Politics: How to Play the Game (and Lose)

Here at home we've seen a general election that managed to both shatter the status quo, and yet simultaneously reinforce it by returning a Fine Gael government; albeit a minority one. Abroad we've seen the UK vote to leave the European Union on the back of what is now coming to be accepted as a movement built on lies; "Brexit" lead to the main two parties, Conservatives and Labour, tearing themselves apart, with David Cameron's resignation and the challenge to Jeremy Corbyn's Labour leadership from Owen Jones rocking Britain. Meanwhile, in the United States we're still witnessing one of the strangest presidential election races of all time, one that seemingly takes a new twist & turn every day. The political sphere as a whole seems to have completely given up on maintaining any semblance of logic or straightforwardness.

Naturally enough for politics there’s a lot of anger, dismay, disappointment and apathy coming from those who are now finding themselves on the wrong side of democracy, having to go along for the ride that others have set out for them. What’s interesting isn’t the fact that this disappointment exists among those who have lost, but the reaction among those who have won when confronted. Democracy by its very nature will create winners and losers; it’s always to be expected that those who lose will cry out how they were right and mistakes have been made. What has changed, it would seem, is that society has completely forgotten how to handle this situation. We can see it in the United States among Bernie Sanders supporters, who for the most part found a new passion for politics, igniting a leftist movement that hasn’t been touched since the presidential reign of Roosevelt, and Hillary Clinton supporters creating a toxic environment in which all discourse was completely disregarded.

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