This was fantastic, thank you. I've struggled to articulate something like your exquisitely rendered argument but sadly produce only a muddled mess. I so appreciate the clarity and rigor reflected in your writing. It is more helpful than you probably know.
The challenge, of course, is bringing this type and level of examination and deliberation into the cultural and political conversation. In our current state everything and everyone seems detached from real meaning. Incoherence, when it is even noticed at all, is ignored or dismissed easily. The very idea of love being a foundational driver and constituent of a polity is probably incomprehensible to a dissociative society.
The chess board line is the one that clicked with me. Reading it from the UK side, the metaphor maps directly onto the two sides of the Commons floor. Government and opposition facing each other across the board. The trouble is that British politics has turned the board into a theatre. Brinksmanship, daily adversarial performance, the architecture treated as something to occupy and perform on rather than something to maintain. Six prime ministers in ten years suggests the players have stopped recognising the board exists at all.
The constitutional inheritance is real but uncodified, scattered across statutes and conventions the executive can stretch faster than anyone can catch up. The materialism diagnosis lands hard from this side of the Atlantic. The polity has been lost in exactly the way you describe, and the absence of a codified text means there is nothing written down that compels anyone to find it again. Without the framework, the door to authoritarian capture stays open by default.
Mike, I'm gonna restack and share this piece far and wide. I lack the ability to express these concepts so clearly but I knew what I'd been feeling for years. I know too many folks who relfexively reject anything to help the common man as "socialism" as though it were nasty.
Reminding them about sewage services, public schools, trains, parks, hospitals, firestations and pointing out these are all examples of the dreaded socialism earns me a blank look or a response that reeks of the attitude "my feelings will outweight your facts every GD time!"
All I can do with that is offer the information and continue on my journey.
Am I right in that this boils down to government being neither pro-business nor anti-business, but creating the environment in which business operates according to the wishes of the citizens (polity)? That sounds right to me.
This was fantastic, thank you. I've struggled to articulate something like your exquisitely rendered argument but sadly produce only a muddled mess. I so appreciate the clarity and rigor reflected in your writing. It is more helpful than you probably know.
The challenge, of course, is bringing this type and level of examination and deliberation into the cultural and political conversation. In our current state everything and everyone seems detached from real meaning. Incoherence, when it is even noticed at all, is ignored or dismissed easily. The very idea of love being a foundational driver and constituent of a polity is probably incomprehensible to a dissociative society.
The chess board line is the one that clicked with me. Reading it from the UK side, the metaphor maps directly onto the two sides of the Commons floor. Government and opposition facing each other across the board. The trouble is that British politics has turned the board into a theatre. Brinksmanship, daily adversarial performance, the architecture treated as something to occupy and perform on rather than something to maintain. Six prime ministers in ten years suggests the players have stopped recognising the board exists at all.
The constitutional inheritance is real but uncodified, scattered across statutes and conventions the executive can stretch faster than anyone can catch up. The materialism diagnosis lands hard from this side of the Atlantic. The polity has been lost in exactly the way you describe, and the absence of a codified text means there is nothing written down that compels anyone to find it again. Without the framework, the door to authoritarian capture stays open by default.
Mike, I'm gonna restack and share this piece far and wide. I lack the ability to express these concepts so clearly but I knew what I'd been feeling for years. I know too many folks who relfexively reject anything to help the common man as "socialism" as though it were nasty.
Reminding them about sewage services, public schools, trains, parks, hospitals, firestations and pointing out these are all examples of the dreaded socialism earns me a blank look or a response that reeks of the attitude "my feelings will outweight your facts every GD time!"
All I can do with that is offer the information and continue on my journey.
Appreciate you amplifying the argument, which I do not take full credit for, to be clear.
Your candor and clarity are appreciated. And your articulation is inspiring, my friend!
Am I right in that this boils down to government being neither pro-business nor anti-business, but creating the environment in which business operates according to the wishes of the citizens (polity)? That sounds right to me.
Interesting and illuminating angle.