Posts Tagged ‘political culture’

“Suprematism”

October 3, 2026

Ricardo F. Morin

January 31, 2026

Oakland Park, Fl.

Suprematism functions as the universal grammar of repressive justification.  
Suprematism is less a doctrine than a habit of explanation:  the manner in which domination comes to sound necessary, privilege comes to appear orderly, and exclusion comes to be described as preservation.  Its forms vary—race, religion, nation, civilization, party, historical destiny—but its logic remains constant:  some are presumed fit to decide, others to comply.

This habit is not confined to any one society or system.  It appears wherever hierarchy can be narrated as natural or deserved, and wherever authority is spared the burden of explanation.  What distinguishes societies is not their immunity to suprematism, but the degree to which it is restrained.  Progress does not consist in its disappearance, but in limiting the circumstances under which supremacy can excuse itself.

When that restraint weakens, advantage acquires moral cover, grievance hardens into entitlement, and authority reorganizes itself around exception rather than obligation.  Suprematism then ceases to be merely a social tendency and becomes a principle of coherence—one that prepares the ground for repression not by force, but by familiarity.

Suprematism is rarely named at the moment it takes hold.  It enters social life quietly, through habit rather than declaration, and through permission rather than force.  Most people encounter it not as a belief, but as a pattern:  who is trusted without question, whose mistakes are forgiven, whose grievances are taken seriously, and whose presence is treated as a complication.  Long before it becomes political, suprematism arranges everyday expectations.

At its core, suprematism is the assumption that order depends on hierarchy—that some are naturally entitled to decide, while others must adapt.  This assumption has appeared in every form of organized society.  It attaches itself easily to existing distinctions, but does not depend on any of them.  Its content changes.  Its function does not.  Wherever it takes root, it relieves power of the burden of explanation and replaces justification with inheritance.

Historically, efforts to restrain such arrangements have rarely depended upon the actions of those most affected by them alone.  Groups subjected to discrimination often possess the least access to the institutions capable of altering laws, customs, and public attitudes.  As a result, challenges to entrenched hierarchies have frequently depended upon the participation of individuals and institutions situated within the very structures being contested.  The durability of supremacy lies not only in the injuries it imposes, but also in its capacity to limit the means through which those injuries can be redressed.

No society outgrows this impulse.  What matters is whether it is constrained.  Where restraint holds, authority remains conditional, rules survive inconvenience, and grievance does not harden into entitlement.  Where it weakens, dominance reappears under new names, and inequality begins to feel practical rather than dangerous.

Suprematism becomes most persuasive in moments of strain.  Economic uncertainty, cultural change, and political fragmentation make procedural life feel slow and fragile.  In such moments, hierarchy offers clarity.  It promises stability without negotiation and coherence without equality.  What it conceals is the cost of that promise:  the quiet replacement of shared obligation with selective privilege.  These conditions do not create suprematism; they reveal how readily it adapts to the language through which societies interpret threat.

In contemporary American politics, strands of conservatism increasingly function not as custodians of institutional continuity but as vehicles through which suprematist reasoning finds renewed expression.  The language of preservation — tradition, order, cultural defense — often serves to frame hierarchy as necessity rather than preference.  Within segments of the Republican Party, populist rhetoric recasts political disagreement as a struggle between an authentic people and forces portrayed as alien or corrupt.  This framing does not merely mobilize support; it reorganizes legitimacy itself, narrowing the field of acceptable plurality while presenting exclusion as protection.

Historically, populism has not always culminated in authoritarian forms, yet its grammar lends itself to them when grievance becomes the organizing principle of political identity.  Suprematism thrives precisely in such moments, because it does not require explicit doctrine; it operates through the normalization of unequal standing and through narratives that portray dominance as restoration.  What appears as resistance to change thus becomes a mechanism by which hierarchy is reaffirmed under the guise of necessity and allows power to concentrate while it retains the appearance of democratic expression.

Because the premise concerns order rather than identity, it travels easily across contexts.  In one place it is spoken plainly; in another it is implied through custom or history.  Everywhere it functions by the same means:  by presenting inequality as inheritance rather than choice, and by treating dominance as continuity rather than imposition.  Its strength lies not in what it claims, but in how little it needs to explain.

What has been accepted socially soon reorganizes authority.  Once unequal power is experienced as stabilizing, its concentration no longer appears alarming.  Decisions migrate upward with little resistance, justified less by argument than by temperament, experience, or presumed fitness.  Exception enters quietly, not as a rupture but as an adjustment, a temporary deviation said to protect what remains intact.  Law continues to exist, but its role shifts.  It no longer governs in advance.  It follows explaining afterward what authority has already decided.

When this reorganization occurs, authority begins to act directly rather than procedurally.  Executive power is justified as the fulfillment of popular expectation and treated as license to bypass legislative and judicial mediation.  Enforcement expands inward, organized around targets rather than warrants, and selection shifts from proven violation to presumed risk.  At the same time, electoral administration is recast as a security problem, with authority drawn upward from the states on the claim that existing safeguards cannot be trusted.  In both cases, an asserted threat is used to replace prior limits with command, to concentrate power, and to present the change as necessity rather than choice.

As this pattern settles, restraint becomes uneven.  Rules remain visible, but their force depends increasingly on who invokes them and against whom.  Obligation is emphasized downward, while discretion accumulates upward.  What was once justified as exception begins to feel ordinary, even prudent.  The expectation that authority must submit itself to procedure weakens, replaced by a belief that outcomes matter more than the means by which they are reached.  Constitutional life does not disappear; it thins.  It survives as language and form, while its discipline is quietly set aside.

Suprematism does not announce itself as cruelty or ambition.  It presents itself as common sense.  It appears whenever power no longer feels obliged to explain itself, and whenever inequality is treated as a condition of order rather than a failure of it.  Societies do not collapse because they lack ideals, but because they grow accustomed to exemption.  When supremacy is permitted to justify itself—by history, identity, urgency, or fear—law becomes selective, authority becomes personal, and procedure becomes a formality observed only when convenient.  The disorder that follows is not chaos, but a disciplined imbalance in which restraint is asked of some and entitlement is granted to others.  This is how constitutional life ends:  not in rupture, but in acceptance.

“Weightless Thoughts”

August 5, 2026

Ricardo Morín
Weightless Thoughts
Acuarela y lápiz sobre papel
14 x 20 pulgadas
2005

Ricardo F Morín, Dec. 18, 2025, Oakland Park, Fl

I

Intellectual life does not require freedom in the civic sense to persist. It requires space, continuity, and reward. Where these are provided—through markets, institutions, or private channels—thought can circulate even when public agency is constrained. What disappears under such conditions is not intelligence, nor curiosity, nor sophistication, but friction. Ideas move freely because they are not asked to carry consequence.

In these environments, thinking becomes agile rather than anchored. It adapts to incentives, learns the contours of what is permitted, and develops fluency without exposure. The absence of civic agency does not silence inquiry; it changes its weight. Thought no longer presses against shared conditions. It hovers above them, unburdened by the obligation to answer for its effects.

This is not an impoverishment of intellect but a reorientation of it. Intellectual life becomes efficient, mobile, and polished—capable of range without depth of risk. It survives precisely because it is not required to intervene.

II

When civic participation is limited, exchange does not cease; it becomes transactional by default. Speech, labor, expertise, and culture continue to circulate, but always under terms that prioritize continuity over exposure. The public sphere narrows, yet private exchange expands. What cannot be contested collectively is negotiated individually.

Under these conditions, intellectual production aligns with systems that reward stability. Analysis sharpens, but it avoids points of rupture. Critique refines itself into commentary. Complexity is welcomed so long as it does not demand revision of the structures that sustain it. The result is not conformity, but containment.

This containment does not require repression. It relies instead on predictability. When the limits of action are known, thought learns where it can move without consequence. Over time, this learning becomes instinctive. The question ceases to be what is true, and becomes what is viable. Thought remains active, but its horizon contracts around what can circulate without resistance.

III

What emerges from this arrangement is not cynicism, but distance. Relations take on the character of exchange rather than exposure. Engagement is shaped less by shared risk than by mutual advantage. The language of values remains intact, but it floats free of obligation. Conviction becomes performative rather than binding.

In such a climate, depth appears excessive. Urgency feels misplaced. Appeals that depend on shared responsibility lose traction, not because they are rejected, but because they exceed the available structure. What cannot be absorbed by the system is not debated; it is bypassed.

This is the condition that gives the essay its name. Thought becomes weightless—not because it lacks intelligence, but because it is no longer tethered to civic consequence. It travels far, connects widely, and impresses easily. What it does not do is settle. And what it does not settle into cannot generate accountability, only circulation.


“The Constitution Within”

August 10, 2025

*

Ricardo Morin
The Constitution Within
GCI
2025

*

Politics (from the Greek politikós, “of, by, or relating to citizens”) is the practice and theory of influencing people at the civic or individual level.

*

By Ricardo Morin

August 10, 2025.

~

From their earliest formulations, constitutional frameworks have been more than foundational legal agreements; they have stood as declarations of political philosophy, and defined how power should be organized, how it should be restrained, and to whom it must be answerable. Contemporary governance, to a large extent, continues those experiments, shaped over centuries of trial and adaptation. Yet these forms can endure in appearance while being emptied of substance. In more than a few States today, constitutions proclaim liberty while they narrow its scope, define rights in ways that exclude, and preserve the interests of a governing elite. Partisanship exploits the perceived limitations and vulnerabilities of others as grounds for exclusion; self-righteousness becomes a tool for domination, silences opposition, and suppresses dissent. The worth of a constitutional framework, therefore, is measured not only by its letter but by the ethical integrity of those who sustain it. Without ethics, politics loses its meaning; without civic virtue, the law ceases to serve peace and becomes an instrument of dominion.

The separation of powers, vigorously defended by Montesquieu, rests on the conviction that liberty survives when power is compelled to check power. This principle is distorted when institutions are subordinated to partisan or personal interests. In recent years, several States have formally preserved an independent judiciary while, in practice, subjected it to appointment processes controlled by the Executive or the ruling party. Such hollowing-out is not merely a technical failure; it reflects a political culture in which ambition, fear, or indifference among citizens permits the disfigurement of the very mechanisms designed to protect them. It also reveals how institutional strength and civic responsibility are bound together in ways that cannot be separated.

Historical constitutions continue to shape how political communities imagine authority. They bequeath principles that, at their best, offer adaptable frameworks for meeting new challenges without renouncing their essential core: that the legitimacy of a Government rests not on the strength of its rulers but on the solidity of the structures that limit them.

Yet these structures endure only when citizens reject duplicity and sectarianism. Divisions of ideology must not harden into exclusive loyalty to one’s own group at the expense of a shared civic framework. They endure only when citizens resist the idolatry of power, because authority loses its legitimacy once it is treated as sacred or unquestionable. And they endure only when citizens repudiate the cult of personality, in which a leader is raised above criticism through image-making, propaganda, and personal loyalty.

The durability of constitutional order, then, does not lie solely in written texts or institutional arrangements. It rests equally on the civic ethic of those who inhabit them. When ambition, fear, or indifference allow citizens to tolerate duplicity or surrender to sectarian loyalty, the limits on power become fragile. Conversely, when vigilance and responsibility prevail, constitutions retain their strength as both shield and compass—guarding against arbitrary rule while orienting political life toward justice and restraint.

True reform is not solely institutional but also internal: a revolution in the individual and collective sphere, in which each person accepts the responsibility to act with integrity, openness, and commitment to the common good, in harmony with oneself and with others. Only through the alignment of institutional structures with civic responsibility can any Constitution preserve its meaning and endure as a safeguard against arbitrary power.

*


Annotated Bibliography

~

  • Ginsburg, Tom, and Aziz Z. Huq.; How to Save a Constitutional Democracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. (Ginsburg and Aziz examine the legal and institutional pathways through which democracies weaken, from court-packing to the erosion of independent oversight. They draw on comparative examples from the United States, Hungary, and elsewhere to show how constitutional mechanisms can be used to consolidate power while preserving a façade of legality.)
  • Landau, David: “Abusive Constitutionalism.” UC Davis Law Review 47 (1), 2013: 189–260. (Landau develops the concept of “abusive constitutionalism” to describe how incumbents exploit constitutional change to entrench their rule. Uses Latin American and other global cases to illustrate how amendments and reinterpretations weaken checks and balances, alter electoral systems, and undermine judicial independence.)
  • Levitsky, Steven, and Way, Lucan A.: Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. (Levitsky and Way analyze regimes that preserve the formal institutions of democracy but manipulate them to ensure ruling-party dominance. They introduce the concept of “competitive authoritarianism” as a framework for understanding how constitutional norms are hollowed out while democratic forms are maintained.)
  • Levitsky, Steven, and Ziblatt, Daniel: How Democracies Die. New York: Crown, 2018. (Levitsky and Ziblatt argue that modern democracies often decline through the gradual decline of norms rather than coups. The book shows how leaders exploit constitutional ambiguities, stack courts, and weaponize law to suppress opposition, eroding both civic trust and institutional integrity.)

~