"The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected." - C K Chesterton
at the risk of entering in a forum I rarely go, let me lightly dip my toes into this. I found this quote amusing.
can there be a more moderate approach to politics?
does everything have to be entirely polarizing?
do parties really agree more than they disagree?
why can't we all just get along?
what is your ideal approach to politics?
I had an nearly unitelligible conversation with a friend yesterday to this end - unitelligible because of my lacking, not his - though I use that word more for dramatic effect.
But it got me thinking.
do you?
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4 comments:
-yes
-no, but that's what wins
-no, but they certainly agree more than they admit
-because our system is all about winning and getting along doesn't get votes
Ideal approach? That's a great question. Unfortunately all political systems have at their center people running them so they are doomed to be inadequate in my opinion. I think our system in Canada actually does pretty good considering its massive limitations.
What prompted this thinking in your life?
firstly - hi friend. it's been far too long
secondly - thanks for reading and commenting. it is an honour to have you here.
thirdly - don't tell anyone this, but I think about politics most every day - but usually I play the ignorant pastor card.
Blah whats the point. Ya lets all base our ideologies on a human created system and then pick our "teams" based on what we're afraid of.
Then lets fragment each side of the political spectrum with a bunch of parties and most often men with interest groups pulling their decisions left to right to upside down.
Then lets apoint leaders (most often men) to these parties that we deify and turn on within minutes when they fail to be the gods we've asked them to be.
But why not be even more counter productive and create fear tactics between each party saying one leader isn't Canadian enough or another leader wants to make Canadians pay for health care and in the end screw over all of Canada.
Politics is stupid.
Hi Tyson, too long indeed. I love that you think about politics so much, we need more people to engage in this in our generation. That sounds cheesy but it's true, our generation is so disengaged that we're not making the difference we could be making.
As for Ryan, I get the cynism, I've been there and go there often still but in reality I don't think you're taking the right approach here. It's easy to criticize, trust me I do it all the time, but it's much harder to find solutions and that's what we should be doing.
Your first comment about men and interest groups has some truth to it, but not much. We actually have a lot of women in high political positions in Canada and special interest groups hold far less influence in Canada due to their inability to make donations to parties. They have to send spokesepeople and actually try and convince politicians with reason. Honestly most of the politicians I've met really are trying to do what's best for the country and make the most logical decision, it just doesn't seem that way because the media shows us 10 second sound bites of the worst moments of the week.
Deification of leaders, fair comment in the US, I don't think we do this in Canada though, if anything we refuse to even respect our leaders in Canada in my opinion.
Fear tactics abound, you're right about that. I hate it too but unfortunately it's what works and what wins and our system is based on winning. People say negative politics makes them mad but it works, it always works. Having said that, that stuff is about winning elections and getting in power, once in power there is actually a lot of work done that the media never reports on. Committees that meet for hours, meetings and debates... my point is, the negative ads and campaign stuff is just window dressing and it's only there because Canadians respond to it. The parties are desperate to define themselves in a way that makes you vote for them, and define their opposition in a way that makes you hate them, the whole point is to get power, not for power's sake, but in order to make Canada better.
At the end of the day Canada works pretty well. We have a ton of freedom, we have health care that works well for the most part, we have high quality of life, we have social system that gives money to the needy and taxes the rich... people have this ultra negative view of politics here but that's mostly because the negative side is all we're shown by our terrible main stream media.
Ok, I could go on forever so I'll stop now.
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