{"id":672,"date":"2009-03-03T16:28:06","date_gmt":"2009-03-03T16:28:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/?p=672"},"modified":"2009-03-03T16:32:45","modified_gmt":"2009-03-03T16:32:45","slug":"playing-politics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/2009\/03\/03\/playing-politics\/","title":{"rendered":"“Playing” Politics"},"content":{"rendered":"

Politics is an unusual game. Not unlike the \u201cblame game<\/a>\u201d, it is played by pretending that your opponent is playing it but you\u2019re not. When caught red-handed in an act of mendacity, accuse anyone who has the temerity to call you on it of playing the Blame Game. Similarly, when you have just made a mess of the job to which you were elected, a common response is to accuse critics of \u201cplaying politics\u201d. <\/p>\n

But politics isn\u2019t a game. It is the system whereby we decide how the country is to be governed, and call to account those who govern, or who misgovern. It is, in principle, a noble activity, however ignoble many of its practitioners might be. To denigrate it as a game is a dodge, a way of evading responsibility by people who are only too happy to play the game when they have a chance of winning. <\/p>\n

This is not to say that there aren\u2019t plenty of people in politics who do see it as a game. Fianna F\u00e1il, about to join their third European grouping in ten years, are about power, not ideology. For them, it\u2019s all about winning. So its no wonder they dismiss principled opposition as \u201cplaying politics\u201d \u2013 it has never occurred to them that politics is anything other than playing. <\/p>\n

But you expect that kind of thing from Fianna F\u00e1il. It\u2019s more worrying when you start getting it from high-minded, allegedly non-partisan types, and it makes you wonder if you weren\u2019t a little na\u00efve in taking things like a basic belief in democracy for granted. <\/p>\n

The other day an experienced correspondent of a major national newspaper mused<\/a> that it may be time to abandon the parliamentary system unless the opposition stops opposing. When pressed he suggested there was no other option: \u201cWhat\u2019s your solution?\u201d (My solution, for the record, is incomplete, but it would involve not dismantling the institutions of the Republic)<\/p>\n

The assumption here is that everyone knows what must be done, but won\u2019t agree. All that stuff they talk about in the Dail, or even those arguments you yourself have in the pub. It\u2019s all nonsense. You might think yourself sincere, but you don\u2019t mean any of it. You just want to win the argument, not do what\u2019s best for the country. Like Bill Hick’s Marketing Men applauding <\/a>him for going after “that anti-marketing market”, this view sees all principles as equally phony but useful cards to be played in the game. Oh, pretending to have a concern for the underpriveliged, right, that’s the populist tactic, that’s a great card to play…<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s fine, that\u2019s well and good, when things are going well. It gives the papers something to write about and adds to the gaiety of the nation. But now that things are serious we should abandon the charade of pretending to disagree on matters of principle. These days, politics is just petty squabbling while the country goes to rack and ruin. If only they, the politicians, would set aside politics and get to work doing what\u2019s best for the country.<\/p>\n

What we need is a new party. One that will put aside the old arguments. It will be quite simple. Decent people will come together and form a party whose policies will be neither left nor right, but simply correct. The government, and opposition, will exclaim \u201cWhy, I\u2019d never thought of it that way before\u201d and will all join this new party and we will be forever relieved of having to think about politics because it will have been abandoned in favour of simply doing the right thing. There will be no arguments, because everyone will agree on what the right thing is.<\/p>\n

It is worth noting that we heard much of the same from the US in the aftermath to September 11th. This, the logic went, is an existential threat. What good will due process and democratic institutions be to us, it was asked, when we have ceased to exist? Maybe, high-minded and mature people suggested, it\u2019s best to just assume that the president knows what\u2019s best, to put aside the bickering and get out of the Decider\u2019s way. We saw how well that went for them, how men like Sen. Joe Lieberman who posed as bipartisan patriots, putting the country first, soon were exposed as spineless pushovers who lost their heads and abandoned their principles.<\/p>\n

This crisis is our 9\/11 \u2013 not in the intensity of its tragedy, but in it\u2019s forcing of a reckoning. It is worthwhile to pay attention to people\u2019s reactions to it. These are testing times. Some are passing the tests and some are failing. In years to come it will be useful to remember who kept their cool, and stood by our admittedly flawed institutions, and who lost theirs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Politics is an unusual game. Not unlike the \u201cblame game\u201d, it is played by pretending that your opponent is playing it but you\u2019re not. When caught red-handed in an act of mendacity, accuse anyone who has the temerity to call you on it of playing the Blame Game. Similarly, when you have just made a mess of the job to which you were elected, a common response is to accuse critics of \u201cplaying politics\u201d. But politics isn\u2019t a game. It is the system whereby we decide how the country is to be governed, and call to account those who govern, or who misgovern. It is, in principle, a noble activity, however ignoble many of its practitioners might be. To denigrate it as a game is a dodge, a way of evading responsibility by people who are only too happy to play the game when they have a chance of winning. This is not to say that there aren\u2019t plenty of people in politics who do see it as a game. Fianna F\u00e1il, about to join their third European grouping in ten years, are about power, not ideology. For them, it\u2019s all about winning. So its no wonder they dismiss principled opposition as \u201cplaying politics\u201d \u2013 it has never occurred to them that politics is anything other than playing. But you expect that kind of thing from Fianna F\u00e1il. It\u2019s more worrying when you start getting it from high-minded, allegedly non-partisan types, and it makes you wonder if you weren\u2019t a little na\u00efve in taking things like a basic belief in democracy for granted. The other day an experienced correspondent of a major national newspaper mused that it may be time to abandon the parliamentary system unless the opposition stops opposing. When pressed he suggested there was no other option: \u201cWhat\u2019s your solution?\u201d (My solution, for the record, is incomplete, but it would involve not dismantling the institutions of the Republic) The assumption here is that everyone knows what must be done, but won\u2019t agree. All that stuff they talk about in the Dail, or even those arguments you yourself have in the pub. It\u2019s all nonsense. You might think yourself sincere, but you don\u2019t mean any of it. You just want to win the argument, not do what\u2019s best for the country. Like Bill Hick’s Marketing Men applauding him for going after “that anti-marketing market”, this view sees all principles […]","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-672","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/672","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=672"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/672\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=672"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=672"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=672"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}