Political microcosm

The above video is a microcosm for all politics—if you want to understand what politics is about, just watch this clip. This is the left-right division: there is a man who enforces the law, and there is a boy who uses passive-aggressive self-pitying lies to try and work round the law without technically breaking it. In this case, the issue at stake is whether New Age travellers can just wander round the country at random, sometimes crash into a farmer’s field when they feel like it to camp. The police say they are free to go, so long as they pick a destination. The travellers, not wanting to put out money for an actual campsite, hedge around the issue with half-lies, evasions, and intimidation (with the promise that the police will be embarrassed before the media when things get ugly, so representing the implicit role the media plays in facilitating left-wing politics).

The issues differ from country to country and at different times—the New Age travellers are a non-issue today, they have bled back into time. Yet you could take the same dynamic above and apply it perfectly well to the whole current debate about transgender issues—you can see exactly what framework underlies it from this clip. “Define woman.” “Jus give us a campsite.”

On one side, you have men who stand for almost unstated common-sense laws and traditions that are thousands of years old—laws that almost predate any organised religion as we understand it, being so foundational to human affairs—and on the other side you have youngsters, women, and outsiders who play dumb (even though they know what the rules are really, they just lie without lying). At times, the youngsters goad the police into actions that hurt them—and then the media descends to decry violence against “helpless victims” who really play the victim. This is all there is to politics—everything else is local elaboration and the changes in issues that confront people over time.