[indigo945]

    > Politics is inherently about policy, the consensus mechanism involved is undefined. 

It's true that the consensus mechanism is undefined, but it is definitely not the case that politics is about policy. I hate etymological arguments, but in a literal sense, the "political" is merely a translation for "public" - that is, anything that happens when you step outside is political.

That also means that "cultural divide-and-conquer games" are not in some sense "not politics". They're inherently political by virtue of being public, in the same sense that coming out as gay, wearing a MAGA hat or claiming on an online forum that the "job of a state is to create social good for its citizens" are political. Once you accept that almost everything is, in fact, politics, it also becomes clear that we don't have policy to generate particular outcomes in a detached and neutral manner, but to police politics.

I agree that the liberal/conservative spectrum is a "reductive vision of what politics could ever even possibly be", I'm just not convinced that associating politics with state power is any less reductive.

[tovej]

Close, but not quite, political as a term refers to polities, groups of people that make decisions together.

Political as an adjective refers to anything related to making decision on the behalf of a social group of people.

[lotyrin]

This is only socially and "practically" true, not literally or inevitably or technically (or in my opinion, actual-practically) so.

One of the things we need to accept as social animals is that there are a lot of different flavors of "true" and "correct".

A lot of times I'll get someone to concede with my opinion of stuff in a way where they say something like "well, sure, but good luck convincing anyone of this" and that's them just giving into the social-consensus truth rather than the empirical (what the evidence shows, what follows from that and our choices of axiomatic principles) or practical (produces the best outcomes in the situation) truth.

If we want to be a species worthy of surviving our impending climate extinction we need to have a population of leaders and actors who are willing to act on and create institutions according to the practical truth as informed by the empirical truth, and become villains in the eye of the social-consensus truth.