It is election time, but is it not time for less, rather than more politics?
It’s time to to fry in Ossewit (“Make Frying Oil Tallow Again“), The American Health Minister, Robert Kennedy, posted on X in October 2024. Everyone who still baked in vegetable fat, was poisoning the American people, was partly guilty of the obesity epidemic and was on the wrong side of the political spectrum anyway.
Everything is political and political is an insatiable monster. In times of revolutions and crisis it can happen that the most everyday things are drawn in the vortex of political polarization. In history, this is a good indication of increasing tensions and even mass paradicalization or revolution.
“We can be sure”, so wrote an editor of a renowned fashion magazine In September 1789, “that we ended up in a different time. With a different fashion image.” And indeed, less than two months after the storming of the Bastille, velvet and brokaat were nowhere to be found, the white cotton shirt for women had become a hit and almost everyone wore a chest, on his chest, his hat or shoes. The new sneaker also had a Bastille-shaped buckle to indicate that the carrier experienced the left in the line of the revolutionary trend.
Instead of listening to the new rulers and their roaring statements, you could feel, smell and see the change of power in the streets. The Assemblée was about livelihood of the third position, and about a new social contract. But on the street it was about what you could still put on and what no longer. How to appeal to each other in the right way, with which call and which pronouns. And not to forget what you were going to eat. With the abolition of the guilds the restaurant system for the common man advancedwhere the real revolutionary ordinary, easy and nourishing, ‘restorative’ soup was served, hence the term ‘restaurant’. Anyone who felt too good for bread and broth and chose a multi -course dinner in the ‘Salle à Manger’, could just end up under the Guillotine.
Everyday polarization: in the US they are in the middle of it again, according to Pew Research. When you look at distribution charts, it is clear that in 2004 there is still a lot of overlap between republican and democratic voters, but that the two divisions (a blue mountain and a red mountaincheck this link) in ten years have come to be further apart. The overlap in what they share with values and views has become smaller and smaller. Enter the baking oil. Democrats and Republicans Dress, Cook and hug In the meantime even different.
More and more things that were previously neutral are being drawn into the polarized domain
But also in Germany serves the AfD In the Bundestag the notorious ‘Mett-Brötchen’, a half white ball, thickly covered with butter, raw minced meat (‘Metten’) and onion pieces. Elsewhere in Germany, right -wing extremists have founded ‘Völkische Siedlungen’, where only natural, self -sufficient and traditionally cooked and baked. For tofu you have to be at the Grünen.
In the Netherlands we always lag behind with these types of trends. But here too we see an increasing rigidity and displays of ideas and sentiments, of views and customs around one sharply defined political identity. In fact, anyone who announced for years that the distinction between left and right was fading, should try to serve a BBB’er a beet ball instead of a bitterbal. Or to pronounce an office prayer at a D66 meeting. The distinction has become more comprehensive. It has become a monster from Frankenstein. Even if you do not want to make a left or right statement at all, or radiate something political at all, you cannot escape it, because more and more things are already frequently freatened by the way of ‘affective polarization’.
It is also nice, in that cacophony of crises, conflicts and Moral Panicsto be able to quickly decide on which side you are standing. Complexity is difficult to keep out, a faux pass is made in this way and a murmurized sheltered through the Socials for eternity. It is simpler and safer to explain the other person, who just uses a wrong term, a certain scarf, a cargo bike or SUV, or votes just another party, forever out of order.
But recent research express The fact that this mechanism of ‘Issue Salience Polariazation’ is highly contagious: when a society already suffers from affective polarization (we-side-thinking not only on content but also on emotion and identity), more and more neutral, things are drawn into that polarized domain. Why do we do that? That is simple: it prevents you from having to take a step outside your own comfort zone and that you have to negotiate with a ‘counterparty’ that you still normalize a bit. Instead of resolving something together, it is advanced to a new battle scene. While the real political conflicts under all those marginal new issues are covered.
In short, to let the elections really cross something again, courage is needed to leave affective, cultural and identical matters in the margin. And to tackle the really substantive complex political issues together. What if we don’t do that? Then it can happen that a Napoleon stands up, such as in 1799, to end the political crackle and to hoist the entire population in one uniform.