Many Americans talk about politics in confused ways. The confusion comes from a variety of missteps they make along the way. But one central political mistake stands out to me. It’s the one mistake most people make – even most leftists. And it holds together many of the others.

What’s that mistake, you ask?

The Biggest Political Mistake

It’s this one: most people talk about the government and its actions using the word ‘we.’ In other words, they think of themselves as political actors, as a part of the political system.

Let’s look at a basic example. When Americans debate about, say, the U.S. war in Afghanistan, liberals will say things like, “We have to stay in Afghanistan, because we have to help those people.” In response, even leftists will say things like, “We need to get out of Afghanistan, because we caused harm.”

But as I’ll point out, this doesn’t work. The political system in the U.S. excludes regular citizens. To the people in power, we don’t matter.

The False Assumption

In my own work on foreign policy, I defend an approach much closer to the one I attribute above to leftists. The one pushing against military intervention. It’s a better view than the liberal stance in favor of the war.

However, both the liberal and leftist depend on a shared false assumption. Both assume that ‘we’ – inclusive of the person saying it, and those of you out there reading this post – are a constitutive part of the system performing actions.

But that’s not how it works. In reality, the U.S. government is largely independent of its individual citizens. It primarily serves its patrons, corporate stakeholders, and the perceived interests of those groups.

This goes more so in foreign policy, where public input is far less important to the U.S. than in domestic policy. And so, the problem with claims like, ‘we have to stay in the war, because we have to help those people,’ is that ‘helping those people’ has nothing to do with why the U.S. was in Afghanistan in the first place.

Rather, the U.S. government sent troops in order to advance its perceived national interests. And ‘perceived national interests’ mostly just amounted to the interests of the bourgeoisie.

The Upshot

And so, the main error of liberalism here was to advocate that the U.S. take a course – keeping troops in Afghanistan – for reasons that it couldn’t possibly hold. In practice, keeping troops in the country would’ve served bourgeois interests first, and the interests of Afghan people only insofar as those interests coincided with bourgeois ones.

They rarely did.

But leftists were not without their own set of flaws. Advocating that the U.S. government end the war was a noble endeavor. But, even there, leftists oddly pretended to be a part of the political system in a way that falsely suggested that we could affect that system just by doing things like writing our Congresspeople, voting, and holding protests.

For the purposes of making longer term change, those moves are woefully insufficient.

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