The biggest issue of politics is that it is not seen as managing 100 million people but as stupid terms of left and right.

There’s no left when managing 100 million people There’s no right when managing 100 million people

There are 10000 different characteristics of each person and the ruler has to choose the right action for or against the right person. That is politics. It is not liberal, it is not authoritarian. An ideal ruler is liberal against one who’s liberal and authoritarian against one who’s authoritarian.

When we stop seeing politics in terms of these stupid terms, all will be solved!

  • poVoq
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    2 years ago

    You got that exactly backwards ;)

    Politics is all about ideological grandstanding, because you can’t actually “manage 100 million people”. Precisely because they are all individuals with different incentives and backgrounds.

    As a politician the best you can hope for is that people buy into the story you are selling them and then realign their behavior accordingly. Thus if you stop peddling grand stories about society you basically make yourself irrelevant as a politician.

    That by itself is of course not a bad thing, but then you quickly reach a point where you realize that without such grand stories, nation states (at least big ones with a large territory and 100 million people) are untenable and would collapse to smaller units that can be managed based on local concerns that people naturally share.

    tl;dr: Such ideological divisions first appeared with the rise of large nation states and are integral to their function and existence.

    • Sagar AcharyaOP
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      12 years ago

      Nah. Yes, one sways people here and there according to ideology and winning elections is important, but work of a politician is to manage system as a whole, it is to divide responsibility to next layer of hierarchy, check how much of policies are implemented on grassroots by taking feedback from grassroots and hold that next layer accountable and incentivize or penalize them. Those in next layer will take care of layer below them till things reach the last layer.

      Obviously more layers will lead to more cost (commission, corruption, etc.).

      As far as I know, authoritarian means that who implements his decision irrespective of whether population likes or not. Such behavior is important in some times. Liberal means that who allows freedom. That too is important in some cases. There’s no middle right, middle left, left and such crap. If I were a politician, I’d simultaneously be at complete scale, precisely because it’s a useless scale.

      I really don’t know the meaning of word politics, polity, etc. but I understand very well influence, elections and decision making which are real concepts to me. Statesmanship for me, is the most difficult thing, to be divided into simple duality of right and left.

      • poVoq
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        2 years ago

        Sorry, but that is a very incomplete and IMHO naive analysis you are doing here.

        How do you as a politician actually get “your” hierarchy to follow your orders?

        I never said that your grand story needs to win over a majority.

        Authoritarian politicians usually get by through winning over a dedicated minority of state bureocrats and/or the police/military who then terrorize the rest of the population into submission.

        • Sagar AcharyaOP
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          -22 years ago

          I’m pretty sure those who aren’t authoritarian also have the same strategy of winning over a minority and controlling a majority. The only difference is in that case the majority believe that they’re not being terrorized and they really believe the ruler acts in their best interests.

  • Liwott
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    22 years ago

    There are 10000 different characteristics of each person and the ruler has to choose the right action for or against the right person.

    It is not realistic to manage millions of people one by one though. Politics is about managing a collectivity, choosing sets of rules and strategies to implement them. So different programs will have different characteristics, for example socially liberal vs authoritarian, that make up ideologies.

    Then overall a program or an ideology can be positioned on the left-right axis according to its tendency to be more progressive (left) or conservative (right). Of course it is only one characteristic for the general direction, who ever said it suffices to precusely describe a program?

  • @TheConquestOfBed@lemmy.ml
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    2 years ago

    This is why dictatorships of the proletariat pare things down to one party. 😉

    If all minorities are in the same party with everyone else, the state has to consider them proportionally instead of assigning them to the “enemy” political party in order to reverse their rights and send that party’s progress backwards.

    Vietnam, for example, has land protections for ethnic minorities that can’t be voted away, and 48% of the representatives in Cuba’s legislature are women. Both countries have recently expanded lgbt rights as well. Compare to terf island where lgbt rights were voted in rapidly when it was popular, but are now being eroded alongside state healthcare as conservatism sweeps across Europe.