I find it hard to imagine that you are right when you imply that politics hasn’t got anything to do with policy. ”...has anything at all to do...”
To take a recent US example, pulling out of Afghanistan. No matter how much we focus on the Meta level politics, (eg. “Trump started it but Biden finished it, so who gets the blame?”, “Will it embolden the US’s enemies my creating an image of weakness?”) it is still clear that an actual physical thing really happened, and that it would not have happened had the political landscape looked different in some key ways.
Here in the UK we left the European Union. That was discussed and voted on primarily through the lens of political issues (Typical conversation starters might have been: “will it help Boris unseat Cameron so he can launch his own leadership bid?”, “are we the kind of country that is welcoming to foreigners?”, “But surely we identify collectively much more on the level of a nation state than some kind of united states of Europe?”). But it happened, we have legally left. And the practicalities are slowly fitting into place.
Politics is not the same as policy, there are steps in between. But the suggestion that they have literally zero causal connection seems to be an obvious nonsense. I think this illusion possibly forms when the actual policy never touches you. The median voter is not a migrant, so migration policy feels fictional, only read about. The median voter is not a soldier (or a foreigner), so foreign wars also feel abstract. Most people have not been accused of a crime, so criminal policy again follows the pattern. Same with so many other things. When the COVID lockdown kicked in and for the first time in my life I actually felt a policy change “hit me” it was a bit of a shock. So, in typical times, it feels like politics doesn’t effect policy—because almost all policy is targeted at a minority that probably doesn’t include you.
I find it hard to imagine that you are right when you imply that politics hasn’t got anything to do with policy. ”...has anything at all to do...”
To take a recent US example, pulling out of Afghanistan. No matter how much we focus on the Meta level politics, (eg. “Trump started it but Biden finished it, so who gets the blame?”, “Will it embolden the US’s enemies my creating an image of weakness?”) it is still clear that an actual physical thing really happened, and that it would not have happened had the political landscape looked different in some key ways.
Here in the UK we left the European Union. That was discussed and voted on primarily through the lens of political issues (Typical conversation starters might have been: “will it help Boris unseat Cameron so he can launch his own leadership bid?”, “are we the kind of country that is welcoming to foreigners?”, “But surely we identify collectively much more on the level of a nation state than some kind of united states of Europe?”). But it happened, we have legally left. And the practicalities are slowly fitting into place.
Politics is not the same as policy, there are steps in between. But the suggestion that they have literally zero causal connection seems to be an obvious nonsense. I think this illusion possibly forms when the actual policy never touches you. The median voter is not a migrant, so migration policy feels fictional, only read about. The median voter is not a soldier (or a foreigner), so foreign wars also feel abstract. Most people have not been accused of a crime, so criminal policy again follows the pattern. Same with so many other things. When the COVID lockdown kicked in and for the first time in my life I actually felt a policy change “hit me” it was a bit of a shock. So, in typical times, it feels like politics doesn’t effect policy—because almost all policy is targeted at a minority that probably doesn’t include you.