Bourgeois politics uses progressive-conservative coding instead of truth to give political direction

Evidence

It is symptomatic of the conditions in very complex power and societal orderings that fully developed bourgeois society does not use a media hierarchy to give political direction (i.e. it does not legitimize politics by reference to truth), but that it has formed for this purpose a new sort of political code with a high affinity to opportunism, namely the dichotomy between progressive and conservative. This binary paradigm fulfils the strict prerequisites for a code in the sense outlined above61 – it can be suitably used to attach its opposite to any particular political theme. In so far as it becomes a matter of politics, anything in existence can become a topic propounded from progressive, reformist points of view, and vice versa, any proposal for change can be countered by questioning the reasons for it and by arguing for what already exists. The code does not contain within itself anything to obstruct either change or preservation. It is formal, and for precisely that reason can be used both universally and in ways quite specific to certain subject-matter. The (binary) code effects a patently forced doubling of political reality; it is part and parcel of the structure of political subject-matter; it has become a condition under which topics become politicized. If any topic emerges, progressive and conservative forces also emerge, no matter how they proceed to arm themselves ideologically from history’s catalogue of slogans. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 694

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the political code as the progressive-conservative binary that functions formally like any media code.
• XREF: Connects to Giddens’s expert systems and Ishiguro’s Stevens: political coding as a faceless institutional structure the individual defers to. — connects to: Bourgeois ethics inherits Enlightenment’s truth-postulate as the demand to be oneself.; Bourgeois tolerance functions as a mask preserving the status quo — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 342