The increasing commonality of the idea that ‘everything is political’ provokes quite a lot of controversy. For example, US hockey player, Jack Hughes, recently criticised that “everything is so political” following backlash “surrounding [the team’s] post-Olympic call with President Donald Trump.” While I would argue that a conversation with the lead representative of the United States is probably as political as one can get, there is also a general sentiment that people who ‘make everything about politics’ are annoying and unnecessarily politicise things like art, food, sport, and travel. This is often associated with a limited view of politics as being exclusively about elections and political parties, economics, military activity, international relations, and power. And while these are the most obvious, and still highly important, parts of politics, the social realm of cultures and identities is just as obviously and inextricably interconnected with them.
To be clear, I do believe that essentially everything is political — be it in its (historical) construction, unequal distribution, or how it’s interacted with — even if it isn’t perhaps intended to be. But, to an extent, it makes sense why some people want to create barriers between their personal lives and the invasive nature of politics, because politics has, in many ways, become rather exhausting to interact with.
Unforgiving social media debate culture and the aggressively polarised ‘teams’ representing different sides of the political divide have made it so that ‘everything is politics’ also essentially means that ‘everything is up for debate’. And that can become incredibly draining to engage with, particularly when such conversations are rarely productive because of social media’s preference for offensive and hateful bashings of one another.
Politicising previously ‘un-politicised’ issues can also have much broader repercussions, especially if they become successfully entrenched in the mainstream, as we can see with the now highly-contested subject of migration.
Relatedly, I’ve been reading R. B. J. Walker’s collection of essays on the boundaries and limits of modern politics in his novel Out of Line, elements of which grapple with this question of what is included in and excluded from politics in really insightful ways. And in one section on politicisation, he states that “the very act of defining what is political is itself political.”
Defining what is political has substantive implications for clarifying matters of security and securitisation, as well as questions of what values are worth protecting, and what identities are worth including. These decisions impact our day-to-day lives, even if they might go unnoticed.
While not everything needs to be actively politicised, it is valuable to recognise the political roots of seemingly unimportant things and their impacts. Otherwise, we might not notice dangerous political efforts to dismantle fundamental policies and laws — like the Equality Act that Reform wants to repeal, or when Roe v. Wade was overturned in the US in 2022 — which have been created to give us various forms of security, the benefits of which we’ve grown used to and might have begun to overlook.
Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash
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Becoming Exhausted with Politicisation: The ‘Everything is Political’ Debate
The increasing commonality of the idea that ‘everything is political’ provokes quite a lot of controversy. For example, US hockey player, Jack Hughes, recently criticised that “everything is so political” following backlash “surrounding [the team’s] post-Olympic call with President Donald Trump.” While I would argue that a conversation with the lead representative of the United States is probably as political as one can get, there is also a general sentiment that people who ‘make everything about politics’ are annoying and unnecessarily politicise things like art, food, sport, and travel. This is often associated with a limited view of politics as being exclusively about elections and political parties, economics, military activity, international relations, and power. And while these are the most obvious, and still highly important, parts of politics, the social realm of cultures and identities is just as obviously and inextricably interconnected with them.
To be clear, I do believe that essentially everything is political — be it in its (historical) construction, unequal distribution, or how it’s interacted with — even if it isn’t perhaps intended to be. But, to an extent, it makes sense why some people want to create barriers between their personal lives and the invasive nature of politics, because politics has, in many ways, become rather exhausting to interact with.
Unforgiving social media debate culture and the aggressively polarised ‘teams’ representing different sides of the political divide have made it so that ‘everything is politics’ also essentially means that ‘everything is up for debate’. And that can become incredibly draining to engage with, particularly when such conversations are rarely productive because of social media’s preference for offensive and hateful bashings of one another.
Politicising previously ‘un-politicised’ issues can also have much broader repercussions, especially if they become successfully entrenched in the mainstream, as we can see with the now highly-contested subject of migration.
Relatedly, I’ve been reading R. B. J. Walker’s collection of essays on the boundaries and limits of modern politics in his novel Out of Line, elements of which grapple with this question of what is included in and excluded from politics in really insightful ways. And in one section on politicisation, he states that “the very act of defining what is political is itself political.”
Defining what is political has substantive implications for clarifying matters of security and securitisation, as well as questions of what values are worth protecting, and what identities are worth including. These decisions impact our day-to-day lives, even if they might go unnoticed.
While not everything needs to be actively politicised, it is valuable to recognise the political roots of seemingly unimportant things and their impacts. Otherwise, we might not notice dangerous political efforts to dismantle fundamental policies and laws — like the Equality Act that Reform wants to repeal, or when Roe v. Wade was overturned in the US in 2022 — which have been created to give us various forms of security, the benefits of which we’ve grown used to and might have begun to overlook.
Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash
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