We Forgot What Politics Actually Is

It is not partisanship

They say wearing masks has become politicised. All anti-Covid-19 measures are politicised. Global warming is politicised.

The undertone is that this is bad (and it is). But do we mean by that?

Something being politicised colloquially means that it has been used to fire up a preexisting divide between political parties.

It also means that the debate about the alternatives has been at least in part divorced from reason and science, and turned into an ego-driven tribal war, where facts and logic don’t matter because they are only means to another goal which is acquiring power

This is what we normally consider politics to be: savage dogmatic tribalism.

But politics should be about managing common problems and common resources. Even Wikipedia defines politics (from Greek: Πολιτικά, politiká, ‘affairs of the cities’) as:

the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations between individuals, such as the distribution of resources or status. The branch of social science that studies politics and…