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Comment by reillyse | Hacker News Reader

I feel like this article exposes a huge fallacy in how people think about politics in the US. Politics isn't a horse race. It's not about winning. It's about making the country a better place by enacting laws and making sure everything runs correctly.

If you win the election but make the country a worse place, you've still lost.

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But people disagree about what makes the country "a better/worse place" and that disagreement leads to political parties and the need to win to promote policies they agree with. Just consider any wedge issue to see how this works, e.g. abortion and the fight over supreme court justices as a result.

The issue is the rhetoric these days is dominated by useful idiots online spouting talking points and propaganda to the point that "debates" are nothing more than whatever scores points (literally points = social media likes).

> It's about making the country a better place by enacting laws and making sure everything runs correctly.

That is a pretty subjective statement, "better" and "correctly" all have different definitions to different people.

These days politics in the US is a ship without a captain visionary where two highly antagonistic teams of sailors fight for the right to steer the wheel, and when a sailor of one team gets to grab the wheel, he promptly appoints his cronies on all important posts, while the other team barricades the kitchen and sabotages whatever the first team tries to do. As you might expect, the ship's trajectory is rather unpredictable and it's a miracle it's staying afloat at all.

The US government isn't supposed to be efficient. Quite the opposite, really.

The whole point of federalism is that no single "captain visionary" has enough power to really enforce his/her will.

Politics is about making the country a better place FOR YOUR GROUP, whatever that group may be. There are many groups, with competing, incompatible definitions of "better." That's why "politics" exists in the first place. It's not a bunch of enlightened scholars competing to find the best solutions to hard problems, it's any number of tribes fighting to secure a piece of the pie for their people.

So yes, it's absolutely about winning. Losing means that your group suffers, and eventually that your group (ideologic, geographic, economic or, grimly, even ethnic) ceases to exist.

Reminds me of how important individual rights are, the smallest and weakest group is yourself.

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