Polypolitics: A New Framework for Political Valuation
We can do more than emote or smear: we can act with motive power.
In the past several months, we have witnessed an unmistakable pattern of the political Right fracturing into distinct factions. Sometimes this happens formally, often informally—but nearly always with considerable hostility. Smears fly; personalities become polestars; and good-faith interaction is aborted. What might have been reckoned as disagreement over tactics, emphasis, or presentation is escalated into existential enmity, forcing even conciliatory men to pick a side and prove loyalty by pathologizing dissenters.
Responses to this dynamic vary. Some pretend the fractures do not exist, or paper over them as trivial. Others acknowledge them and interpret the factionalism as an omen for any number of things: a clear indication that the Right is forever doomed to impotence, a revelation that we must excise and separate from any who disagree with us on the flashpoint, or the inevitable disorder of a social media free-for-all. Whatever truth these interpretations contain, I submit that there is another factor at work: polypolitics.
