the structuring of society, or its self-constitution under rules, we fall back to the necessity of having an understanding of this whole society, which we, as I mentioned, lack almost completely. Instead, I think we can describe it as a specific kind of action, which I want to call for lack of a better term the _normative_ action. This action has the general kind: something should be this way; and is the codification of this wish as that what _needs to be_. What are the specific qualities of this action?
First of all, it is not moral or ethical in nature. This is very important to state, as they are often confused, and indeed often connected, causally and epistemically. But they are not the same; no law book is a moral philosophy, maybe only based on one. Polical action fundamentally is simply this act of saying, that some action should happen, and that it should not happen because the other should themselves think they should happen, but because I _think_ they should happen _in a political act_ and that others in general should respect this political act as the expression of a general idea of the good or of society. But the reason, for why the other should accept the act, is really only formal; it is because the other should accept the person that makes the decision (by election or birth or something else), that this position or title of the other in itself justifies the acceptance of the decision; it is therefore a structure of authority. But authority over what? Not simply anything; only over _what most generally should happen_. not the way it is being done. This is because political actions are all speech acts, not practical teaching; they only describe documents, which others should defer to. In other words, if we understand that this deference is structurally mediated by experts in these documents, sitting in bureaucratic hierarchies, than the politcal can be described completely as: the act of writing documents that are binding for a bureaucracy not only, but also to the people who are externally interacting with it, including basically only three actions: laws, judgements and executive decision in foreign policy (diplomatic agreements and military orders).
If we have this very concrete understanding of politics, we first have some idea of what the political is, but we have completly lost the connection of that to any idea of "society". And here we have to really look at the formal quality of law, and at this difference, that in the idea it is written for "the people", but in practice for legal bureaucracies. This difference is so dominating, that is might be the most central aspect of the western democracies since 1789. The people of a country is institutionalized to a subject "the people" that represents it - officially in the parliaments, and inoffecially in the class of lawyers, which de facto represent the people, as non-lawyers hardly ever talk about the details of laws or judgments outside of rare media events (which even then is mostly limited to what professional lawyers already have written as an analysis). And I think that the experience, that politics is so to say speaking into the void, is another description of the collapse of this notion of "the people" - that it becomes ever more obvious, that the subject of politics are the institutions that make the decisions and react to them, not an imagined unity of society in which name they take place.
There is a certain, and very justified sense, in which all such description must be itself a form of protest against it, as long as the idea of democracy is still important to our understanding of ourselves, and what we find acceptable. However, it is important to distinguish that from a kind of enmity against politics, which is also the cause of this situation, or at least not unconnected to it.
What do I mean with that? I certainly don't mean that it's the fault of people who don't see a connection of society, or of those who have great difficutly having political understanding in such a confounding situation. What I do mean, is that the power of lawyers is largely based in the fact that such a thing as a true subject of the population is absent. The question of the possibilty of democracy, in which the conceptual question of what the political is becomes practical, therefore is: Can there be such a thing as an audience of politics? Or does it merely have "users" of its products in legal departments and bureaucratic apparatusses?
Political theory, if it understands its purpose not the analysis of a failed project of democracy, because it failed to serve the people in which's name it was begun, but the creation of a subject in which's name it _could_ begin in the first place, must change its methodology from that of trying to enlighten us about the wrongness of the current order (which is more or less obvious, except to the exceptionally indoctrinated), to that of attempting to show how politics can be possible as something beyong power-grabs. And for this, there are a series of hurdles, which we need to take if such a theory wants to take itself serious at all and not mereley be a porformative act of protest without any historical substance:
a) We need to explain the history that lead to the current catastrophic point, not merely by taking sides - that's the easier, and in a sense wronger option - but by explaining the motives that force people to act not just against their interests, but against their beliefs: Why did European socialists supported first World War 1, and then Lenin, Stalin and Mao? Why did Liberals in America submit to big Corporations, which are the opposite of free markets, and often more oppresive than many governments? Why did politicians who officially call themselves Green, and who sit at the seats of power, where they could take those responsible for the climate crisis to justice, be it by arrests or other measures, not act at all on that and are afraid of their own agency? etc. - These questions aren't merely questions about dead people or other politicians; they are about the substance of ourselves. We have to recognize that these people did and do in fact claim to speak for "the people" in some form or the other, and that every such way of talking is riddled with ideological elements. If we cannot deal with that history, we will likely not fare any better than them. Mere desire to become better is no guarantee for being better, our beliefs will not save us.
b) We need to seriously reflect on political action, and what it actually means to be a political subject. I may enjoy just as anyone else to make light of the predicament of living in a state of lawyers, not of law, but it really is no laughing matter. If we really are at the discretion of the people interpreting the texts that we imgine rule us in their place, than our inability to understand and criticize legal documents is part of that predicament, and my dissatisfaction may contribute to it. "Leaving politics to the politicians" or "the experts" is part of the problem; but merely stating that we dislike it is no solution. We have to think through what our disinterest, or boredom, around policy and law means for our self-objectification under law; after all, how could we be so uninterested in our social fate? But we are, largely. The main goal of political theory here must be to help us separate aspects of it, that are necessary and important, from performative institutions of self-affirmation, which to hold a distance from is honorable. (For example, from understanding law to venerating law, from taking legal language seriously from taking it as scientific or exact etc.) This is mostly a problem of motivation, and thus again, much more difficult than one of the old theoretical questions, that only concerned objective causality, since by causal understanding, those that have resources and interest _should_ be studying it, but, to a large extent, just don't.
c) We need to look at the mechanism of politics, or at what it really only is. I do think that political theory here can learn a lot from the sociology of politics, both the very empirical elements but also very general reflections on the structure of politics as a social system of society interacting with other such systems (bureaucracy, law, economics, military, education etc.), only really in writing documents. I wrote briefly about this at other places, that politics is, in its interaction with the subjective interpretations, a system of necessary betrayel; maybe that takes it a bit too far, but the basic idea is true, I think, that we cannot ever be totally satiesfied with political results, as we never can understand even our own desires completely, let alone someone else's, so we are forced to choose our support (in elections but also in personal support) based on slogans and names more than on substantive understanding. Both of these elements - the purely textual element, and the element of unclarity of the intention of the author in any text, including legal documents - are necessary, but can be remedied; but in order to do that we need to be very conscious of them, and for that we need to be very conscious about the limations of politics as such and of what it can actually do in the world, where it can only hope that something happens, and where it at least could do more, and says it can't more as an ideological front than as an admission of impotence.
These three elements, the limitations of our beliefs, of our motivation and of our power in politics, are amongst the most basic things that, in my opinion, need to be cleared out in order to have any clear understanding of politics, political goals, and therefore, of society at all. Because I think, the old slogan from Nietzsche, is truer of politics than of humanity: that if yet still lacks its goal, does it not lack then too - itself?