Politics: How to Play the Game (and Lose)

2016 has been an interesting year for politics, to say the least. 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.In the wake of Clinton winning the Democratic nomination, Sanders was quick to reassure his supporters, sending a message that the fight was not over. Unfortunately, the interpretation of this message seemed to be to maintain this toxic lack of discourse, continuing personal attacks. Instead of creating something to take forward and build, it seems the idea of building for the future, like Sanders would have hoped, has been disregarded in favour of holding onto the anger caused by the past. Instead of biding time and solidifying a movement, the order of the day has been to whine and demonise others. The justification for this would actually be quite humorous if it wasn’t almost tragically ironic; those who are so highly proud of their liberal views that they can’t tolerate those who are more conservative, are going as far as labelling all levels of conservatism equal. In the Express last year I wrote about the possibility of Sanders supporters of creating a situation in which Clinton’s campaign could be derailed. Since then we’ve seen Sanders supporters claim the actions of the Clinton campaign be equal to the anti-muslim & anti-immigrant sentiment of Trump.Much has been said of the US Presidential race as a battle of the lesser of two evils. By continuing to use such phrasing there is a strong possibility that the labels placed upon a candidate will become the reason for voting, as opposed to the proposed policies and their effects. We can see already the anti-Clinton sentiment as people refuse to vote for the lesser of two evils due to such a label implying that Clinton is inherently evil. The inability to lose has caused blindness among some as to what the purpose of playing the game is in the first place. The way the landscape has been changed by those who reject that democracy has not sided with them has seen them attempt to create a situation in which politics is a non-continuous entity. That is to say that political movements are entirely about creating one moment in which a movement is ultimately proven right. This can never be allowed to be the case as it goes against the idea of progress as a whole. If one is to lose in politics that does not mean that politics itself is redundant, nor should it mean that a decision taken is not one of value.This idea that somehow those who lose in a vote should inherently have a right to avoid the outcome of a vote can be seen after the outcome of two very different referenda, the Marriage Equality Referendum in Ireland and the Brexit Referendum in the UK. In both cases there have been many on the losing sides who have called for a second referendum to be held or for the result of the first referendum being regarded as invalid. Political movements cannot exist in a snapshot of time, they are ever-changing entities which must adapt to the political realities in which they exist. Defeat in politics should never be seen as a finality, especially if a movement is seen to have grown significantly before being defeated. As long as there are people there will be politics, there will be people who disagree on almost everything. To treat politics as such, ultimately leads to the impression that someday politics will end after we’ve somehow fixed every problem ever without creating new ones.