MINOT — Every day every American engages in politics.
From the grandees in Washington, D.C., with the mobs of lobbyists and bureaucrats and news media professionals who surround them, to the local Facebook gadflies griefing the school superintendent over their decision to call a snow day (or not call one, as the case may be), politics is everywhere.
We often talk about politics as if they were some optional thing in American society. “I don’t want to get political,” you might hear a person say. But politics infuses our lives. We live in a democracy (and yes, you pedantic cranks, our republic falls under that definitional umbrella), and that means we can’t avoid politics, whether they be landmark matters of national import or a statewide debate over whether school lunches
ought to be paid through user fees or legislative appropriations.
Political debates are central to my life, which is to be expected given how I earn my keep, but they’re central to yours as well. We are all governed, and the manner in which we are governed, from the type of government we have to what policies that government implements, is decided by politics.
Why am I doing this Captain Obvious routine? Because the holiday season makes me reflective, and I’ve been thinking, as I observe and chronicle these turbulent times, about what the point of all this is. My objective is not to subject you to 500 words or so of lapalissade, but to ask you to ask yourselves why it is we all do politics?
“So we don’t kill each other,” is my answer. The goal of politics is to organize our society in such a way that the public is free to live and pursue prosperity and happiness under a regime of laws that generally (if imperfectly) reflect the will of the people and not whichever despot has the most guns.
It really is that simple, and yet it’s something we have to be reminded of, because today, millions of Americans seem to be operating under the delusion that politics is about performatively trouncing the opposition. The politicians are hiring professionals to advise them on memes. Vast swaths of the media, from local columnists to cable news stars to podcasters and TikTok influencers, make a living goading certain constituencies for the titillation of others.
This isn’t done to us; it’s done for us. The politicians and the pundits and the influencers are doing this because it works. We gobble it up. With our clicks, make it profitable; with our attention, we allow it to decide elections.
It’s fashionable to call these times we’re living in “divided” — I’ve used that term as much as anyone — yet we’ve always been divided. How could a pluralistic society like ours not have faults that run along lines like race, religion and culture? If we say that this political era is divisive, it suggests that our goal ought to be to unite, and while that’s a nice thought, it also suggests that we are capable of forgetting our differences.
I don’t think that we are. In fact, much of what’s gone wrong in American society are our attempts to impose unity on one another.
That’s bad politics. Good politics is finding a way to live with what divides us.
Something worth keeping in mind as a new election year begins soon.
