The meaning of politics
Competing perceptions
Are politicians really just blood-sucking parasites?
Arguments could be made that they are, but we could also see them as:
The representatives of our collective will
Noble champions of justice and fairness
Ideology driven warriors fighting for their vision of a good society in a better world
Corruptible opportunists
Dedicated servants of evil masterminds working on our collective enslavement
Maybe all of the above. Let’s explore the questions.
As I was sitting at my son’s wedding reception not too long ago, talking to their friends, someone asked me what I do.
I said I write. I’m retired and I write.
Write about what? - Mostly politics, I said.
At that point, a guy sitting behind me at the next table swung around to confront me with the question:
“So, what do you think of Trump?”
Now, imagine yourself losing your balance next to a patch of mud or freshly poured concrete, realizing that you cannot avoid stepping into it. That’s how I felt.
How can I explain in one minute that this is not what politics is to me? In the situation, under the circumstances that one minute is the time you have to make a point………… if you can.
I hope I will have a little more latitude here and offer a longer answer.
Because the question is, actually, quite important.
What do I think of Trump?
I could say “42”, or be a little more polite and ask: “what do you mean exactly?”
What is Trump? A person with a myriad attributes, a person with a history, failures and accomplishments; a person with a bad attitude and bad hair (debatably) .
He is also a face of a movement he created or was created by – meaning the populism of the MAGA phenomenon. He is the face of populism in America.
He is a boaster and a narcissist who talks too much, but have an incredible ability to handle crowds and ordinary people. (Just read Win Biggly)
He is a fundamentally decent person acting without ulterior motives and has a better than average level of integrity. I have seen no evidence, that he is corrupt, which would be the norm in American politics.
He is a person in the storm of a radically changing reality; he is the fulcrum of the destruction of American democracy. His detractors, in the process of trying to destroy him, are destroying American democracy itself.
I could continue, but at some point, I would have to ask: what does it matter? What difference does it make? (I’m channeling Hilary here)
Is what I think of Trump is what politics is? Is politics a popularity contest? A competition?
If yes, then a competition of what? I understand the ‘for’, the prize, which is (political office, prestige, power, status, influence, etc.), but that is not the question.
I don’t know what the person asking the question expected, but there was a bit of a provocation in the question. To find out whether I am friend or foe. The question was clearly asking me to take a side, to express my position for or against on this most superficial level.
I could ask again: is THAT politics? Taking sides to define ourselves by?
Is politics a spectator sport? Trump or Biden, the Yankees or the Metz?
Once you take your side, to what extent does it define you?
In its idealized form, politics is the expression of our collective will. The problem with that is the assumption that there is such a thing, that there are things that we can all agree on. I explained elsewhere why this is such a silly idea.
The compromise we all make is delegated decision making, a.k.a. democracy, representing several delusions.
It assumes that our delegates will represent our interest as opposed to somebody else’s,
It assumes that they can, and the system in which they operate (bureaucracies, agencies, etc.) will allow it.
It assumes that our representatives will be making well informed decisions and not just lazy, expedient, party aligned or corrupted ones.
In most electoral systems, representatives are expected to vote along party lines, regardless of the will of their constituents or their own conscience.
I compared politics to spectator sports, but I could just as easily compare them to performance art.
Think of Parliamentary or House speeches, question periods in the Canadian and British parliaments, House and Senate hearings, media interviews and appearances. All of it is self promotion, nothing more.
Even at their best, when they provide a forum to actual experts, the function of those testimonies is not to inform or – God forbid – to change minds, but to profess, illustrate and support the preexisting divide between the parties. I don’t think they ever changed a single parliamentary vote. It’s a circus.
What happens in the British style question periods is just mud-slinging. The Prime Minister and the official opposition are just hurling smart-ass-ish insults and accusation at each other disguised as questions that are NEVER answered. It’s about scoring points while virtue-signaling to their political base. It is indistinguishable from spectator-sport tribalism.
Would you call these politics? None of them accomplishes anything and cannot influence our lives in any way. It is entertainment. A spectator sport. Meaningless gossip fodder.
A few days ago, I got an email with an attachment, a pamphlet from the Canadian Taxpayers Federation:
Pigs_at_the_Trough-2024.pdf (taxpayer.com)
Americans can have a lot more thorough version from Arianna Huffington:
Pigs at the Trough: How Corporate Greed and Political Corruption Are Undermining America
With this second book, we are getting a little warmer, a little closer to what politics is; in this case the distortion of the political decision-making process through corruption.
The Canadian version is just a list of incidents of lavish spending of tax dollars by politicians on themselves. Whipping up emotions over petty corruption without addressing the root causes.
This is not politics.
Neither is the endless fascination with the sexual proclivities, personal scandals, missteps, lies and overall hypocrisy of politicians.
Politicians have been made a part of the celebrity culture and the mass media misdirection industry. The job of that industry is to keep our attention away from anything that really matters in politics.
Electoral politics
Looking at the recent elections in France and England is a good illustration of electoral politics, which is all about power. With this, we are a step closer to actual politics. Both of these elections represented machinations of the system to protect the status quo. These two videos explain how:
In Britain, Reform UK, the new party of Nigel Farage, came in third with the number of popular votes and seventh in the seats it got. With 4,117,221 votes (14.3% of the total) the party got the same number of seats as the Democratic Unionist Party got with 172,058 votes (0.6% of the total).
Quite remarkable, if you think about it. (data from this page)
In France, National Rally was the clear winner of the first round, but ended up with only 142 seats for 37.4% of the votes, while the winner (NFP) got 177 seats for only 26.8% of the votes.
All of it was maneuvering. Mortal enemies teaming up to beat their common enemy. The damage they cause (dysfunctional government) matters less to them than the temporary victory.
What these two elections demonstrated is the power of the political establishment to protect itself from the actual will of the electorate through the manipulation of the outcomes. For political parties, the goal of politics is gaining and holding onto power. That is to focus of electoral and party politics. It has little to do with the will of the electorate.
Electoral politics is like the competing groups of mean girls in High School. Shifting alliances, back-stabbing, betrayal, cheating and maneuvering to gain prominence.
We may already call this politics, but it is still not something that I would pay too much attention to.
It’s politicking. But we are getting closer.
What animates the political parties, are ideologies.
A shared world view, a shared understanding of reality, a shared vision of our possible future and a loosely defined shared plan to get there. A party platform is tactical ideology. Who we are and what to do.
Most voters align themselves with parties based on their professed ideology and desert them when they feel that their faith and trust have been betrayed.
The exception here may be Canada where a large segment of the voters decided that the hair on Trudeau’s head was more indicative of his abilities than the vacuum in it.
Ideology IS already politics and we should pay far more attention to it.
The problems I described above, are crowding out the important subjects and questions.
We also need to understand that the subjects I discussed so far represent only a small fraction of the political decisions affecting our lives.
Most political decisions are made by unelected bureaucracies, supra-national organizations and clandestine, nefarious actors corrupting the system.
You and I are not writing laws, but neither do our elected representatives. Neither we nor them have much say in what’s getting into them. They are all written by ‘experts’ serving the interest of the people paying them. Not yours, not mine. When it comes to voting on it, the vote is enforced by the Party Whip almost all the time.
Those laws are interpreted and enforced by vast bureaucracies whose only interest is to stay in business in perpetuity.
There are 23 lobbyists for every single representative in Washington.
There are rogue government agencies regularly breaking the laws (NSA, CIA, FBI, FDA, etc.)
This last subject deserves a post (if not a book) on its own and I will return to it.
Nefarious actors are trying to take control of our world. Penetrating governments (Schwab), buying District Attorneys and ‘grassroot’ organizations of violent thugs (Soros); media outlets (Bezos and Soros) farmland and drug companies (Gates); housing (Blackrock).
We are signatories to a number of international organizations and treaties that we had no saying in joining. We are part of climate agreements, pandemic treaties, NATO, the IMF and the World Bank and God only knows what else. If Switzerland declares war on Latvia, we would be obliged to run to the latter’s rescue.
With that long introduction telling you what politics is NOT, I can finally tell you:
What politics means to me
Just about everything other than the circus I described above.
Anything that is touched by power around me is politics.
My life controlled by the decisions of others.
Politics is delegated or usurped decision making
that is affecting us in our personal lives.
Politics is also a competition of conflicting interests and of ideologies
The essence of libertarianism (the minarchist version) is the limiting of government power to a limited set of rules defined by negative laws. They are summed up nicely in Matt Kibbe’s book:
Don't Hurt People and Don't Take Their Stuff: A Libertarian Manifesto
Note the negatives in the two examples. Positive laws that prescribe the things I have to do or the condition I have to meet before I am allowed to do certain things is the realm of politics.
Please note, that this is NOT a libertarian manifesto, just the enumeration of the things that are affecting my life and are NOT fully under my control. Decisions and rules made by others that I have to accept and abide by.
Not being under my control means that they may result in higher costs, limited options, violation of my person or my moral principles. Just listing them is a gargantuan task. (Meaning yes, this is the short version.)
My person
Bodily autonomy
My health is not entirely under my control. Cannot even get a blood test in a laboratory without the permission of a licenced and credentialed professional. There is a serious shortage of doctors in Canada, which (their numbers) is entirely under political control.
Health-care in Canada, where I live, is 100% under the control of the government. In the rest of the Western world it is 80-90%. Access to health care is vastly better in the so-called third world than in Canada.
The food I can buy and consume is subject to thousands of regulations, labeling and other requirements. Consuming raw milk is a revolutionary act in North America.
What kind of drugs I can buy and consume is strictly regulated by government agencies and controlled by the pharmaceutical industry. I may be compelled to take some drugs while forbidden to take others. Big Pharma is trying to take control even of dietary supplements.
My mind and the freedom of speech and thought
We are drowning in post-modernist relativism, Marxist and globalist totalitarian propaganda.
DEI, ESG, woke language requirements, extremely aggressive demands for more speech and thought control.The politicization of science is destroying its credibility and corrupting the results of research. Very few branches of science can escape it. Those that cannot be politicized, are destroyed by the enforced incompetence of DEI requirements.
Censorship has been normalized to such extent, that arguing for it is treated as a legitimate position.
Education
The US is 18th, Canada is 8th in the OECD PISA ranking. Not exactly a leading position.
Public education is run by ideology driven radicals and in turn controlled by politically motivated labour unions.Higher education is even more politicized, churning out woke radicals in ever increasing numbers.
My money
The whole Western world runs on fiat money.
The whole Western world is in an unsustainable debt bubble.
The liberal welfare state is a giant Ponzi scheme bound to collapse.
The only way out of it is either sovereign default or inflation.
Law and order
Laws are not enforced. Instead of locking up criminals, we are locking up citizens who protest the lawlessness.
People may get away with murder, but can be locked up for mean tweets or whatever-phobic social media posts.
Governments, politicians and agencies break their own laws with impunity.
Illegal immigration is treated as a matter of course.
My property
My property isn’t really mine.
In Toronto, the yearly property tax is 0.5-2.5% of the property’s value.Myriad forms of regulations are restricting the use of my property.
Our business
Our businesses are overregulated.
Various licences and compliance costs are raising the price of their products until they cannot compete with cheaper imports.
The economy
Governments meddling with the economy is not a help but a hindrance, usually making whatever they are trying to fix even worse.
Foreign affairs and geopolitics
Our tax dollars are paying for the slaughter of people around the world. Ukraine and Israel are just the presently running examples.
The Western world is about to collapse and our leaders do not seem to be bothered about it.
A new multi-polar world is emerging and none of the Western leaders have a clue on how to handle it.
That is politics
Tell me how to deal with our ACTUAL problems, many of which I didn’t even manage to mention.
Just don’t ask me what I think about Trump or the latest burp of Justin Trudeau.
That is circus, not politics.
As I am finishing this post, I realized that the joke at the start is no joke.
Politicians, ideologues and their controllers are indeed sucking the lifeblood out of our economies, societies and even our civilization.
Damn them all!
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Zork, how could you forget the pithiest description of them all?!? “Politics is show business for ugly people”.