American Politics

I write a lot about British politics. Don’t you worry that hasn’t gone away now that I’m more aligned with the government. I think there’s lots of areas in which they can improve and I’ll be saying as such. But for the moment, American politics is looming large. And if you’re interested in British politics, it makes sense to me that you should be interested in American politics. For better or worse, the USA holds a lot of sway over the world and so their politics impacts on us greatly. Unfortunately for me, the British politics podcasts that I listen to also have American offshoots and so I have easy access to some of the info I crave.

Some friends and I have a semi-regular game of Risk. We arrange a date, a time and place and then troop round to have a good battle. It’s fun, we chat, I want to win, but I never come away sore that I’ve inevitably lost. In all the years we’ve been playing, I think I’ve won one which was very recent. I have an awesome American friend, who asked if his Dad come could along and play. His parents happened to be over visiting and Dad is a deft hand at Risk. Of course he could play. The reason I mention this is because whilst playing, we got onto politics. Now sometimes politics chat between different generations can be tricky because the generations sometimes don’t see eye to eye and generally will have a political leaning that might not be in the same way. I readied myself to potentially move the conversation along if required because no one wants to get heated over a game of Risk. Well not about current politics anyway.

However I found that we were fairly aligned in our views on American politics. At one point I believe I said, ‘now I don’t want to speak about Americans generally with an actual American citizen in the room but…’ and then proceeded with my opinion. It was received in good grace. The politics itself was not that interesting really. We agreed Trump is bad and Biden is bad but in different ways. What was great about this conversation for me was that the opinions I held and the facts that I was able to reel off were tested, questioned and sometimes pushed back on, but in a friendly way. Like I said, we agreed generally, but there were times when my friend’s father would disagree and so we’d discuss it like respectful human beings and if we still didn’t quite align, that was ok.

It was a great conversation and a great night. We were able to sit and affably talk about politics and not go off the rails. I feel we need to try and get back to that position. So much of the time, we seem divided along political lines and if you’re not politically pure, you’re the enemy. That’s rubbish. We’re human beings and can believe all sorts of stuff for all sorts of reasons. Politics should be about finding those areas where we can agree and building from there. Also there’s a benefit of the doubt that we need to start building in to how we view those with differing political opinions. Just because someone believes something different to you on a subject doesn’t mean they’re to be written off. And politics is about the art of persuasion. If you can’t defend your position, rebuff advances and bring other people to your side, maybe your position isn’t worth defending.

My friend’s Dad won the game.