There’s a familiar trope in Hollywood. The weary, world-wise detective who, when confronted with some grotesque new crime, sighs, “I’m too old for this.”

You can hear Morgan Freeman muttering it in Se7en, or Tommy Lee Jones whispering it in No Country for Old Men, staring blankly at a world that’s spun out of moral logic.

Lately, I’ve found myself saying the same thing.

Outside Facebook, I spend time in a few small discussion groups. Inevitably, someone will ask, “So what do you think is going on now?” And like those jaded movie detectives, I too surrender with a sigh: “I’m too old for this.”

Because today’s politics, especially in Bangladesh, feels less like politics and more like a hallucination.

The Awami League and the BNP still play their old game, each a model of the third-world kleptocratic party, extractive and endlessly self-serving. Add India’s imperial ambitions to the mix, and you get the 16-year machinery of autocratic plunder we live under now.

It’s mischief, yes, but at least it’s predictable mischief–there’s a method to it.

But what do you do with the surreal politics of the new era–“Bagchas,” “Boibichha,” “Inkilab Moncho,” “Sovereignty”? They are less parties and more fever dreams.

One day they’re melodramatically screaming, “Stop that man!” and the next they unleash their own proxy groups to chase him down. The old parties, for all their corruption, at least wanted to win elections, even if by rigging.

The new ones don’t even care if their candidates lose; the real game is happening elsewhere, in the shadows.

This kind of politics isn’t just ours. It’s metastasized across the world, a shadowy para-politics that has become part of the neoliberal world order.

In India, it takes the shape of the RSS and Shiv Sena. In Europe, it’s the “Knights Templar” and “Guardians of the West.” In America, it’s QAnon and the cultish believers of the post-truth era.

Of course, states have always had secrets. Their basic machinery–the bureaucracy, the intelligence apparatus, even some parts of the judiciary and the deals and dependencies–are not meant to be visible to the public.

If you stumbled upon a random state document on the street, you’d likely understand nothing. The codes, the language, the invisible exchanges–these are how the system survives.

A necessary complication

That opacity isn’t always sinister. It’s simply how systems function. The columns holding up your building are hidden beneath plaster; the wires, pipes, and conduits that make your life possible are buried in the walls.

But now, those invisible systems seem to have taken on a life of their own, governing us, mocking us, and playing games we can no longer see, let alone understand.

In a normal state, the logic is simple: you work, you earn, and you pay taxes from the value of your labor. In return, the state provides a set of basic, background services that keep society running. That’s the deal.

But imagine living in a country where, to ensure that this background system actually functions, you have to remain in a state of constant vigilance, scrutinizing every move of bureaucrats, learning the cryptic language of ministries, decoding symbols, and following paper trails.

You’d quickly find that your ordinary life collapses under the weight of this anxiety. The private world cannot survive if citizens must monitor the state full-time.

And yet, that’s the paradox. The state must remain partly secret to function. But the more secretive it becomes, the easier it is for those inside to take advantage of the public’s ignorance.

You pay their salaries through taxes and VAT, yet you understand almost nothing about how they spend it. In that gap between secrecy and civic disengagement, irresponsibility takes root, and corruption becomes routine.

Representative democracy was meant to fix this. It was designed as a translation device–a way to bridge the opaque machinery of the state with the interests of the people. Citizens would elect one of their own to enter the inner sanctum of government.

These representatives, answerable to voters at regular intervals, were supposed to serve as our eyes and ears inside the machine. Their own political survival depended on keeping the system aligned with the public good.

Think of it like driving a car. The automotive engineer knows the intricate details of how the engine converts fuel into motion. You, the driver, don’t need to. You just need to know how to steer, accelerate, and brake.

The car’s design gives you intuitive control over a complex mechanism. The levers and gears translate engineering into everyday usability.

That’s what elected representatives were meant to be–the steering wheel of the state. The bureaucrats and secretaries are the engine, humming beneath the hood, unseen.

But the steering, the part that allows citizens to direct the course of power, was supposed to remain visible and responsive.

The problem arises when even that steering stops working—when you press the brake and nothing happens, when you turn the wheel and the car keeps going in the same direction.

Then the system ceases to be a democracy in any meaningful sense. It becomes a runaway machine, driven by those who have sealed themselves inside the engine room.

A new class of operatives under shadows

Since July, Bangladesh has been witnessing the rise of strange new political entities–groups that operate in shadows and move with the secrecy of state intelligence units.

Their presence is as hard to interpret as the nervous glances of a rickshaw-puller whose chain has just slipped off in a dark Mohammadpur alley. You can sense something is about to happen, but you don’t know what–or from which corner the mugger will appear.

The colors, ideologies, slogans, and shifting alliances of these groups have created an atmosphere of deep suspicion, one that corrodes our ability to make sense of events themselves.

It’s not simply that politics has become chaotic; it’s that the chaos has begun to feel deliberate, even staged. I’ve written before that this is not confusion born of incompetence, it’s confusion as strategy.

The very act of trying to decode what’s happening now feels like a trap.

This is tragic, because the purpose of systematic politics was once precisely the opposite: to pull power out of the shadows, to make the secretive legible.

But what we see today is a grotesque inversion. Politics has become a parody of itself–public theater masking private maneuver. Instead of keeping the machinery of the state accountable to the people, it’s legitimizing the clandestine system even further.

Imagine again that metaphorical car of the state. The steering wheel, gears, and pedals–our institutions of representation–were designed to make the engine serve the driver, not the other way around.

But now, those controls seem to move on their own. The car drives itself. The driver–the public–sits frozen, stripped of all agency.

The result is a society sliding into political apathy, where people no longer see politics as a tool of change but as a kind of national farce.

We are living through what might be called, without exaggeration, “the politics to end all politics”--a self-consuming process that turns civic participation into futility.

And this, of course, is where the specter of the Deep State reappears. If, by definition, the state must operate partly in secret, then open politics was supposed to keep that secrecy in check.

But when open politics collapses–when it is replaced by chaos and performative disorder–the only beneficiaries are those who thrive in the dark. The architects of the clandestine state no longer have to hide; the chaos hides them perfectly.

The real question, then, is not whether the mugger will emerge from the alley, it’s whether we’ll start talking about the death of politics itself before he does.

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Mikail Hossain is a writer and analyst