What is wrong with politics? Is it a ‘science’? Or is it an interpretation of human behaviour? I have often wondered if politics was invented as a replacement for war: diplomacy being a level of political resolution but politics has another meaning, another life in the arena of human thought and philosophy.

We define a playing field, like a competitive team sport, with the sides labelled ‘Left’ and ‘Right’. These teams are not identical, but are increasingly opposite in their views. It may be more useful to use ‘North’ and ‘South’ or ‘Capitalist’ and ‘Socialist’ but that would be prescriptive.

The Left vs Right playing field has generalised differences, along these lines:

The list of differences is much longer than that. Each side has two sides. Extreme and centre. On the extreme Left we find minority rights, on the extreme Right we find tax cuts and billionaires. The extreme Right try to denegrate the Left by calling it ‘woke’. And the extreme Left calls the Right ‘fascists’.

The problem with the Centre is that compromise is necessary, so you may get the worst of both worlds.

The problem with this model is that it produces governments in conflict with the previous administration. Making progress a snail in a well model – it climbs up 2 feet, only to slide down 18 inches, so progress is extremely slow and regression is normality.

What we call ‘democracy’ is actually just a way of mixing it up. Let votes interpreted by rules made by the Right (or the Left) that dictate a certain advantage (like First Past the Post voting systems) so that the future government is formed due to inaccurate representation of the popular need.

Or when the extremes create insults of the other to prevent people from voting. Democracy is 2 feet underwater most of the time. Or it simply fails to work.

Authoritarianism seems to be a terribly awful alternative. Years of spectacular growth in the Chinese economy due to conditions of free trade brought about by American protection of the seas are now all coming crashing down due to jingoistic decisions to build cities and accommodation for population who were not born and an increasingly less helpful American policy spells economic dread and the entire model is essentially dictated by one person and a lot of acolytes playing the game of survival. Russia is even worse, they play for domination due to an intolerance of the West. There is nothing wrong with Russia being protected by NATO from invasion but instead of that, they invade their neighbours to create a buffer zone as there is inherent distrust of ‘the other’. The same effect is occurring in American politics. Nearly half of the voters want a president who has declared he would be a dictator. How un-American can you get, but Trump’s power is increasingly coming from victimhood and that will not work for the aggressive Right ‘base’ that simply wants to do away with any form of Government because they have their collection of automatic weapons to ‘protect’ their family.

The Left is being distracted from creating an economy for the working population by issues of increasing concern that have inherited the label ‘woke’ from the BLM movement, and totally corrupted its meaning. These actions including the overloaded ‘Trans’ debate allow attacks from the extreme Right to sound realistic.

Polarisation of political positions is more like war and less like diplomacy.

A better modal is to abandon the Left vs Right dichotomy in favour of independent political movements that have stands (like the Green movement, you know what they are after) and who are elected into a collection of smaller Governments. To devolve power from a central heavyweight to more local concerns. To respect the voices of people instead of this ridiculous cage fight mentality that hides the terrible difficulties that are created.