The Game of Politics

If you want to make a philosophy nerd in your life happy, send them a comic from this website. My personal favorites are the ones where philosophers play Monopoly. Inevitably, Marx looses and yells, "REVOLUTION!" as he flips the table. The writer of Existential Comics must think Marx was either a bad economist or simply a bad capitalist. In reality, if Marx played monopoly he'd eventually quit after outright rejecting the premise of the game. Maybe he was a sore loser and created his own game.

When it comes to politics many people are like the Marx in the comic strip. I know I am. I prefer to reject the game of politics as I see it conducted. Some days I want to flip the board over and start again. Here's one reason I feel this way. Many people use the word "political" in a negative sense, like its some shady game we don't play firsthand but see what it does to people who do play it. "Oh, the decision was purely political." When we use the word in this light, it paints politics as a game resigned only to those shady people in power & with influence. But, what is at the heart of the game of Politics?

Alasdair MacIntyre, one of my personal heroes, wrote a lot about politics. Part of his purpose was to help people ask more helpful questions than, "Republican or Democrat?" In one brief essay, MacIntyre urged people not to vote in the 2004 presidential election. His reason? Neither option was good in his view, not because either side gave wrong answers, but they answer wrong questions.

What then are the right political questions? One of them is: What do we owe our children? And the answer is that we owe them the best chance that we can give them of protection and fostering from the moment of conception onwards. And we can only achieve that if we give them the best chance that we can both of a flourishing family life, in which the work of their parents is fairly and adequately rewarded, and of an education which will enable them to flourish. These two sentences, if fully spelled out, amount to a politics. - Alasdair MacIntyre

If MacIntyre is correct, then the game of politics comes down to this: what do we owe our children? If this is not the question you and I are asking, then we are not playing the game of politics. If this is not the question our politicians are asking, then they are making politics a mere game.

-HGM