What is first and most important, our reasoned membership in a certain political group, or having the ability that a certain platform provides in justifying more personal things?

I bombed at this topic in a different formulation, in the typically obscure and indirect way that makes me suspect that I’m avoiding something about myself, but think the topic is interesting and important so will try to re-present it, but differently.

We have a party and invite people at random, a cross section of our common interest group, our nation.  We arrive as we will, the conservative businessman alongside the liberal artist.  As soon as we are in we start looking around for someone we can relate to.  Before long we are congregated into distinct groups, with little interaction between them.

Within each group there is a variety, rich and poor, formally educated, and casually educated, and uneducated, hip and content, etc.  And it is likely that each group will be predominantly uniform in political views.

As it stands, the rational that we use to justify our politics seems suspiciously specious.  Can we agree on that?  Easy to say about the other aisle, but it takes a lot to entertain that our own party-line is wrong.  So much effort is put into defending it that we can wonder if there is something else happening behind all the rational, the defense of which is so rigorous that we easily suspect it upholds something whose loss would have more grave consequences than a social arrangement.     



Of course, politics has real and important consequences.  But clarifying why and how we get our views can only help.

Risking falling into the abyss of the obscurity that I vowed to avoid, can we see ourselves in an existential background with no qualities, accept that state where we barely exist and accept the attendant anxiety, and then search for what it is that raises us out of it—and if I haven’t already prejudiced the outcome, ask if our political views determine our personality and way we act, or if our personality and nature determine political views that we can’t otherwise justify?

Darn, can someone else ask this more clearly?