my political life essay

Essay on Politics: Topics, Tips, and Examples for Students

Defining What is Politics Essay

The process of decision-making that applies to members of a group or society is called politics. Arguably, political activities are the backbone of human society, and everything in our daily life is a form of it.

Understanding the essence of politics, reflecting on its internal elements, and critically analyzing them make society more politically aware and let them make more educated decisions. Constantly thinking and analyzing politics is critical for societal evolution.

Political thinkers often write academic papers that explore different political concepts, policies, and events. The essay about politics may examine a wide range of topics such as government systems, political ideologies, social justice, public policies, international relations, etc.

After selecting a specific research topic, a writer should conduct extensive research, gather relevant information, and prepare a logical and well-supported argument. The paper should be clear and organized, complying with academic language and standards. A writer should demonstrate a deep understanding of the subject, an ability to evaluate and remain non-biased to different viewpoints, and a capacity to draw conclusions.

Now that we are on the same page about the question 'what is politics essay' and understand its importance, let's take a deeper dive into how to build a compelling political essay, explore the most relevant political argumentative essay topics, and finally, examine the political essay examples written by the best essay writing service team.

Politics Essay Example for Students

If you are still unsure how to structure your essay or how to present your statement, don't worry. Our team of experts has prepared an excellent essay example for you. Feel free to explore and examine it. Use it to guide you through the writing process and help you understand what a successful essay looks like.

How to Write a Political Essay: Tips + Guide

A well-written essay is easy to read and digest. You probably remember reading papers full of big words and complex ideas that no one bothered to explain. We all agree that such essays are easily forgotten and not influential, even though they might contain a very important message.

If you are writing an essay on politics, acknowledge that you are on a critical mission to easily convey complicated concepts. Hence, what you are trying to say should be your main goal. Our guide on how to write a political essay will help you succeed.

Conduct Research for Your Politics Essay

After choosing a topic for the essay, take enough time for preparation. Even if you are familiar with the matter, conducting thorough research is wiser. Political issues are complex and multifaceted; comprehensive research will help you understand the topic better and offer a more nuanced analysis.

Research can help you identify different viewpoints and arguments around the topic, which can be beneficial for building more impartial and persuasive essays on politics. Sometimes in the hit of the moment, opposing sides are not able to see the common ground; your goal is to remain rational, speak to diverse audiences, and help them see the core of the problem and the ways to solve it.

In political papers, accuracy and credibility are vital. Researching the topic deeply will help you avoid factual errors or misrepresentations from any standpoint. It will allow you to gather reliable sources of information and create a trustworthy foundation for the entire paper.

If you want to stand out from the other students, get inspired by the list of hottest essay ideas and check out our political essay examples.

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Brainstorm Political Essay Topics

The next step to writing a compelling politics essay is to polish your thoughts and find the right angle to the chosen topic.

Before you start writing, generate fresh ideas and organize your thoughts. There are different techniques to systematize the mess going on in your head, such as freewriting, mind mapping, or even as simple as listing ideas. This will open the doors to new angles and approaches to the topic.

When writing an essay about politics, ensure the topic is not too general. It's always better to narrow it down. It will simplify your job and help the audience better understand the core of the problem. Brainstorming can help you identify key points and arguments, which you can use to find a specific angle on the topic.

Brainstorming can also help you detect informational gaps that must be covered before the writing process. Ultimately, the brainstorming phase can bring a lot more clarity and structure to your essay.

We know how exhausting it is to come up with comparative politics essay topics. Let our research paper writing service team do all the hard work for you.

Create Your Politics Essay Thesis Statement

Thesis statements, in general, serve as a starting point of the roadmap for the reader. A political essay thesis statement outlines the main ideas and arguments presented in the body paragraphs and creates a general sense of the content of the paper.

Creating a thesis statement for essays about politics in the initial stages of writing can help you stay focused and on track throughout the working process. You can use it as an aim and constantly check your arguments and evidence against it. The question is whether they are relevant and supportive of the statement.

Get creative when creating a statement. This is the first sentence readers will see, and it should be compelling and clear.

The following is a great example of a clear and persuasive thesis statement:

 'The lack of transparency and accountability has made the World Trade Organization one of the most controversial economic entities. Despite the influence, its effectiveness in promoting free trade and economic growth in developing countries has decreased.'

Provide Facts in Your Essay about Politic

It's a no-brainer that everything you will write in your essay should be supported by strong evidence. The credibility of your argument will be questioned every step of the way, especially when you are writing about sensitive subjects such as essays on government influence on economic troubles. 

Provide facts and use them as supporting evidence in your politics essay. They will help you establish credibility and accuracy and take your paper out of the realm of speculation and mere opinions.

Facts will make your essay on political parties more persuasive, unbiased, and targeted to larger audiences. Remember, the goal is to bring the light to the core of the issue and find a solution, not to bring people even farther apart.

Speaking of facts, many students claim that when they say ' write my essay for me ' out loud, our writing team is the fastest to respond and deliver high-quality essays meeting their trickiest requirements.

Structure Your Political Essay

Your main goal is to communicate your ideas to many people. To succeed, you need to write an essay that is easy to read and understand. Creating a structure will help you present your ideas logically and lead the readers in the right direction.

Sometimes when writing about political essay topics, we get carried away. These issues can be very emotional and sensitive, and writers are not protected from becoming victims of their own writings. Having a structure will keep you on track, only focusing on providing supported arguments and relevant information.

Start with introducing the thesis statement and provide background information. Followed by the body paragraphs and discuss all the relevant facts and standpoints. Finish it up with a comprehensive conclusion, and state the main points of your essay once again.

The structure will also save you time. In the beginning, creating an outline for essays on politics will give you a general idea of what should be written, and you can track your progress against it.

Revise and Proofread Your Final Politics Essay

Once every opinion is on the paper and every argument is well-constructed, one final step should be taken. Revision!

We know nothing is better than finishing the homework and quickly submitting it, but we aim for an A+. Our political essay must be reviewed. You need to check if there is any error such as grammatical, spelling, or contextual.

Take some time off, relax, and start proofreading after a few minutes or hours. Having a fresh mind will help you review not only grammar but also the arguments. Check if something is missing from your essays about politics, and if you find gaps, provide additional information.

You had to spend a lot of time on them, don't give up now. Make sure they are in perfect condition.

Effective Political Essay Topics

We would be happy if our guide on how to write political essays helped you, but we are not stopping there. Below you will find a list of advanced and relevant political essay topics. Whether you are interested in global political topics or political science essay topics, we got you covered.

Once you select a topic, don't forget to check out our politics essay example! It will bring even more clarity, and you will be all ready to start writing your own paper.

Political Argumentative Essay Topics

Now that we know how to write a political analysis essay let's explore political argumentative essay topics:

• Should a political party take a stance on food politics and support policies promoting sustainable food systems?
• Should we label Winston Churchill as the most influential political figure of World War II?
• Does the focus on GDP growth in the political economy hinder the human development index?
• Is foreign influence a threat to national security?
• Is foreign aid the best practice for political campaigning?
• Does the electoral college work for an ideal political system?
• Are social movements making a real difference, or are they politically active for temporary change?
• Can global politics effectively address political conflicts in the modern world?
• Are opposing political parties playing positive roles in US international relations?
• To what extent should political influence be allowed in addressing economic concerns?
• Can representative democracy prevent civil wars in ethnically diverse countries?
• Should nuclear weapons be abolished for the sake of global relations?
• Is economic development more important than ethical issues for Caribbean politics?
• What role should neighboring nations play in preventing human rights abuse in totalitarian regimes?
• Should political decisions guide the resolution of conflicts in the South China Sea?

Political Socialization Essay Topics

Knowing how to write a political issue essay is one thing, but have you explored our list of political socialization essay topics?

• To what extent does a political party or an influential political figure shape the beliefs of young people?
• Does political influence shape attitudes toward environmental politics?
• How can individuals use their own learning process to navigate political conflicts in a polarized society?
• How do political strategies shape cultural globalization?
• Is gender bias used as a political instrument in political socialization?
• How can paying attention to rural communities improve political engagement?
• What is the role of Amnesty International in preventing the death penalty?
• What is the role of politically involved citizens in shaping minimum wage policies?
• How does a political party shape attitudes toward global warming?
• How does the federal system influence urban planning and attitudes toward urban development?
• What is the role of public opinion in shaping foreign policy, and how does it affect political decision making
• Did other countries' experiences affect policies on restricting immigration in the US?
• How can note-taking skills and practice tests improve political engagement? 
• How do the cultural values of an independent country shape the attitudes toward national security?
• Does public opinion influence international intervention in helping countries reconcile after conflicts?

Political Science Essay Topics

If you are searching for political science essay topics, check our list below and write the most compelling essay about politic:

• Is environmental education a powerful political instrument? 
• Can anarchist societies provide a viable alternative to traditional forms of governance?
• Pros and cons of deterrence theory in contemporary international relations
• Comparing the impact of the French Revolution and World War II on the political landscape of Europe
• The role of the ruling political party in shaping national policies on nuclear weapons
• Exploring the roots of where politics originate
• The impact of civil wars on the processes of democratization of the third-world countries
• The role of international organizations in promoting global health
• Does using the death penalty in the justice system affect international relations?
• Assessing the role of the World Trade Organization in shaping global trade policies
• The political and environmental implications of conventional agriculture
• The impact of the international court on political decision making
• Is philosophical anarchism relevant to contemporary political discourse?
• The emergence of global citizenship and its relationship with social movements
• The impact of other countries on international relations between the US and China

Final Words

See? Writing an essay about politic seems like a super challenging job, but in reality, all it takes is excellent guidance, a well-structured outline, and an eye for credible information.

If you are stressed out from juggling a hundred different course assignments and have no time to focus on your thesis, our dissertation writing services could relieve you! Our team of experts is ready to take over even the trickiest tasks on the tightest schedule. You just have to wish - ' write my essay ' out loud, and we will be on it!

Ready to Enrich Your Understanding of Politics?

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Annie Lambert

specializes in creating authoritative content on marketing, business, and finance, with a versatile ability to handle any essay type and dissertations. With a Master’s degree in Business Administration and a passion for social issues, her writing not only educates but also inspires action. On EssayPro blog, Annie delivers detailed guides and thought-provoking discussions on pressing economic and social topics. When not writing, she’s a guest speaker at various business seminars.

is an expert in nursing and healthcare, with a strong background in history, law, and literature. Holding advanced degrees in nursing and public health, his analytical approach and comprehensive knowledge help students navigate complex topics. On EssayPro blog, Adam provides insightful articles on everything from historical analysis to the intricacies of healthcare policies. In his downtime, he enjoys historical documentaries and volunteering at local clinics.

Related Articles

My Political Depression Problem—and Ours

Granular study of the ever-more-authoritarian right didn’t demoralize the author as much as reaction from the left.

by Rick Perlstein

May 29, 2024

Julia Nikhinson/AP Photo

Former President Donald Trump speaks to members of the media upon arriving at Manhattan Criminal Court, May 28, 2024, in New York.

I don’t want to make this about me, because it really isn’t about me. I don’t want make it about them, because it really isn’t about them.

I’m talking about an anguish I felt this past week, a weight heaving down somewhere around my sternum, grinding away at my ability to proceed through daily life. Such feelings are not unfamiliar to me; just ask my pharmacist. But I’ve never had them before over politics.

So, yes, OK: Maybe this is a little bit about me.

I’ve spent half my life now, starting in 1997 when I was 27, trying to make sense of the right. It was a fortunate career choice. With each passing year, the right became more and more the star of the American political show. More and more, people began telling me, with aching earnestness, that what I did was profoundly valuable to them. I helped them understand their childhoods; I helped them fear the future less, because they saw what we had overcome before. They still feared the future, but they were grateful, because I inspired them to launch their own careers as activists or politicians to fight for it.

This has been a fortunate thing for my soul. Writing that last sentence, in fact, I misted up a little bit—which is a good thing, because for the last several days, I’ve felt so dead inside that I’ve hardly had any emotions at all.

What does my work on American conservatism come down to? One of my readers once put it best: “There’s always more, and it’s always worse. But it’s never new.”

The most important part of that formulation is the “always worse” part. Right now, that means three things. First, there is no going back to some more innocent conservatism of the past. Second, if Donald Trump wins the majority of electoral votes and accedes again to the White House, this will obviously be very bad. But third, if he does not win the majority of electoral votes—well, it might be worse. I’ve heard that the secret to politics is repetition. Can you stand for me to repeat it one more time ? The question is not just how many votes Donald Trump gets, but how many are willing to take up arms for him if he loses .

More from Rick Perlstein

Always worse. In the book I’m working on now, I’ve developed a theory to explain why that is, and how it works. I call it the “authoritarian ratchet.” Its axioms are that the basic thing conservatism promises to its adherents, a return of society to a prelapsarian state , is impossible ; but that this impossible thing, in the logic of conservatism, is also imperative to achieve, lest civilization collapse, and good people suffer a kind of living death.

To understand the “imperative” part, note how conservatives talk in every generation about whatever it is they identify as the latest existential threat to civilization.

“The demand is for the abolition of all distinctions … It attacks the integrity of the family; it attacks the eternal decrees of God Almighty; it denies and repudiates the obligations of motherhood.” (That was a delegate to the California constitutional convention of 1879, speaking on a motion to give women the vote.)

“Never in the history of the world has any measure [been] so insidiously designed … to enslave workers … The lash of the dictator will be felt … [It will] pull the pillars of the temple down upon the heads of our descendants.” (That was Republican congressmen in the debate over Social Security in 1935.)

“You and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children, and our children’s children, what it once was like in America when men were free.” (That was Ronald Reagan in 1961, talking about what would happen if Congress enacted Medicare.)

“We won’t have a country anymore.” (Donald Trump, 2015–present, usually about “open borders,” but more recently , about what will happen if he loses in November.)

When conservatives lose fights like these, and civilizations stand nonetheless, conservatives just move on to the next existential threat: people using the “wrong” bathrooms, lab-grown meat, or whatever else is invented by some clever ideological entrepreneur.

Which is strange. Imagine living, as your basic orientation toward the world, under the imperative/impossible dyad. No wonder conservatives, as a basic psychological proposition, tend to feel so angry and unhinged.

What is even stranger is when conservatives win . When this, that, or the other liberal horror they’ve been working decades to repeal is finally repealed (think, most recently, of the right to abortion). When after decades of struggle, they take command of a marquee institution like the Supreme Court. When they control the White House, House, and Senate, like they did between 2017 and 2019. And yet that never makes them less agitated. The promised return to a prelapsarian peace doesn’t feel any closer—because retuning to that fictional state is impossible.

Note how conservatives talk in every generation about whatever it is they identify as the latest existential threat to civilization.

Of course, a conservative could respond by moderating their expectations of what politics could achieve—but then other conservatives say they are no longer conservatives. They are “squishes,” “RINOs,” or “cucks.” No wonder there are fewer moderate Republicans to point to all the time.

A conservative could also respond by questioning the original premise. But if they do that, they are no longer “conservative” either.

Those who do affect this apostasy are often the most clear-eyed explicators of what happens next, as the imperative/impossible dyad continues to fail to deliver. Constituents demand, and conservative politicians offer, even more radical panaceas, the problem always being that the previous ones were not conservative enough . Ever-more-elaborate conspiracy theories as the only explanation for the disappointment. Ever-more-fierce hunts for quislings to purge. Ever-more-metastasizing scapegoating. Anger at the designated Others who must have made it happen—for conservatism itself can never be the problem. Conservatism, as I once wrote, never fails. It is only failed.

This is why I now describe the history of conservatism as a ratchet. It must always move in an invariably more authoritarian direction, with no possible end point but an apocalyptic one.

Just listen to any recent Donald Trump speech: The redemptive promises he makes are more insanely fantastical with each passing day. Imagine the disappointment their serial failures will bring in their wake, which can never redound on him. (Conservatism never fails …) They must instead be blamed on the Enemy.

Which is us.

That is why another Trump term—or the potential insurgency after a Trump defeat—may be traumatic beyond our poor powers to imagine it. People seem to think there’s some modern American exception to the ease with which human beings can turn to violence on a mass scale, and the pleasure they will take in it, once they receive sanction from on high to do so. It can happen here. It might.

But believe it or not, contemplating that is not what is making me so depressed.

LOOK AT THE FIRST PARAGRAPH OF THIS ESSAY: its reference to “them.” I’m not talking about right-wingers.

There have always been right-wingers. They’ve always harbored the potential to do the most terrible things imaginable. After all my years dwelling intellectually among them, I’ve devised ways to retain equanimity while staring down that particular abyss, and become adept at taking in their harshest assaults. I’m talking about the kind of person who tracks down your email to let you know they hope someday to flay all the skin off your body (I got that one for calling the Vietnam POW/MIA flag “racist”); or the kind of Fox News host who spits out “that Perlstein ,” as a picture of me with my nose photoshopped to be 15 percent more Jew-y flashes on the screen; or a top-drawer right-wing publicist, one of the people at the vanguard in driving Bill Clinton’s impeachment, trying to smear my career out of existence for writing a book critical of Ronald Reagan.

No, the injury grinding me down is built of much smaller differences. It comes from encounters with colleagues and comrades on the left. What we disagree on, as you might have guessed, is endorsing a Democratic president who shares responsibility for the massacre of tens of thousands of innocents, in a criminal war that another country’s quite fascist leader seems to be pursuing, not merely out of fanatical bloodlust and racism but in order to stay in power and perhaps to avoid prison.

It’s happening, no surprise, on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, where I’ve been drafted as an apologist for “Genocide Joe” for arguing why the alternative is so much worse.

People who read me here won’t be particularly surprised to learn that I agree with these interlocutors that the best word the English language gives us to describe what the IDF is doing to the population trapped within Gaza is, indeed, “genocide.” And while I think the version of the argument that holds that Joe Biden himself is committing genocide is a grievous violation of reason, I still believe that, considering the tools at his disposal to stop it, Biden’s moral culpability for the slaughter is only a few notches below that.

So, saying you should vote for him anyway is a hard argument to make. Maybe I should be gentler on myself that I’ve not managed to persuade the literally thousands of people on the left raining abuse down upon me for making it. All the same, my failure is gutting me worse than anything that has happened to me before in my career.

What it comes down to, I guess, is this. If I of all people can’t convince people on the left to fight right-wing authoritarians who consider them veritable Untermenschen , then what the hell have I been wasting half my life on this work for?

FORMERLY-KNOWN-AS-TWITTER IS NOT REAL LIFE , they say, and you can dismiss a lot of the nastiness, especially when it’s attached to a pseudonym, as the product of minds not mature enough to know better.

But it has also come from grown-ups with considerable cultural capital, including people I deeply admire. When I reposted a picture of an IDF soldier proudly sitting and reading in the library of Gaza City’s Aqsa University, in front of a set of shelves he and his unit had set on fire, a response shredded my insides more than anything I had ever fielded about my writing (including the guy who wanted to flay me alive). It came from someone who is a major intellectual influence on me. It amounted to: Rick Perlstein thinks you should vote for Biden, because under Trump, the books will burn faster.

Not bad, by Algonquin Round Table standards: That’s genuine wit. You’ll have a hard time finding the post, though, if you care to search, because by the time this essay is posted I plan to have closed down my formerly-known-as-Twitter account, at least until people can be counted on to have moved on. It’s hardly an original insight to point out that the incentives on social media are set up to award the hit-and-run over respectful mutual engagement. So I’ll take a break—not least because I am very guilty of that sin, too.

My worst offense was an over-the-top claim that we can expect second-term Trump to urge Israel to use nuclear weapons, that they just might, and that this would lead to World War III and global Armageddon—and, well, isn’t that worse than what is happening now?

The thing is, I don’t really believe it. Still, I convinced myself I did, doubling down, patronizing people by claiming they just didn’t know the literature , etc. My temptation to histrionic speculation was born of the logic of fka Twitter: to score points. It helped nothing. It opened me up to a mocking that was probably deserved.

I’ve certainly made arguments there that I stand behind, ones that don’t demand speculation about what Trump would do, but point to what he has done. Trump doesn’t care about causing mass death when those dying are red-blooded Americans. In my column on sociologist Eric Klinenberg’s book on COVID, I cited a study demonstrating that if the United States had the same COVID death rate as Australia, 900,000 more people would be alive today. This is largely Trump’s fault, for refusing to do things Australia did like establish federal task forces, publicly subsidize necessary equipment, establish uniform lockdown policies and contact-tracing protocols, respect and empower the relevant public-health experts, etc. The reason he did not was his infantile magic thinking that if he pretended there was not a crisis, there would not be one, and he would not be blamed. Imagine how much less he’d care about corpses in a “shithole” like Gaza.

Another argument I stand by is a hoary cliché of the “lesser evil” sweepstakes: quoting Frederick Douglass’s famous advice to recently enfranchised Black voters that “the Republican Party is the ship, all else the sea.” I pointed out that, in 1872, white Republicans’ willingness to sell out multiracial democracy in the South was already in evidence, and the sharecropping system that forced Blacks into conditions almost as bad as slavery already in formation. So was Frederick Douglass pro-sharecropping? No, he was just saying that the leaky, rusting pile they were stuck with beat the hell out of drowning. It was a 19th-century version of imploring people once to hold their noses and support another oft-pathetic political party, our own benighted Democrats.

The authoritarian ratchet grinds ceaselessly on, with anti-authoritarians helpless to stop it.

Be that as it may. For making arguments like these, I learned I was “a genocidal racist and it defines your politics, your character, and your scholarship.” And maybe I’ll keep pushing arguments like these, somewhere. But not chez Elon Musk.

I don’t trust my own infantile temptation to answer back snark for snark, to dream up cleverer cheap shots, to fantasize about spurring my own troops to a pile-on. So no more. De-escalation, or nothing.

Blame Joe Biden for this present mess, sure—this guy without the character to grasp how vulnerable any campaign would be for a second term that ends at age 86. This guy without the wisdom or foresight to conspicuously groom a successor. This guy who, in some unreachable recess of his brain, seems to have convinced himself he’s somehow saving another six million Jews from death by letting Benjamin Netanyahu indiscriminately massacre Palestinians.

Or, hell, blame Adolf Hitler, for making what was once the ideology of only a tiny minority of Jews—state-based Zionism—seem suddenly the only viable solution to the worst refugee crisis the world had ever seen.

Blame whoever you want, because either way, no one’s getting anywhere on fka Twitter.

One thing I’ve been thinking about a lot instead: calling the guys (the debaters seem to be all male, for what it’s worth) who’ve been slamming me. On the telephone, like in the olden days. Ask where they are coming from. Establish a common ground of understanding. Then , maybe, have the arguments.

Because what happens on fka Twitter, and I hope my interlocutors there don’t find this too patronizing, aren’t even actually arguments . They can be, certainly. But according to a koan issued by a long-forgotten social critic named Marshall McLuhan: The medium is the message . How a conduit for information structures that information determines how that information comes across. In Elon’s house, collecting endorphin hits from piling up points—follows, retweets, pile-ons, etc.—is just too easy. And in the world we live in, in 2024, all of us need some kind of narcotic just to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

It’s a symptom . A symptom of a time when oceans are rising and fires are burning and trust is evaporating and guns are proliferating, when AI is embraced headlong even as proof piles up that it just makes everything worse. A symptom of what happens when one broken society, the United States, smashes up against another broken society, Israel. A symptom of institutionalized stupidity, like Jews getting regularly called antisemites for not holding the same opinions as the most powerful people in society. People gulp the available pixel-pills to keep from feeling too much pain—which only makes us all more insane, and thus adds to the diseases causing the pain.

We need the drug. He’s got the drug. That makes this particular opium den, whatever the stakes of the arguments, just one more manifestation of an entire society in unceasing fight-or-flight mode, looking for an enemy to blame or a bunker to hide in. Our highbrow version of the thoroughgoing trashiness of MAGA culture. If it wasn’t, people agreeing on 95 percent of everything else wouldn’t be acting like such assholes to one another.

For me, it’s a symptom most of all of my helplessness, as the authoritarian ratchet grinds ceaselessly on, with anti-authoritarians helpless to stop it whether we “win” in Washington or not, with the way one group of anti-authoritarians accuses another group of anti-authoritarians of being complicit “shitlibs,” and with that group accusing the first group of sole responsibility for every loss to the Republicans since the time when convention power brokers smoked backroom cigars. It was my New Year’s resolution two years ago to do whatever I could to keep an operational peace between “liberals” and the “left”; and how’s that working out for me?

As I like to point out in another of those arguments I kept futilely making on fka Twitter, the bad guys want to put us all in stretchers, not recognizing any distinction we’d care to make. It’s like an old joke from the 1960s. A cop bops a liberal on the head with a billy club at an anti-war protest, calling him a “Commie” as he slaps the bracelets on him.

“But officer, I’m an anti- Communist!”

“I don’t care what kind of Communist you are, you’re coming with me.”

No wonder I’ve been depressed.

LAST NOVEMBER, ON FRESH AIR , at the end of an interview with the outstanding and prolific writer Garrett Graff , who had written a new book on the possibility of life on other planets, Terry Gross asked him to reflect back on an interview they’d done two years earlier about a prescient article he’d published about the damage Trump might still do to democracy in his remaining weeks in the White House. “So I’m wondering what you’re thinking now about Trump … if he does manage, in spite of all the indictments, to get re-elected.”

I deeply appreciated Graff’s response. He said it better than I could.

“Let me give you an answer,” he began, “that, unexpectedly, is going to connect to UFOs.”

Gross laughed. I didn’t. I had some idea where he was going.

The scientists who work on SETI—the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence—have this thing called the “Drake Equation.” It’s an equation that is supposed to predict the number of intelligent civilizations out there, and how many there are at any given time. The main variable scientists call “L,” which stands for the length of time an advanced civilization lasts. To me, the challenge is, L could turn out to be, based on where humanity is heading, a pretty short number. And when you look around our world right now … there’s no guarantee that human civilization is around for that much longer … So to me, when I look at Donald Trump’s possible return to power, what I’m thinking about right now is what it does to the L of American democracy and human civilization and how it could, and almost certainly would, accelerate the unwinding of modern American life.

Me, too. I can’t be the only one whose unconscious figures out ways to keep them in bed until noon, even on sunny spring days where everything else in life is full of safety, sweetness, rewarding work. Read Auden, he said it even better than anyone: We must love each other, or die.

But there I go again, being histrionic. I can’t help it. It’s simply how I understand the stakes.

Extra! Extra! Got Infernally Triangular questions you’d like to see answered in a future column? Send them to [email protected] .

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Essays About Politics: Top 5 Examples and 7 Writing Prompts

Essays about politics address delicate and intriguing matters. See our top essay examples and prompts you can incorporate into your writing.

Politics encompasses movements and ideas that aim to control and encourage progress. It attempts to run a country through relevant developments and efficient governance. Though it started in the 19th century , it’s also the root of many disputes. Because of its complexity, politics is a famous essay topic coaxing writers to be open-minded and wise. It’s also an extensive subject to tackle.

5 Best Essay Examples

1. the impact of media on teens’ views on politics by anonymous on gradesfixer.com, 2. the problem of gun politics in the united states by anonymous on papersowl.com, 3. education: controversial issue in florida politics by anonymous on ivypanda.com, 4. the politics of modern day abortion in jamaica by anonymous on ivypanda.com, 5. the importance of public awareness in politics by anonymous on gradesfixer.com, 1. the role of a politician, 2. why do we need political parties, 3. qualifications of a good politician, 4. the effect of having uneducated politicians , 5. social media and political campaigns, 6. politics and corruption, 7. if i were a politician….

“With the spike in internet usage and the rapid spread of thoughts and ideas, the effect on the human psyche comes into question. Applications like Instagram and Twitter have a “Like-Button” that acts as a representation for interest and has created an uproar on the need for attention amongst teens.”

The author examines the different media released online that are easily accessible to young people and how these contents receive engagement through likes and comments. The essay talks about government officials with social media accounts and how their simple posts can instantly change a teen’s view about politics. The piece also includes statistics on teens’ participation in these networking sites, the elections, and the effects of teens on politics.

“Every day 39 children and teens are shot and survive, 31 injured in an attack, 1 survives a suicide attempt and 7 shot unintentionally. Not only is the 2nd amendment giving access to guns to protect ourselves, it is giving others access to commit violent crimes that involve a firearm. Guns are not just used to have protection against harm, but it is also used to create dangerous scenarios out in the public.”

The essay delves into gun politics problems for US citizens. It mentions how bearing guns give people easy access to heinous acts such as mass shootings and suicides. The writer offers relevant statistics to demonstrate how severe the situation is, citing people who die or get injured from gun violence. At the end of the piece, the author says that they believe the 2nd amendment isn’t for protection but for crimes and violence.

“Some schools are already implementing full-time education, while others are not ready to accept students in person. Undoubtedly, this can still be dangerous for all stakeholders, but the state does not have a definite policy in this regard. Nevertheless, online education also comes with some challenges. It is difficult for teachers to maintain the required level of quality of distance learning.”

The essay focuses on Florida’s politics and how it affects the state’s educational system. Even after the pandemic’s peak, some Florida schools still struggle to implement policies that may help their schooling structure. The author also mentions that these institutions do not prioritize students’ mental health and don’t take racism seriously, which leads to high suicide rates and violence.

“Currently Jamaica maintains one of the most unique positions, with abortion being illegal officially, but still performed as part of the status quo in particular situations. The discussion around abortion in Jamaica is inherently complex, stemming from colonial influences on modern sociopolitical and religious perspectives.

The author shares their opinion about Jamaica’s political view on abortion and the protection of women. Abortion is illegal in Jamaica. However, some still do it by paying medical professionals handsomely. Abortion is a complex issue in Jamaica, as there are many things politicians need to consider before coming up with a solution. Although this topic still needs a lengthy discussion, the author believes there is a massive opportunity for change as people gradually forget the traditional beliefs about abortion.

“It’s imperative to get involved with politics so people can get educated and grasp their own opinion instead of listening to others. These aspects are vital to the understanding of how the government works and how a citizen of America will shape the country.”

The writer explains that being aware of politics is key to voting correctly during elections. Moreover, they say that involving young people in politics will help with the structure of the laws in the country. This is because understanding politics and governance yourself is better than believing others’ opinions, mainly when the country’s future depends on this framework.

Tip: If writing an essay sounds like a lot of work, simplify it. Write a simple 5 paragraph essay instead. 

7 Prompts on Essays About Politics

List the duties and responsibilities of a politician running the country. Then, add your opinion on whether your country’s politicians are successfully fulfilling their duties. You can also discuss whether politicians are necessary for a country to thrive.

Political parties are groups of people sharing the same political ideas. They usually band together and support each other in hopes of earning the public’s trust. They also help shape the opinions and decision-making of the citizens on who to vote for. Use this prompt to discuss why political parties are essential in a government, give examples, and add some of their principles. You might also be interested in our guide on the best books about American politics .

Everyone can be a politician. But to be good at their job, they must have an excellent educational background and character to manage the country’s issues and its citizens. Identify and explain each qualification. You can also add events or names of politicians considered good at their jobs. 

Education is a right for everyone in most countries, and so does having educated politicians. An uneducated politician can’t successfully run a nation because they lack the knowledge to discern what’s best for different segments of the economy, etc. As a result, they tend to make wrong decisions and affect citizens’ political behavior. Discuss the risks of giving uneducated politicians government positions and add previous incidents to support your claims.

Social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram are utilized to spread information, including political campaigns. A single post from a knowledgeable person across these three platforms can change a silent reader’s mindset about a particular political party. This prompt explains how politicians use social media in today’s political campaigning. You can also add the dangers of immediately believing viral posts online. 

Politics is also concerned with managing budgets to improve infrastructures and institutions. However, because it involves large sums of money, corruption is also rampant. Use this prompt to explain how corruption happens within the government, including the measures used to stop it. You can add statistics about the most and least corrupt countries. Then, add examples or scenarios to make your essay more interesting.

Being a politician is not easy because you’ll have to consider not only yourself and your family but the welfare of many in every decision you make. Use this prompt to share what you want to focus on if you are a politician. For example, you’ll pay more attention to education so the youth can have a better future.

For help with your essays, check out our round-up of the best essay checkers.

Maria Caballero is a freelance writer who has been writing since high school. She believes that to be a writer doesn't only refer to excellent syntax and semantics but also knowing how to weave words together to communicate to any reader effectively.

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Student voices

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Tips for writing Politics essays

15 February 2023 by Kitty

Hiya! I’m Kitty, and I study Politics with International Relations at the University of York! In my blog post, I share the methods I’ve developed to write a good Politics essay. Academic writing is very different to anything I had done before, and it took me a while to understand how to go about developing the correct skills.

Expectations vs reality

When I started university, I felt confident that I’d have no issues with writing essays, as it was something I was well practised in thanks to my A levels. When I received feedback suggesting that my approach to academic essays and writing wasn’t quite right, I felt my confidence waver and I was unsure how to adapt my skills. Through a bit of trial and error, I have developed an approach to essays which has drastically improved my confidence and skill.

Essay preparation

Throughout first year, I noticed that my skills improved as I read more academic articles. These exposed me to academic writing, and just through reading them for seminar work, I noticed that I was becoming more accustomed to the style. When I first started writing essays, I found looking back at articles an easy way to remind myself of the style and format.

I also started putting more effort into the formative assessments, as this is the main opportunity to receive feedback on your essay style. If the feedback is ever unclear or leaves me with questions, I make sure to go to the tutor’s feedback and guidance hours. I often find verbal discussions more useful than written feedback, so I try to make a note of any important information. This way, I am able to remind myself of what was said while I’m writing the essay.

Do some wider reading

When I plan an essay, I like to start by reading some of the key resources on the topic to ensure that I have a good understanding of the central debates. I usually look through the reading list on the VLE, as this tends to have the most relevant resources. As I’m reading these, I will make a note of the resources they reference, as this is another quick way to find the relevant texts. While reading, I make notes of any nuggets of information or quotes that I think could be useful to include in my essay. I always try to note the page numbers as I go, to save myself from having to search through again later.

Give your essay some structure

Once I feel that I have read enough resources to give me a good overview of the topic, I think of how I want to structure my essay, using the existing literature to develop my own argument. I start by creating a rough structure of the essay using bullet points and brief notes of what will be said where. I then start to expand the bullet points by adding in references to resources and my own opinion. Slowly the bullet points transform into sentences, paragraphs, sections, and eventually an essay.

Often, I find that I need to adapt the essay as I write, and I always try to leave enough time to have a few days break from it. This allows me to re-read the essay with fresh eyes. Having some distance from my work helps me identify any errors in the writing or overall structure, and gives me time to make any changes I see necessary. I also try to get a friend or family member to read over the essay to ensure it’s understandable to someone who’s not as close to the topic. This is important, as sometimes I phrase something in a way which I think is digestible, but actually isn’t very clear.

I have developed this approach to essays through a lot of trial and error, but find that a methodical and steady style works best for me.

Best of luck in your future essays!

Read more student experiences of studying Politics at York.

About Kitty

I’m Kitty, and I study Politics with International Relations at the University of York! I’m in my final year, and have found the course incredibly engaging and enjoyable!

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16 August 2023 at 2.00 pm

this is really helpful thank you 🙂

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Politics Essay Writing Guide

The analysis of political life is largely based on the written word. In both academic and ‘real world’ debates on politics, the examination of texts – books, journal articles, official reports, declarations etc. – is central and highly prized. All of the great political speeches in history began life on a blank page before a word was even uttered. In your studies as a politics student, it should not be surprising, therefore, that the practice of writing will occupy a major proportion of your time. This will involve you doing different types of writing, including shorter presentation outlines in seminars, book reviews, examination answers and larger dissertations. This guide is focused on the art of essay writing, although many of the recommendations expressed below will be relevant to the other forms of writing you will conduct. At the outset, it is important to underscore that there is no single ‘correct’ way to write a great politics essay but, rather, many potential avenues that could be selected. However, this guide contains a series of suggestions and tips that, if acted upon in an effective manner, may increase the likelihood of you achieving higher marks and enjoying the essay writing experience.

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4.3: Civic, Political, and Private Life

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• Robert W. Maloy & Torrey Trust
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Standard 4.3: Civic, Political, and Private Life

Distinguish among civic, political, and private life. (Massachusetts Curriculum Framework for History and Social Studies) [8.T4.3]

FOCUS QUESTION: What are the differences and interconnections between civic, political, and private lives?

In America's democratic society, people engage in three different types of social life: Civic, Political, and Private.

• Civic life is the "public life of the citizen concerned with the affairs of the community and nation as contrasted with private or personal life, which is devoted to the pursuit of private and personal interests" ( Center for Civic Education, 2014, para. 2 ). How people act in relation to their town, city, or community is known as a person's " civic duty. "
• Political life is where individuals seek to influence and/or direct local, state, or national policies through interaction with the government. Political life "enables people to accomplish goals they could not realize as individuals" ( Center for Civic Education, 2014, para. 4 ). One engages in political life by voting and actively participating in politics through individual and group actions and by becoming informed about key issues and pending decisions by government leaders.
• Private life is the area of individual behavior and action that is removed from political and civic life, but in theory protected by both. Private life includes the concept of privacy which refers to the right of an individual to live one's life without interference from or control by people or governments. Individuals' right of privacy is highly contested in United States politics. It is at the center of the Roe v. Wade abortion decision and a woman's right to choice as a matter of personal control. Privacy concerns are also raised by the ways companies conducting online activities collect personal information about adults and children, often without one knowing about it (see Right to Privacy: Constitutional Rights & Privacy Laws ).

What are the dimensions of civic, political, and private lives in the United States today? The modules for this standard explore this question by first examining whether the government can restrict personal freedoms (private life) in a public health emergency such as the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. Other modules examine women's political participation (political life) around the world and whether the United States should adopt Universal Basic Income (civic life) as a national policy.

Modules for this Standard Include:

• MEDIA LITERACY CONNECTIONS: COVID-19 Information Evaluation
• MEDIA LITERACY CONNECTIONS: Women Political Leaders in the Media
• ENGAGE: Should the U.S. Adopt Universal Basic Income (UBI) or Guaranteed Employment as National Policies?

4.3.1 INVESTIGATE: People's Lives and Government Responses to COVID-19

The U.S. response to the 2020 COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic revealed the interconnections and tensions that exist between civic, public, and private life in this country's democratic society. The coronavirus outbreak began in the United States in late January 2020 - the first confirmed case was January 21st; the first reported death was in early February . The disease spread quickly. A national emergency was declared on March 13. By the beginning of April, there were COVID-19 cases in all 50 states with hotspots centered in Washington state and New York City.

Governments at the national, state, and local level responded, although each had different powers to enact and enforce coronavirus policies . In an effort to limit the spread of the disease, the federal government issued recommendations for social distancing, wearing of masks, and closing of federal offices. Some state governments went further, closing public schools, colleges and non-essential businesses; shutting down parks, lakes and common spaces; and issuing stay-at-home orders for entire communities. Other states chose not to close businesses, restrict travel, or issue stay-at-home orders. In every instance, local governments and their police departments were then expected to enforce COVID-19 rules, but lacked the resources to do so without high levels of public cooperation.

Unlike the United States, other nations in the world imposed much greater restrictions on people's freedoms in response to COVID-19. China locked down some 60 million people, many in isolation centers. India subsequently locked down 1.3 billion people, the largest quarantine in world history. In those nations, the national government used the pandemic to order draconian restrictions on people's private lives.

What are the government's powers to intervene in people's lives in a national emergency? The question impacts people's civic, political, and private lives. The federal government does have public health powers and could issue a national federal quarantine order, as was done during the "Spanish Flu" pandemic of 1918-1919 ( Legal Authorities for Isolation and Quarantine , Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2020).

However, long-standing constitutional law gives the states and their governors greater legal authority to act in public health emergencies ( The Police Power of the States to Control a Pandemic, Explained ). The ruling precedent, set by the Supreme Court in Gibbons v. Odgen (1824) is that the police power belongs to the states . Quarantine laws, Chief Justice John Marshall said, "form a portion of that immense mass of legislation which embraces everything within the territory of a State not surrendered to the General Government" (as cited in Bomboy, 2020, para. 7).

Individual citizens also have rights in such situations. Under the 14th Amendment, public health laws cannot be "arbitrary, oppressive and unreasonable" (Constitutional Powers and Issues During a Quarantine, 2020, para. 11). According to the Human Rights Watch (2020), restrictions on people's rights during an emergency must be " lawful, necessary and proportionate " ( para. 14 ).

The COVID-19 pandemic blended civic, political, and private lives in unique ways. Government action is effective only if there are rules and people see it as their duty to obey them. People must believe it is everyone's civic responsibility to ensure health and safety for all. At the same time, people have a right, within reason, to make their own choices about their personal lives and private conduct. Politically, people will be more likely to accept restrictions of personal freedoms if they believe they will not lose their jobs or homes and they will have access to needed health care, unemployment funding and essential services during a pandemic. Learn more: Why There Is No National Lockdown .

Finding ways to bring individuals' civic, political, and private interests together is complicated by everyone's presumed right of privacy (see Patient Right to Privacy Called into Question During COVID-19 Pandemic ). Although the right to privacy is not mentioned in the Constitution, the Supreme Court has interpreted several of the amendments to establish this right ( Does the Constitution Protect the Right of Privacy? ). Students in schools, however, do not have the same wide-ranging privacy rights as do adults in homes and communities ( Students: Your Right to Privacy ).

Does the increasing use of social media blur the line between people's private life and political life when encountering an event as unprecedented as COVID-19? How do you know? In what ways? As a nation, we are still debating how to effectively balance private and civic interests in a time of a pandemic, a process that has many political dimensions.

Media Literacy Connections: COVID-19 Information Evaluation

There has been an array of fake and false claims in the media about the severity and duration of the COVID-19 pandemic. This has led to very different responses by people throughout the country to government-based COVID-19 policies and recommendations (e.g., mask requirements, lockdown, social distancing).

Have you been able to distinguish fake news about COVID-19 from the truthful and reliable information and guidance? How do you think other students and community members did with evaluating news about COVID-19? The following activities are designed to explore these questions.

• Activity 1: Counter False News about COVID-19
• Activity 2: Evaluate Twitter Posts about COVID-19 in Regards to Civic, Political, and Private Life

Suggested Learning Activities

• What are examples of issues that influence the civic, political, and private lives of students?
• Should individuals' rights be restricted during a national emergency to protect the broader public?
• What restrictions should a government be allowed to impose on individuals and businesses during a national public health emergency, like a pandemic, or a natural disaster, like a hurricane or earthquake?

Online Resources for Civic, Political and Private Life and the Right of Privacy

• How Can Citizens Participate? , Center for Civic Education
• Recalling the Supreme Court's Historic Statement on Contraception and Privacy, National Constitution Center
• Griswold v. Connecticut (1972) : Supreme Court case held that a state's ban on contraceptives violated the right to privacy of married couples. The case included the concept people have a "zone of privacy."
• Where Did the Right to Privacy Come From? , ThoughtCo. (May 31, 2018)

4.3.2 UNCOVER: Women's Political Participation Around the World

New Zealand was the first country to grant women the right to vote in 1893. Today, Vatican City is the only country where women cannot vote (Saudi Arabia began allowing women to vote in 2015).

Even with the right to vote, women's entry into positions of political leadership has been slow internationally. At the beginning of 2019, women were more than half of the lawmakers only in Rwanda (61.3%), Cuba (52.2%) and Bolivia (51.3%). According to the World Economic Forum, the United States ranked 75th on a "Women in Parliamen" list with just 23.5% of members of Congress being female ( Thorton, 2019 ).

Consult Women's Power Index , an interactive map from the Council on Foreign Relations that identifies where women have power around the world.

Internationally, 59 countries have elected a woman leader, beginning in 1960 with Simimavo Bandaranaike , who was chosen Prime Minister in Ceylon/Sri Lanka ( All the Countries (59) That Had a Woman Leader Before the U.S. ). Angela Merkel (Germany), Sahle-Work Zewde (Zimbabwe), Jacinda Ardern (New Zealand), Katrin Jakobsdottir (Iceland), and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf (Liberia) were among the women-led countries in 2019 ( Female Heads of State and Government in 2019 ).

In 2016 in Iceland, women held 30 of 63 seats in Parliament making it the most gender equal political system in the world without a quota system ( The Tiny Nation of Iceland is Crushing the U.S. in Electing Female Politicians ).

For a video of interest, check out Women Leaders of the Yukon First Nations (TEDWomen, 2020) that discusses the long history of women leaders among tribal peoples in northwestern Canada. Visit also the website of the Yukon Aborignial Women's Council .

Gender Quotas and Gender Parity

There are 80 countries in the world that have quotas for women's electoral participation in government ( The Washington Post , March 29, 2019). The word "quota" refers to "numerical targets that stipulate the number or percentage of women that must be included in a candidate list or the number of seats to be allocated to women in a legislature" ( Women in National Governments Around the Globe , February 8, 2021, p. 4). Most quotas are set at 30% women, but they range from 20% to 40%.

Quotas function differently in different countries. In some places, quotas reserve seats for women in national legislatures. In other places, quotas reserve places for women on election ballots or ask political parties to voluntarily nominate women candidates for elected office.

There are examples where quotas have expanded women's political participation. India has reserved one-third of seats in the local governments for women since 1993; legislation is pending to extend that rule to all state legislatures and the lower house of the national parliament. A 1999 constitutional amendment in France mandated political parties "endorse an equal number of men and women candidates in municipal, legislative and European elections" ( French Women in Politics , Lambert, 2001, para. 13). For more than two decades, Belgium has required political parties to put equal numbers of women and men on election ballots. In 2014, Mexico began requiring gender parity among candidates for its national legislature.

Would you support gender quotas for local, state, or national elections in the United States? Would you favor voluntary quotas for political parties or gender parity mandated by law?

You can access a country-by-country breakdown of women's participation in electoral politics at Gender Quotas Database .

Impacts of Women's Political Leadership

"Do women leaders perform differently than men in similar positions?"

This research subject has taken on new immediacy in a time of a global pandemic and heightened international tensions. Exploring why women-led nations did better addressing the COVID-19 pandemic, a New York Times reporter suggested female leaders (like Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand and Angela Merkel of Germany) were more willing to consult a broader range of information sources than male leaders when deciding to implement virus testing, contract tracing, and social isolation measures ( Taub, 2020 ). In the United States, however, that same report found both female and male Republican governors were slower to implement virus control shut-down measures than their Democrat peers, suggesting political party affiliation was a stronger influence than gender-based dispositions.

For additional information, go to ENGAGE: Can a Woman Be Elected President or Vice President in the United States?

Media Literacy Connections: Women Political Leaders in the Media

Media coverage of women in political roles can vary greatly. Some women are in the news all the time; others are hardly ever mentioned. Those who appear regularly are often presented differently depending on the political lean of different media outlets. Social scientists have shown that the media cover women and men political leaders differently. Stories about women in politics more often mention their appearance, clothing, family, and instances of combative behavior, all in line with traditional gender stereotypes. Such gender bias hinders women and helps male leaders politically.

In these activities, you will examine how women political leaders are represented in the media, both in the United States and in different countries around the world.

• Activity 1: Examine the Representation of Women Political Leaders in the Media
• Activity 2: Evaluate the Media Representation Women Leaders in Different Countries and Careers
• Why is the proportion of women leaders around the world so small?
• How Do We Get More Women in Politics? World Economic Forum
• History of Women's Suffrage Timeline shows when women around the world were granted suffrage and given the right to stand for election
• Visual timeline showing when women were granted suffrage around the world.

Online Resources on Women's Political Participation Around the World

• Percentage of Women in National Parliaments
• OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) Interactive Data on women's political participation around the world (2015)
• Angela Merkel , Chancellor of Germany, sometimes referred to as the "Leader of the Free World". She was named Time's Person of the Year in 2015.
• Women Rising: Political Leadership in Africa , YouTube Video
• Interview with Bharati Silwal-Giri, member of Nepali Congress Party and expert on gender, YouTube Video
• Text of speech by Michelle Bachelet , UN Women Executive Director, on women's political participation worldwide

4.3.3 ENGAGE: Should the U.S. Adopt Universal Basic Income (UBI) or Guaranteed Employment as National Policies?

Universal basic income (UBI) refers to regular cash payments (with minimal or no requirements for receiving the money) made to a given population in order to increase people's income ( International Monetary Fund ). Debating Universal Basic Income from the Wharton Public Policy Initiative offers more information about this policy.

Guaranteed employment happens when the government becomes the employer for anyone who cannot otherwise find work. The idea is the economy will be better off when there is full employment when all workers are spending the money they earn purchasing goods and services from businesses and other providers (The Federal Job Guarantee: A Policy to Achieve Full Employment, Center on Budget and Policy Futures, 2018). Guaranteed employment was a centerpiece of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Economic Bill of Rights that set forth a "right to employment" as well as the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Direct Government Payments to People During the Pandemic

The economic dislocations caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has pushed the topic of direct government payments to individuals and families as well as the possibilities of universal basic income and guaranteed employment into the wider political dialog. By mid-April 2020, with more than 22 million people out of work, members of Congress, including then-Senator Kamala Harris and Representatives Maxine Waters, Ro Khanna, and Tim Ryan, among others, were calling for ongoing direct payments to unemployed workers. In his April 2020 Easter Sunday Address, Pope Francis called for governments to consider a universal basic wage . During summer 2020, one in five workers (more than 30 million individuals) were collecting unemployment benefits.

Beginning in April 2020, the federal government has provided 3 rounds of stimulus checks (direct payments to eligible individuals and couples) to provide emergency aid to those impacted by the pandemic, the most recent coming from the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan passed in March 2021. Under that plan, eligible individuals will receive a $1400 check and eligible couples $2800, and there is an additional $1400 for each dependent child. The American Rescue Plan is huge initiative that will be spending $43,000 every second between March 2021 and when it expires at the end of 2022.

Included in the American Rescue Plan is the Child Tax Credit (CTC) that provides direct payments of at least $250 per child every month, up to $3600 a year, between July and December 2021. While these payments are more of a tax cut rather than a form of Universal Basic Income, they will impact some 39 million households (about 90% of all families with children in this country). You can learn more from the Advanced Child Tax Credit Payments from Internal Revenue Service. The Child Tax Credit was originally created as part of the 1997 Taxpayer Relief Act.

Versions of Universal Basic Income

Universal Basic Income gained renewed publicity during the early stages of the 2020 Presidential campaign, when Democratic candidate and entrepreneur Andrew Yang proposed giving $1000 a month to every American over the age of 18. Yang, as well as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, among others, believe UBI will help address the growing problem of workers being displaced from their jobs by automation.

Other politicians regard UBI as a way to help the large numbers of Americans who are living at or near the poverty level and must work multiple jobs just to get by. The Census Bureau has reported that about 13 million workers in the U.S. have more than one job (Beckhusen, 2019).

There are UBI programs in existence right now. Alaska gives every resident a yearly check from the state's oil revenue called the Permanent Fund Dividend . In 2018, all residents received $1,600. Since February 2019, the city of Stockton, California paid 125 low-income residents $500 a month through its SEED (Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration) program ("Will 'Basic Income' Become the California Norm?"). The mayor of the city declared that "unconditional cash provides people the agency to make the right decisions for themselves and their families" ( Tubbs, 2020, para. 8 ).

Beginning in November 2020, Chelsea, Massachusetts, a majority Latino city across the Mystic River from Boston, will begin giving 2,074 families between $200 and $400 a month to use as those family members decide. The program, Chelsea Eats , which has funding from the Shah Family Foundation ($1 million), the city of Chelsea ($2.5 million), United Way of Massachusetts ($250,000) and Massachusetts General Hospital ($200,000) is scheduled to last for four to six months.

Guaranteed Jobs

As an alternative to UBI programs, 2020 Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has proposed a guaranteed government jobs program. Under his proposal, state and local governments would pay people to engage in public works projects related to areas of community need, such as construction of affordable housing, repair and replacement of aging infrastructure, and so on. Workers would be paid $15 an hour and receive paid family and medical leave. Since 2005, in India, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Act has provided 100 days of guaranteed employment every year for adult members of rural households who cannot find a job.

Persistent and Pervasive Income Inequality

Income inequality remains a persistent social problem because the rich are so much richer than everyone else. "Income disparities are so pronounced that America's top 10 percent now average more than nine times as much income as the bottom 90 percent, according to data analyzed by UC Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez," (as cited in Inequality.org, n.d., para. 3) . Providing people with a guaranteed income could make a huge difference for those struggling to survive on a monthly basis.

• Researchers have proposed $75,000 a year. Do you agree or disagree, and why?
• Universal Basic Income and Guaranteed Government Jobs are proposed as ways to create a more equitable society where everyone has an economic and social foundation for personally productive and meaningful lives.
• What steps would you take to create a more equitable society for all?

Online Resources for Universal Basic Income and Guaranteed Employment

• Why Everyone is Talking About Free Cash Handouts--An Explainer on Universal Basic Income , CNBC.com (June 27, 2019)
• 5 Characteristics of Basic Income, Basic Income Earth Network
• Who Really Stands to Win from Universal Basic Income? , The New Yorker (July 2, 2018)
• Universal Basic Income Has Been Tried Before. It Didn't Work. , The Heritage Foundation (October 9, 2018)

Standard 4.3 Conclusion:

Civic life is where people exercise their responsibilities by being active members of their community and nation. Political life is where people actively participate in government at the local, state, and national level as voters, engaged community members who protest and lobby for change, and as candidates for and holders of political offices. Private life is where individuals conduct their own affairs in their own ways. INVESTIGATE looked at how the government's responses to the COVID-19 pandemic impacted people's personal lives and freedoms. From the perspective of political life, UNCOVER examined women's political participation around the world. ENGAGE asked if the United States should adopt Universal Basic Income (UBI) or Guaranteed Employment as national economic, social and civic policies.

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Can I Talk About Politics on My College Applications?

What’s covered:, why is talking about politics not recommended, where can you mention politics in your application, how not to talk about politics in your application, how to effectively talk about politics in your application, where to get your essays edited.

For students interested in politics and government, you are told two conflicting pieces of information when it comes to college applications: talk about your interests and avoid politics. But if you avoid discussing politics, how will you show colleges what you are passionate about? 

We are here to make sense of this sticky situation and hopefully release you from the double bind politics can create. This post will explain when you can talk about politics in your application and how you should, and shouldn’t, go about it.

The general advice to avoid politics in college applications stems from the idea that you don’t want to offend anyone with your application. Politics is a charged topic that many people have strict opinions on, and although admission officers are supposed to be unbiased, they are still human and no one wants to feel like their ideals are being challenged. 

As a student, you have no idea who will read your application, so you have no way of knowing that person’s political beliefs. You might have liberal-leaning views on topics like gun reform and reproductive rights, but the admissions officer on the other side of your application might feel totally different. Even mentioning touchy subjects without discussing your opinion, like election losses or Supreme Court decisions, might trigger your readers and negatively impact how they perceive you.

It’s also recommended to avoid politics because institutions as a whole can have cultures that align with specific political ideologies. For example, liberal arts colleges are known for being more progressive and left-leaning, while some religious universities are aligned with more conservative values. It’s incredibly important to do your research before starting your application to gauge the culture of the school you are considering.

All that being said, don’t automatically assume you can write about how great the Democratic party is if you are applying to a liberal arts college. Just because a college has a reputation for a certain political affiliation does not mean each individual admissions officer identifies with that view. 

With all the traps you can fall into, we normally recommend steering clear of the topic. However, if politics is an essential part of who you are, take these recommendations with a grain of salt and learn how to write about politics in an effective, non-offensive way.

There are two main places in your application where politics will come up: your activities and your essays. You will never be directly asked about your political beliefs or party affiliation, so it would only come up on your application if you write about it in these two sections.

In the activities section, you can include political extracurriculars you are involved with. If you were the president of the Young Democrats/Young Republicans club at your school or the social media manager for a state representative, you should include those activities with pride. Don’t worry about hiding them at the bottom of your application; if they were your most impressive and most important extracurriculars, give them the attention they deserve.

Essays are the other place you can discuss politics because it allows you to expand on your passions. You could use your involvement with politics in a variety of essays, including your personal statement, community involvement topics, and extracurricular topics. However, you might encounter a topic about political and global issues , and in this case, you are welcome to—and expected—to discuss politics.

Stating Your Beliefs Without Providing Context to Your Life

Your political beliefs didn’t just appear out of nowhere—they were shaped and have evolved over years of life experience. Colleges care way more about the life experiences that shaped you and led you to hold your views than what the views are themselves. 

If you are talking about politics and just tell us what you believe without explaining why that’s the case, it could alienate your readers who disagree with your position. But, providing perspective on the experiences that shaped your opinion will make it easier for people with different beliefs to empathize and appreciate where you are coming from.

For example, writing about how you hate guns and think they should be banned in your essay might not go over well with your audience who holds a different view on guns. However, if you explain the mental strain of lockdown drills and the constant anxiety you feel because you grew up hearing about school shootings, your readers will be more understanding of why you have that view.

Describing a Politician’s Beliefs in Detail

When you are explaining the work you did on a campaign or as a politician’s assistant, don’t tell us what that politician’s political views are. Your college application is about you, not a politician, so no one needs to hear about their views on immigration, the work they’ve done to expand rights, or the bills they have sponsored and passed. Talk about the work you did, for example writing memos, sitting in on town hall meetings, and answering constituent questions.

The one exception to this is if you chose to work with a specific politician because of a specific issue they fight for that connects to you. If you volunteered with a politician working on expanding Green Card access because you come from a family of immigrants, then it’s okay. Just keep the focus largely on your background and connection to the topic, rather on the work the politician is doing.

Openly Trashing Other Viewpoints

This should be pretty self-explanatory, but don’t outwardly criticize and demonize opposing political beliefs. Going back to the points made before, you never know who will read your application and you don’t want to offend them. It goes back to the saying from kindergarten: if you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say it.

Lying About Your Stance

If you really want to attend a school where your political beliefs clash with the general culture of the school, don’t lie just to fit in. Students might be tempted to say their views align with the overall vibe of the school, but no good can come from lying on your application. 

Even when a school has a reputation for leaning towards one political ideology or the other, admissions officers want to create a class of diverse perspectives, so you don’t need to conform perfectly to the average student to gain admission.

Focus on Your Involvement Rather than Your Beliefs

When it comes to describing political extracurriculars, either in the activities section or your essays, the focus should be on your involvement, achievements, and lessons learned.

When writing about your work with the Young Democrats, say how you “ Organized annual voter registration drives where over 150 students registered for the upcoming election, ” rather than how you were “ Part of a club that promoted Democratic perspectives on topics like abortion, immigration, and the economy. ”

Treat your political extracurriculars like any other—you wouldn’t describe each soccer drill in depth, instead you would explain how you demonstrate leadership by carefully picking drills based on each player’s weakness. Use your involvement with politics to highlight your character and accomplishments, but don’t dwell on the nitty-gritty details of your beliefs.

Be Open-Minded to Different Perspectives

People tend to be very polarized on certain political topics which makes it difficult to discuss issues rationally. Having an open mind and being willing to hear new perspectives is not only an invaluable skill for future politicians, but any productive citizen. You want to demonstrate in your application that although you might hold certain beliefs, you are always committed to learning and engaging in productive debate to expand your perspective.

Align With the School’s Culture (As Best You Can)

As we mentioned before, each college has its own unique culture that you should take into account when discussing politics. If you are applying to a school like BYU, a Mormon-sponsored institution, you should probably avoid taking a strong pro-LGBTQ stance in your application.

If politics are an important topic to you and you feel like the school you are applying to requires you to censor yourself, you should reconsider whether that school is a good fit for you. If you still want to attend, you can frame your political stances in a way to minimize the gap between your viewpoint and that of the school. You can also consider discussing a political issue that’s more economic than social, as economic issues tend to be less contentious.

Avoid Racism, Sexism, and Bigotism of Any Kind!

Racist, sexist, homophobic, or any other type of bigoted comments on your application are not okay and should never be included under any circumstances. Regardless of your personal views or those of the politician you worked for, avoid anything that could be perceived as offensive. Including anything along these lines is the easiest way for you to get your application immediately rejected.

To make sure that you’re talking about politics in a way that is respectful and productive, you will want to get your essays edited by others. That’s why we created our Peer Essay Review tool , where you can get a free review of your essay from another student. Since they don’t know you personally, they can be a more objective judge of whether your personality shines through, and whether you’ve fully answered the prompt. 

If you want a college admissions expert to review your essay, advisors on CollegeVine have helped students refine their writing and submit successful applications to top schools. Find the right advisor for you to improve your chances of getting into your dream school!

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A Brief History of the Political Essay

From swift to woolf, david bromwich considers an evolving genre.

The political essay has never been a clearly defined genre. David Hume may have legitimated it in 1758 when he classified under a collective rubric his own Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary. “Political,” however, should have come last in order, since Hume took a speculative and detached view of politics, and seems to have been incapable of feeling passion for a political cause. We commonly associate political thought with full-scale treatises by philosophers of a different sort, whose understanding of politics was central to their account of human nature. Hobbes’s Leviathan , Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws , Rousseau’s Social Contract , Mill’s Representative Government , and, closer to our time, Rawls’s Theory of Justice , all satisfy that expectation. What, then, is a political essay? By the late 18th century, the periodical writings of Steele, Swift, Goldsmith, and Johnson had broadened the scope of the English essay for serious purposes. The field of politics, as much as culture, appeared to their successors well suited to arguments on society and government.

A public act of praise, dissent, or original description may take on permanent value when it implicates concerns beyond the present moment. Where the issue is momentous, the commitment stirred by passion, and the writing strong enough, an essay may sink deep roots in the language of politics. An essay is an attempt , as the word implies—a trial of sense and persuasion, which any citizen may hazard in a society where people are free to speak their minds. A more restrictive idea of political argument—one that would confer special legitimacy on an elite caste of managers, consultants, and symbolic analysts—presumes an environment in which state papers justify decisions arrived at from a region above politics. By contrast, the absence of formal constraints or a settled audience for the essay means that the daily experience of the writer counts as evidence. A season of crisis tempts people to think politically; in the process, they sometimes discover reasons to back their convictions.

The experience of civic freedom and its discontents may lead the essayist to think beyond politics. In 1940, Virginia Woolf recalled the sound of German bombers circling overhead the night before; the insect-like irritant, with its promise of aggression, frightened her into thought: “It is a queer experience, lying in the dark and listening to the zoom of a hornet which may at any moment sting you to death.” The ugly noise, for Woolf, signaled the prerogative of the fighting half of the species: Englishwomen “must lie weaponless tonight.” Yet Englishmen would be called upon to destroy the menace; and she was not sorry for their help. The mood of the writer is poised between gratitude and a bewildered frustration. Woolf ’s essay, “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid,” declines to exhibit the patriotic sentiment by which most reporters in her position would have felt drawn. At the same time, its personal emphasis keeps the author honest through the awareness of her own dependency.

Begin with an incident— I could have been killed last night —and you may end with speculations on human nature. Start with a national policy that you deplore, and it may take you back to the question, “Who are my neighbors?” In 1846, Henry David Thoreau was arrested for having refused to pay a poll tax; he made a lesson of his resistance two years later, when he saw the greed and dishonesty of the Mexican War: “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.” But to Thoreau’s surprise, the window of the prison had opened onto the life of the town he lived in, with its everyday errands and duties, its compromises and arrangements, and for him that glimpse was a revelation:

They were the voices of old burghers that I heard in the streets. I was an involuntary spectator and auditor of whatever was done and said in the kitchen of the adjacent village inn,—a wholly new and rare experience to me. It was a closer view of my native town. I was fairly inside of it. I had never seen its institutions before. This is one of its peculiar institutions; for it is a shire town. I began to comprehend what its inhabitants were about.

Slavery, at that time, was nicknamed “the peculiar institution,” and by calling the prison itself a peculiar institution, and maybe having in mind the adjacent inn as well, Thoreau prods his reader to think about the constraints that are a tacit condition of social life.

The risk of political writing may lure the citizen to write—a fact Hazlitt seems to acknowledge in his essay “On the Regal Character,” where his second sentence wonders if the essay will expose him to prosecution: “In writing a criticism, we hope we shall not be accused of intending a libel.” (His friend Leigh Hunt had recently served two years in prison for “seditious libel” of the Prince Regent—having characterized him as a dandy notorious for his ostentation and obesity.) The writer’s consciousness of provocative intent may indeed be inseparable from the wish to persuade; though the tone of commitment will vary with the zeal and composition of the audience, whether that means a political party, a movement, a vanguard of the enlightened, or “the people” at large.

Edmund Burke, for example, writes to the sheriffs of Bristol (and through them to the city’s electors) in order to warn against the suspension of habeas corpus by the British war ministry in 1777. The sudden introduction of the repressive act, he tells the electors, has imperiled their liberty even if they are for the moment individually exempt. In response to the charge that the Americans fighting for independence are an unrepresentative minority, he warns: “ General rebellions and revolts of an whole people never were encouraged , now or at any time. They are always provoked. ” So too, Mahatma Gandhi addresses his movement of resistance against British rule, as well as others who can be attracted to the cause, when he explains why nonviolent protest requires courage of a higher degree than the warrior’s: “Non-violence is infinitely superior to violence, forgiveness is more manly than punishment.” In both cases, the writer treats the immediate injustice as an occasion for broader strictures on the nature of justice. There are certain duties that governors owe to the governed, and duties hardly less compulsory that the people owe to themselves.

Apparently diverse topics connect the essays in Writing Politics ; but, taken loosely to illustrate a historical continuity, they show the changing face of oppression and violence, and the invention of new paths for improving justice. Arbitrary power is the enemy throughout—power that, by the nature of its asserted scope and authority, makes itself the judge of its own cause. King George III, whose reign spanned sixty years beginning in 1760, from the first was thought to have overextended monarchical power and prerogative, and by doing so to have reversed an understanding of parliamentary sovereignty that was tacitly recognized by his predecessors. Writing against the king, “Junius” (the pen name of Philip Francis) traced the monarch’s errors to a poor education; and he gave an edge of deliberate effrontery to the attack on arbitrary power by addressing the king as you. “It is the misfortune of your life, and originally the cause of every reproach and distress, which has attended your government, that you should never have been acquainted with the language of truth, until you heard it in the complaints of your people.”

A similar frankness, without the ad hominem spur, can be felt in Burke’s attack on the monarchical distrust of liberty at home as well as abroad: “If any ask me what a free Government is, I answer, that, for any practical purpose, it is what the people think so; and that they, and not I, are the natural, lawful, and competent judges of this matter.” Writing in the same key from America, Thomas Paine, in his seventh number of The Crisis , gave a new description to the British attempt to preserve the unity of the empire by force of arms. He called it a war of conquest; and by addressing his warning directly “to the people of England,” he reminded the king’s subjects that war is always a social evil, for it sponsors a violence that does not terminate in itself. War enlarges every opportunity of vainglory—a malady familiar to monarchies.

The coming of democracy marks a turning point in modern discussions of sovereignty and the necessary protections of liberty. Confronted by the American annexation of parts of Mexico, in 1846–48, Thoreau saw to his disgust that a war of conquest could also be a popular war, the will of the people directed to the oppression of persons. It follows that the state apparatus built by democracy is at best an equivocal ally of individual rights. Yet as Emerson would recognize in his lecture “The Fugitive Slave Law,” and Frederick Douglass would confirm in “The Mission of the War,” the massed power of the state is likewise the only vehicle powerful enough to destroy a system of oppression as inveterate as American slavery had become by the 1850s.

Acceptance of political evil—a moral inertia that can corrupt the ablest of lawmakers—goes easily with the comforts of a society at peace where many are satisfied. “Here was the question,” writes Emerson: “Are you for man and for the good of man; or are you for the hurt and harm of man? It was question whether man shall be treated as leather? whether the Negroes shall be as the Indians were in Spanish America, a piece of money?” Emerson wondered at the apostasy of Daniel Webster, How came he there? The answer was that Webster had deluded himself by projecting a possible right from serial compromise with wrong.

Two ways lie open to correct the popular will without a relapse into docile assent and the rule of oligarchy. You may widen the terms of discourse and action by enlarging the community of participants. Alternatively, you may strengthen the opportunities of dissent through acts of exemplary protest—protest in speech, in action, or both. Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. remain the commanding instances in this regard. Both led movements that demanded of every adherent that the protest serve as an express image of the society it means to bring about. Nonviolent resistance accordingly involves a public disclosure of the work of conscience—a demonstrated willingness to make oneself an exemplary warrior without war. Because they were practical reformers, Gandhi and King, within the societies they sought to reform, were engaged in what Michael Oakeshott calls “the pursuit of intimations.” They did not start from a model of the good society generated from outside. They built on existing practices of toleration, friendship, neighborly care, and respect for the dignity of strangers.

Nonviolent resistance, as a tactic of persuasion, aims to arouse an audience of the uncommitted by its show of discipline and civic responsibility. Well, but why not simply resist? Why show respect for the laws of a government you mean to change radically? Nonviolence, for Gandhi and King, was never merely a tactic, and there were moral as well as rhetorical reasons for their ethic of communal self-respect and self-command. Gandhi looked on the British empire as a commonwealth that had proved its ability to reform. King spoke with the authority of a native American, claiming the rights due to all Americans, and he evoked the ideals his countrymen often said they wished to live by. The stories the nation loved to tell of itself took pride in emancipation much more than pride in conquest and domination. “So,” wrote King from the Birmingham City Jail, “I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court because it is morally right, and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances because they are morally wrong.”

A subtler enemy of liberty than outright prejudice and violent oppression is the psychological push toward conformity. This internalized docility inhabits and may be said to dictate the costume of manners in a democracy. Because the rule of mass opinion serves as a practical substitute for the absolute authority that is no longer available, it exerts an enormous and hidden pressure. This dangerous “omnipotence of the majority,” as Tocqueville called it, knows no power greater than itself; it resembles an absolute monarch in possessing neither the equipment nor the motive to render a judgment against itself. Toleration thus becomes a political value that requires as vigilant a defense as liberty. Minorities are marked not only by race, religion, and habits of association, but also by opinion.

“It is easy to see,” writes Walter Bagehot in “The Metaphysical Basis of Toleration,” “that very many believers would persecute sceptics” if they were given the means, “and that very many sceptics would persecute believers.” Bagehot has in mind religious belief, in particular, but the same intolerance operates when it is a question of penalizing a word, a gesture, a wrongly sympathetic or unsympathetic show of feeling by which a fellow citizen might claim to be offended. The more divided the society, the more it will crave implicit assurances of unity; the more unified it is, the more it wants an even greater show of unity—an unmistakable signal of membership and belonging that can be read as proof of collective solidarity. The “guilty fear of criticism,” Mary McCarthy remarked of the domestic fear of Communism in the 1950s, “the sense of being surrounded by an unappreciative world,” brought to American life a regimen of tests, codes, and loyalty oaths that were calculated to confirm rather than subdue the anxiety.

Proscribed and persecuted groups naturally seek a fortified community of their own, which should be proof against insult; and by 1870 or so, the sure method of creating such a community was to found a new nation. George Eliot took this remedy to be prudent and inevitable, in her sympathetic early account of the Zionist quest for a Jewish state, yet her unsparing portrait of English anti-Semitism seems to recognize the nation-remedy as a carrier of the same exclusion it hopes to abolish. Perhaps the greatest obstacle to a widened sense of community is the apparently intuitive—but in fact regularly inculcated—intellectual habit by which we divide people into racial, religious, and ethnic identities. The idea of an international confederation for peace was tried twice, without success, in the 20th century, with the League of Nations and the United Nations; but some such goal, first formulated in the political writings of Kant, has found memorable popular expression again and again.

W. E. B. Du Bois’s essay “Of the Ruling of Men” affords a prospect of international liberty that seems to the author simply the next necessary advance of common sense in the cause of humanity. Du Bois noticed in 1920 how late the expansion of rights had arrived at the rights of women. Always, the last hiding places of arbitrary power are the trusted arenas of privilege a society has come to accept as customary, and to which it has accorded the spurious honor of supposing it part of the natural order: men over women; the strong nations over the weak; corporate heads over employees. The pattern had come under scrutiny already in Harriet Taylor Mill’s “Enfranchisement of Women,” and its application to the hierarchies of ownership and labor would be affirmed in William Morris’s lecture “Useful Work Versus Useless Toil.” The commercial and manufacturing class, wrote Morris, “ force the genuine workers to provide for them”; no better (only more recondite in their procedures) are “the parasites” whose function is to defend the cause of property, “sometimes, as in the case of lawyers, undisguisedly so.” The socialists Morris and Du Bois regard the ultimate aim of a democratic world as the replacement of useless by useful work. With that change must also come the invention of a shared experience of leisure that is neither wasteful nor thoughtless.

A necessary bulwark of personal freedom is property, and in the commercial democracies for the past three centuries a usual means of agreement for the defense of property has been the contract. In challenging the sacredness of contract, in certain cases of conflict with a common good, T. H. Green moved the idea of “freedom of contract” from the domain of nature to that of social arrangements that are settled by convention and therefore subject to revision. The freedom of contract must be susceptible of modification when it fails to meet a standard of public well-being. The right of a factory owner, for example, to employ child labor if the child agrees, should not be protected. “No contract,” Green argues, “is valid in which human persons, willingly or unwillingly, are dealt with as commodities”; for when we speak of freedom, “we mean a positive power or capacity of doing or enjoying something worth doing or enjoying.” And again:

When we measure the progress of a society by its growth in freedom, we measure it by the increasing development and exercise on the whole of those powers of contributing to social good with which we believe the members of the society to be endowed; in short, by the greater power on the part of the citizens as a body to make the most and best of themselves.

Legislation in the public interest may still be consistent with the principles of free society when it parts from a leading maxim of contractual individualism.

The very idea of a social contract has usually been taken to imply an obligation to die for the state. Though Hobbes and Locke offered reservations on this point, the classical theorists agree that the state yields the prospect of “commodious living” without which human life would be unsocial and greatly impoverished; and there are times when the state can survive only through the sacrifice of citizens. May there also be a duty of self-sacrifice against a state whose whole direction and momentum has bent it toward injustice? Hannah Arendt, in “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship,” asked that question regarding the conduct of state officials as well as ordinary people under the encroaching tyranny of Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Citizens then, Arendt observes, had live options of political conduct besides passive obedience and open revolt. Conscientious opposition could show itself in public indications of nonsupport . This is a fact that the pervasiveness of conformism and careerism in mass societies makes harder to see than it should be.

Jonathan Swift, a writer as temperamentally diverse from Arendt as possible, shows in “A Modest Proposal” how the human creature goes about rationalizing any act or any policy, however atrocious. Our propensity to make-normal, to approve whatever renders life more orderly, can lead by the lightest of expedient steps to a plan for marketing the babies of the Irish poor as flesh suitable for eating. It is, after all—so Swift’s fictional narrator argues—a plausible design to alleviate poverty and distress among a large sector of the population, and to eliminate the filth and crowding that disgusts persons of a more elevated sort. The justification is purely utilitarian, and the proposer cites the most disinterested of motives: he has no financial or personal stake in the design. Civility has often been praised as a necessity of political argument, but Swift’s proposal is at once civil and, in itself, atrocious.

An absorbing concern of Arendt’s, as of several of the other essay writers gathered here, was the difficulty of thinking. We measure, we compute, we calculate, we weigh advantages and disadvantages—that much is only sensible, only logical—but we give reasons that are often blind to our motives, we rationalize and we normalize in order to justify ourselves. It is supremely difficult to use the equipment we learn from parents and teachers, which instructs us how to deal fairly with persons, and apply it to the relationship between persons and society, and between the manners of society and the laws of a nation. The 21st century has saddled persons of all nations with a catastrophic possibility, the destruction of a planetary environment for organized human life; and in facing the predicament directly, and formulating answers to the question it poses, the political thinkers of the past may help us chiefly by intimations. The idea of a good or tolerable society now encompasses relations between people at the widest imaginable distance apart. It must also cover a new relation of stewardship between humankind and nature.

Having made the present selection with the abovementioned topics in view—the republican defense against arbitrary power; the progress of liberty; the coming of mass-suffrage democracy and its peculiar dangers; justifications for political dissent and disobedience; war, as chosen for the purpose of domination or as necessary to destroy a greater evil; the responsibilities of the citizen; the political meaning of work and the conditions of work—an anthology of writings all in English seemed warranted by the subject matter. For in the past three centuries, these issues have been discussed most searchingly by political critics and theorists in Britain and the United States.

The span covers the Glorious Revolution and its achievement of parliamentary sovereignty; the American Revolution, and the civil war that has rightly been called the second American revolution; the expansion of the franchise under the two great reform bills in England and the 15th amendment to the US constitution; the two world wars and the Holocaust; and the mass movements of nonviolent resistance that brought national independence to India and broadened the terms of citizenship of black Americans. The sequence gives adequate evidence of thinkers engaged in a single conversation. Many of these authors were reading the essayists who came before them; and in many cases (Burke and Paine, Lincoln and Douglass, Churchill and Orwell), they were reading each other.

Writing Politics contains no example of the half-political, half-commercial genre of “leadership” writing. Certain other principles that guided the editor will be obvious at a glance, but may as well be stated. Only complete essays are included, no extracts. This has meant excluding great writers—Hobbes, Locke, Wollstonecraft, and John Stuart Mill, among others—whose definitive political writing came in the shape of full-length books. There are likewise no chapters of books; no party manifestos or statements of creed; nothing that was first published posthumously. All of these essays were written at the time noted, were meant for an audience of the time, and were published with an eye to their immediate effect. This is so even in cases (as with Morris and Du Bois) where the author had in view the reformation of a whole way of thinking. Some lectures have been included—the printed lecture was an indispensable medium for political ideas in the 19th century—but there are no party speeches delivered by an official to advance a cause of the moment.

Two exceptions to the principles may prove the rule. Abraham Lincoln’s letter to James C. Conkling was a public letter, written to defend the Emancipation Proclamation, in which, a few months earlier, President Lincoln had declared the freedom of all slaves in the rebelling states; he now extended the order to cover black soldiers who fought for the Union: “If they stake their lives for us, they must be prompted by the strongest motive—even the promise of freedom. And the promise being made, must be kept.” Lincoln was risking his presidency when he published this extraordinary appeal and admonition, and his view was shared by Frederick Douglass in “The Mission of the War”: “No war but an Abolition war, no peace but an Abolition peace.” The other exception is “The Roots of Honour,” John Ruskin’s attack on the mercenary morality of 19th-century capitalism . He called the chapter “Essay I” in Unto This Last , and his nomenclature seemed a fair excuse for reprinting an ineradicable prophecy.

__________________________________

From Writing Politics , edited by David Bromwich. Copyright © 2020 by David Bromwich; courtesy of NYRB Classics.

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Essay on Politics for Students and Children

500+ words essay on politics.

When we hear the term politics, we usually think of the government, politicians and political parties. For a country to have an organized government and work as per specific guidelines, we require a certain organization. This is where politics comes in, as it essentially forms the government. Every country, group and organization use politics to instrument various ways to organize their events, prospects and more.

Politics does not limit to those in power in the government. It is also about the ones who are in the run to achieve the same power. The candidates of the opposition party question the party on power during political debates . They intend to inform people and make them aware of their agenda and what the present government is doing. All this is done with the help of politics only.

Dirty Politics

Dirty politics refers to the kind of politics in which moves are made for the personal interest of a person or party. It ignores the overall development of a nation and hurts the essence of the country. If we look at it closely, there are various constituents of dirty politics.

The ministers of various political parties, in order to defame the opposition, spread fake news and give provocative speeches against them. This hampers with the harmony of the country and also degrades the essence of politics . They pass sexist remarks and instill hate in the hearts of people to watch their party win with a majority of seats.

Read 500 Words Essay on Corruption Here

Furthermore, the majority of politicians are corrupt. They abuse their power to advance their personal interests rather than that of the country. We see the news flooded with articles like ministers and their families involving in scams and illegal practices. The power they have makes them feel invincible which is why they get away with any crime.

Before coming into power, the government makes numerous promises to the public. They influence and manipulate them into thinking all their promises will be fulfilled. However, as soon as they gain power, they turn their back on the public. They work for their selfish motives and keep fooling people in every election. Out of all this, only the common suffers at the hands of lying and corrupt politicians.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Lack of Educated Ministers

If we look at the scenario of Indian elections, any random person with enough power and money can contest the elections. They just need to be a citizen of the country and be at least 25 years old. There are a few clauses too which are very easy.

The strangest thing is that contesting for elections does not require any minimum education qualification. Thus, we see how so many uneducated and non-deserving candidates get into power and then misuse it endlessly. A country with uneducated ministers cannot develop or even be on the right path.

We need educated ministers badly in the government. They are the ones who can make the country progress as they will handle things better than the illiterate ones. The candidates must be well-qualified in order to take on a big responsibility as running an entire nation. In short, we need to save our country from corrupt and uneducated politicians who are no less than parasites eating away the development growth of the country and its resources. All of us must unite to break the wheel and work for the prosperous future of our country.

FAQs on Politics

Q.1 Why is the political system corrupt?

A.1 Political system is corrupt because the ministers in power exercise their authority to get away with all their crimes. They bribe everyone into working for their selfish motives making the whole system corrupt.

Q.2 Why does India need educated ministers?

A.2 India does not have a minimum educational qualification requirement for ministers. This is why the uneducated lot is corrupting the system and pushing the country to doom. We need educated ministers so they can help the country develop with their progressive thinking.

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Media and Politics Minor | Capstone

Personal reflective essay.

The impact and sway of politics on global media are significantly shaped by the utilization of propaganda and the strategic employment of related tools. Instruments like agenda-setting, framing, and media bias are crucial; however, in isolation, they often prove insufficient for media organizations to exert substantial international, or even regional, influence. The most influential media agencies combine their inherent resources to maximize their impact. 

My foray into the Media and Politics minor was sparked by a keen interest in public policy, fueled by my engagement with political journalism on prominent platforms such as CNN, Times of India, and Al Jazeera. This exposure allowed me to critically assess media bias and its profound impact on shaping public opinion. However, by pursuing this minor, I better understood the complex interplay, more so, the symbiotic relationship between media and political movements. 

Firstly, the media plays a crucial role in changing public perception. Through the American Politics and Government course, I delved into the political systems of the United States through a detailed case study analysis of the Texas Senate race between MJ Hegar and John Cornyn. This study provided a comprehensive view of political parties, partisanship, and polarization, highlighting Senator Cornyn’s successful campaign strategies to secure votes. To a large extent, Cornyn’s victory was significantly aided by his adept use of mass media campaigns across various platforms, both digital and print, employing narratives that resonated with core Republican values such as gun law stances, immigration policies, education, and pro-life choices. 

Cornyn’s campaign’s ability to appeal to emotions and capitalize on these values ensured the retention of existing supporters while also engaging previously inactive voter segments, notably within the Hispanic and African American communities–who were more aggressively targeted across all campaigns. My fascination was centered on his ability to change public perception. Likewise, it also highlighted the necessity of conducting precise target audience research to ensure that curated messages reach intended segments effectively.

However, the effectiveness of Cornyn’s campaign was underpinned by strategic agenda-setting and framing, tools that were instrumental in influencing societal views. The media’s strong emphasis on Republican ideals not only served the political agenda but also reinforced identity politics and exacerbated partisan divides between Democrats and Republicans within the United States. This case study underscored the power of propaganda, narrative building, and the strategic use of media to frame political issues and agenda-setting to mobilize individuals or groups for policy advocacy, to bring impactful change. 

Understanding propaganda and the variability in narrative portrayal across media platforms reveals how information can also be distorted. My coursework in Politics in the Digital World delved into the spread of information, misinformation, media bias, and virality. Using Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal as a case study in my Internet and Society course, I improved my understanding of how even the most reliable and “fact-checked” news on digital platforms can be manipulated, raising ethical questions about the role of propaganda or news in disseminating false narratives. This prompted me to question: Does media bias render information false?

Applying these insights to the news circulated in my home country, India, I examined media coverage and policy frameworks surrounding women’s rights and the extent of their communication or censorship in Indian media. Through analyzing the cases of Jyothi Singh and Laxmi Agrawal—well-known victims and survivors of abuse against women in India, whose stories received unprecedented media attention both nationally and internationally—I better understood how political advocacy leverages virality and how media bias can be a positive force. With the advent of Netflix documentaries, Bollywood autobiographies, retweets, and shares, these individual stories achieved significant media traction, with the media swiftly framing the news to serve justice to their narratives. The stories of these women concerning women’s rights in India demonstrated that media bias is sometimes essential for achieving virality, drawing public attention, and driving policy changes or movements advocating for women’s rights.

Further adding to this theme, my coursework at Georgetown University- Qatar broadened my perspective, introducing me to topics centered around the Arab region as well as the United States. Likewise, the underlying theme of the media’s role in the mobilization of society toward political action further became more apparent. In my International Relations and Small State Security coursework, I analyzed how Qatar’s media and diplomatic strategies concerning the Israeli-Palestinian conflict heavily relied on the media. Through examining the impact of Qatar’s independent news agency, Al-Jazeera, I was able to see how they were more politically affiliated with the values and norms of Qatar and Islam. For example, what Al-Jazeera deemed as “newsworthy” largely indicated Qatar’s role as a mediator in the international politics of the Israel-Gaza crisis. By taking a strong stance that is pro-Palestine leaning but remaining neutral to maintain relationships with the United States, Al-Jazeera’s news framing showcased how the media is a significant political tool as well as an indicator.

Likewise, in a more detailed study of Qatar within the Small State Security course, I better understood the strategic ties Qatar has with the United States. What is remarkable and most noticeable within Qatar’s diplomatic ties, is the educational initiative taken by the Ministry of Education and Qatar Foundation’s Education City, including the current six international branch campuses from the United States. These initiatives add to Qatar’s soft power and are largely publicized and rely on media networks to maintain relevance and publicity to leverage the educational infrastructure of Qatar in global politics. Political entities leverage media and digital platforms to influence public perception and policy initiatives. Essentially, the media plays a crucial role in shaping and navigating power dynamics. In sum, the media being cultivated and produced all add to the image of Qatar as a global and international actor. Although the thematic links are not seemingly related, they essentially reiterate the significance of media in mobilizing people or driving policy and projecting a public image. 

My experience with courses within the minor has given me the necessary skills and background to analyze the influence of media and politics within local and international education policy, a key interest in my undergraduate career. A pivotal example/case study that encapsulates this theme, is my research of education/pedagogy policy in Qatar, India, and other regions. Within all research projects, I more specifically focus on how policies and politics define international and national education for female students, international students, and marginalized populations.

During my time spent as a tutor in Qatar’s Qutor’s Foundation, internships/volunteer work within Tamil Nadu’s local schools and Project Hope (a non-profit orphanage for displaced women), research projects on pedagogy within Education City, I better understood the role of Education in an economy. Within the realm of my experiences, the Education City initiative in Qatar stands out as one of the most successful educational infrastructures. The portrayal of the Education City across all paid and owned media, as discussed by Neha Vora in “Teach for Arabia,” not only highlights Qatar’s stances on the empowerment of women but also links it to Qatar’s economic ties with the United States and advanced its international image being associated with the superpower. This is crucial to consider because once again Education City, while ostensibly aimed at broad societal benefits, also served economic interests and is largely a political move too, illustrating the duality of politics in educational reforms. Likewise, the media drives this image internationally.

The amount of media coverage, endorsement, and investment that continues to go into Qatar’s Education City, stands as a testament to how effective policies, coupled with strategic media coverage, can promote public goods with societal benefits. Indeed, the sum of these experiences has shown me how almost everything is political and relies on the media. The media is necessary to make these changes. Reflecting on my academic journey in the Media and Politics minor, I’ve come to realize its profound impact on reshaping my understanding of policy formation, strategic motivations behind policy advocacy through media campaigns, and the critical role of rhetoric in political mobilization. This experience has not only broadened my perspective, encouraging me to view these dynamics from a global lens but also deepened my comprehension of the dynamic interplay between media strategies and political movements.

My engagement with the curriculum, particularly in exploring the art of persuasive communication tailored to sway public opinion, has illuminated the power of agenda-setting and framing. These tools are indispensable in sculpting compelling narratives across both digital and traditional media platforms, which are pivotal in rallying support for social and political causes. Such narratives underscore the media’s significant influence on public policy and societal transformation. Moreover, the program has enriched my understanding of the media’s watchdog role in sustainable development goals and political transparency, highlighting its capacity to reduce censorship and foster the global spread of information. Despite the prevalence of media bias and misinformation, I remain optimistic about its potential to enlighten the public, enhance freedoms, and empower activists.

This enriched perspective is a product of blending rigorous undergraduate research with practical classroom learning, offering profound insights into the media’s influence on public policymaking. My passion, particularly for educational policy, aligns with understanding how media discourse shapes the agenda, influencing both policymakers and the public. This synthesis of media studies and public policy underscores my commitment to delve deeper into the field, aiming to contribute to the development of educational infrastructure and policies in India and beyond, leveraging media to effect meaningful change.

The journey through the Media and Politics minor has not only enriched my academic knowledge but also ignited a passion for leveraging media as a powerful tool for advocacy and change, particularly in areas that directly impact community well-being and global development.

Within the Indian context, this encompasses advocating for and implementing improved programs for women from rural communities to access education, developing policies aimed at providing better incentives for students to remain in school, offering subsidized education, and enhancing the visibility of existing initiatives that drive these progressive ideas forward. Effective coverage of such issues can help to draw greater attention to these topics, making them more relevant within governments and among leaders of societies that fail to make education equitable for disadvantaged communities. With an interest to pursue academia further,  I look forward to studying education and public policy and analysis at either Harvard or the University of Pennsylvania this fall.

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Home — Essay Samples — Life — Personal Beliefs — Analysis Of My Political Ideology

Analysis of My Political Ideology

• Categories: African American Personal Beliefs

About this sample

Words: 756 |

Published: Apr 11, 2019

Words: 756 | Pages: 2 | 4 min read

Works Cited:

• American Nurses Association. (2021). Nursing World.
• Benson, J., & Williams, M. (2019). Developing Resilience in Nursing. British Journal of Nursing, 28(17), 1130-1135.
• Chang, E. M., Daly, J., Hancock, K., Johnson, A., Lambert, V., Lambert, C. E., & Chau, J. P. (2019). The Essential Elements of a Nurse Residency Program : A Delphi Study. Nurse Education Today, 76, 69-75.
• College of Nurses of Ontario. (2020). Professional Standards.
• Halter, M., Boiko, O., Pelone, F., Beighton, C., Harris, R., Gale, J., & Gourlay, S. (2017). The Positive Impact of Nurse-led Outpatient Clinics on Patient Outcomes: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis. The European Journal of General Practice, 23(1), 8-18.
• Johns Hopkins School of Nursing. (2021). Bachelor of Science in Nursing. Retrieved from https://nursing.jhu.edu/academics/programs/undergraduate/bsn.html
• National Council of State Boards of Nursing. (2021). NCLEX & Other Exams.
• Nursing and Midwifery Council. (2020). The Code: Professional Standards of Practice and Behaviour for Nurses, Midwives and Nursing Associates. Retrieved from https://www.nmc.org.uk/globalassets/sitedocuments/nmc-publications/nmc-code.pdf
• Royal College of Nursing. (2021). Nursing Careers and Jobs.
• World Health Organization. (2021). Nursing and Midwifery. Retrieved from https://www.who.int/health-topics/nursing-and-midwifery#tab=tab_1

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Why You Should Care About Politics

Matthew anderson.

• December 8, 2020

Research shows that around 10% of Americans above the age of 18 are  ‘politically disengaged.’ Most people ’don’t want to get involved with politics because they think it ’doesn’t concern them, but that ’couldn’t be further from the truth.

Politics has its influence on everyone, whether they like it or not. This is why it is essential that people, especially those of voting age, are active and knowledgeable about politics. ’Here’s why you should take the time to read up on the latest political news and issues.

It influences your finances.

According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), countries with higher democracy and freedom show  lower inflation rates . Whether you are an entrepreneur or a working professional, high inflation rates would affect your day-to-day expenses. It dictates the prices of everything, and this directly affects your spending ability. If prices keep going up every year because of political instability, even a higher earner will have a hard time.

For those who engage in stocks and investments, you will be familiar with how politics influences assets’ interest rates and values. It can raise or bring down returns on investment. Even if ’it’s just American politics, the whole international market is affected, which is why so many countries keep a close eye on what is going on.

For people who plan to put up their  property for sale , politics has an impact on your real estate’s value, as well as ’people’s ability to borrow money. If the public has a hard time securing loans or is having employment issues, it is more difficult to sell your home at property value. This is one example of how the situation of the community can inconvenience individual persons.

It shapes your opportunities.

From your education to employment, politics can impact the number of opportunities available to you. For instance, some politicians may promote lower tuition, making it easier for you to pursue higher education with less debt. In the past few years, universities have seen widespread  budget cuts  to their funding, which has forced them to rely on outside sources for finances. It can negatively affect individual schools because it means less money on programs, projects, and scholarships. 

When it comes to unemployment, a government that actively helps businesses significantly reduce the unemployment rate. A more politically stable country will also attract more foreign investors and companies, creating more jobs and opportunities for people. They will see that the country is in good condition for growth and be more motivated to set up operations.

On the other hand, uncertainty and conflict can discourage companies because of the risk. Politics also defines the amount of taxes and fees charged for foreign organizations, which is another factor they tend to consider.

The effects can last for generations.

If you have children and are concerned about their future, then politics is something you should care about. Changing the status quo is a long process, and the policies made today might be difficult to reform in the future. Politics can make it harder for younger generations to achieve the things we have today.

For instance, ever-growing taxes can make it harder for people to make a living, let alone purchase a house or car, in the future. On top of that, college tuition has become so expensive that many have chosen not to pursue it. Those who do are in a depressing amount of debt that will take them a lifetime to pay back. Politics can influence policies that may take away or reduce these fees, making students’ lives simpler and more manageable.

It can define your quality of life.

Politics has a role in everything in our lives. It is present in everything that requires a decision by someone in power. In a community, politics can help build better schools, infrastructure, and transportation. All these will potentially improve your life. When you choose people with good intentions and care about the community, they give back to voters by finding ways to enhance the latter’s quality of life.

Similarly, political decisions and government policies give you more rights and even out the playing field. It can redirect funds to programs that benefit those that need them. Politics can increase grants and scholarships for people who cannot afford it. In the economy today, education is highly valued, helping you improve your overall socioeconomic status.

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• Essay on Law

Example Of My Political Philosophy Essay

Type of paper: Essay

Topic: Law , Philosophy , Sociology , Politics , Justice , Human , Supreme Court , Democracy

Words: 1800

Published: 03/18/2020

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A person’s political philosophy pertains to their ideologies regarding politics as a science; meaning of justice; execution of liberties; ownership of property in the society, articulation of human rights; application of the law along with measures of enforcement. In some cultures political philosophy even has a strong impact on a person’s political science interpretations. As such, the exploration of my political philosophy will be addressed accordingly as it relates to the aforementioned subject areas or branch of disciplines. At first a world view of these interwoven political dichotomies will be presented followed by my personal interpretations of how just/fair a political system ought to function. Essentially, politics means influencing people. My precise philosophical position on influencing people pertains to manipulation into support of a specific idea. Often these ideas are not entirely beneficial to the people being manipulated. Arguments have been that exercising influence is solely for obtaining power to execute dominion over minorities in the society. Consequently, for me the real role of politics in modern as well as ancient societies is creating structured inequality. This design allows for under privileged people to always exist and gaps between rich and poor continue or even broaden. Theoretically, Plato's Republic, the politics of Aristotle and Confucius contributions have shaped political thought. With references to these assumptions and framework of thinking, my discussion pertaining to justice; execution of liberties; ownership of property in the society, articulation of human rights; application of the law along with measures of enforcement, will be embraced. Justice according to Plato’s Republic originates from designing valid social contracts. Further, with reference to Glaucon justice was perceived as not just being a great desire, but an expression of a value for which everyone ought to grave. The philosopher explained that justice does not only benefit the person to whom it is being extended, but also the one who extends it. In essence, justice is then a value which is retributable. The way in which one exercises justice in similar manner it will be returned. Therefore, the ‘do unto others as you would have them do to you’ concept of living fairly, becomes the hallmark of demonstrated justice (Nails, 324) In articulating the use of justice in societies highlighted by Plato and his counterparts, it was communicated that this value is often executed out of fear and not integrity. The philosophers specifically advanced that there are basically two reasons for executing justice by politicians. First, it is protecting themselves and their families from injustices. The population may turn towards them violently. if injustices are obvious. Secondly, the life of the unjust man lacks divine guidance and is open to affliction, Plato and his counterparts argue. However, it was concluded that while justice is relative its practice is not only right, but necessary for a stabled society (Nails, 324). Now, when applying these perspectives of justice to modern political practice we would find politicians during their campaigns try to demonstrate justice through free and fair elections initially. The freedom or liberty relates to persons being given the choice to exercise their franchise regarding who must lead the country. Through a democratic process when a leader is elected justice for contesting parties should have been served. This is not the case in every country around the world. For example, justice during an election campaign is initiated though democracy. Counties such a Cuba and Soviet Union, which for decades did not practice democracy during the electoral process, are they considered just to citizens? In these countries one party obtains power and rules forever. Citizens have no choice of selecting any other leader. They simply have to abide with the conditions offered them or be tortured. It must be understood that while this attitude of executing power may be condemned because of human rights violations other forms of injustices occur among nations practicing democracy. For example, in South Africa and the early United States of America Apartheid and segregation created immense injustices for black skinned human beings. According to Plato the social contracts designed projected inequality and subjugation of man by man for obscene reasons. Through this paradigm my philosophical assumption is that people cannot find justice in democracy nor dictatorship. Both patterns of political governance have produced different degrees of injustices to humanity. Consequently, for justice to be just a new system whereby equality is demonstrated at every social level, must be the focus. Karl Marx (1818 -1863) reiterated that no philosopher must confuse equality with equity. Marx‘s interpretations of these concepts in relation to justice explains that many injustices are demonstrated among humans. Often one group wants to dominate the other economically (Marx. & Engels, 477) This being the motive then, equality is making resources available to everyone alike in the society, whereas equity is insinuating that everyone must have the same amount of resources. This does not have to be the prequalification for social justice to exist in a society. Instead the political system must be so designed that no one is ahead of the game, but everyone has equal opportunities of acquiring the resources that are available. In apartheid and segregation there is no equality. Structured inequality is the name of the game. These are the avenues of injustices articulated by modern political systems in the fallacy of creating social order. Based on these observations of ancient and contemporary models, my political philosophy regarding social justice is not based on democracy or dictatorship rule, but a models that upholds human dignity. The foundation for my assumption is that there is no need to kill, create wars, and segregate one group of people from the other due to prejudices. The underlying motive is economic gain and ultimate acquiring power wield economic power, influence and subjugate minorities. The good news is that there are enough resources in the world for every intelligent human being to become a millionaire. Why prevent the majority from accessing them due to fear that there will not be enough? The fear of not enough has destroyed families and create wars internationally during colorization of the new world. Imperialist systems must go whereby mother counties dominate children colonies and politicians create and demoralize minorities. Minorities are considered uncivilized as the American Indians and native peoples all over the world. This has been the greatest injustice second to slavery executed towards human beings. Man countries that were plundered had their unique patterns of civilizations. These people were forced towards being Christianized against their will and work to support the wealthy. Marx continued to pronounce that religion serves as an option for the masses. Therefore, the fear of a fierce judgmental God keeps poor people anticipating a better day in heaven when they die due to inadequate healthcare or being killed by the police. Ultimately, my philosophy of social justice is destroying all structures, polices, types of governance that prevent people from functioning as free human beings. Why humans have to live in chains on earth while others have more than enough of their share of resources? Essentially social justice summarized the extent to which liberties can be executed; property owned or resources acquired. Social justice also determine the level of human rights privilege one can demonstrate within the social structure. Ultimately, social justice allocations are the true remedies for inconsistencies in law applications within the legal system. It is also the solution to law enforcement uses unnecessary force against minorities, when compared to supporter of white supremacy. The aforementioned deliberations regarding the face of social justice within modern and ancient political systems, explain my specific opinions on current political issues. These issues articulated reflect my position on fundamental problems of political thought regarding social justice. For me social justice encompasses human liberties, human rights, the rule of law and law enforcement practices. Certainly, the ideas shared pertaining to democracy and dictatorship are grounded in world view concepts of the situations presented as examples. Machiavelli’s interpretation of human nature fascinates me as a political philosopher. He advanced that humans will engage in any activity to achieve power. These activities often require that fellow humans suffer and even die. However, the end justifies the means. Therefore, social justice is determined by achievement of personal goals regardless of who gets hurt in the process(Adams, 20). While for me such disregard for human dignity appalling it must be admitted that this is the way world politics functions currently. Since my concept of human nature is inconsistent with those of a Machiavellian perspective the politics for me should be presented with cleanliness. Democratic political processes are relatively transparent when compared to various levels of dictatorship. As such, this has influenced my thinking of politics as an institution in society while expected to design compatible social structures still fail to create them. For example, when measures of law enforcement are explored at a deeper level, it was discovered that the police in America seems to be interpreting laws from a personal political agenda. There are series of police shootings across the nation. The socio-political function of this institution is public safety. If twelve years olds are being gunned down to death by police for carrying a toy gun. Where is the public safety offered by this political structure? Is this section of the law enforcement mechanisms serving the rights of people in these communities? How are politicians responding to this crisis? The law specifies that if some kills that person ought to pay the penalty for the life lost by being executed. However, the scenario has been the police who kills an innocent child goes free. Therefore, in my judgment politics is a dirty game with total disrespect for human life. There is no justice for the masses. My political values embody classical liberalism. In some political cultures it is called laissez-faire liberalism being advanced by philosophers in the caliber of Adam Smith and others. Human rationality is a sub value of this doctrine. Also, protection of civil liberties, constitutional government limitation, free markets, individual freedom, and individual property rights among many more positions encompass classical liberalism. Its main assumption is that government must play limited role in structuring society (Adams, 20). The people to whom the society belong must participate in this activity. This is how I think government and society ought to be organized with human rationality prevailing. Individual property right is the next value of priority in my value paradigm with free market and individual freedoms following

Works cited

Adams, Ian, Political Ideology Today. Manchester University Press. 2001. Print. Marx. Karl; Engels Frederick. The Communist Manifesto. Collected Works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. 1848. Print Nails, Debra. The People of Plato: A Prosopography of Plato and Other Socratics. Hackett Publishing. 2002. Print

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Greg Abbott’s Personal Life: Exploring the Question of his Previous Marriage

This essay about Greg Abbott’s personal life addresses the question of whether he was married before his life-altering accident. It explores the evidence surrounding Abbott’s marital status before the incident, highlighting the enduring partnership between Abbott and his wife, Cecilia Phalen. Through an examination of public records and Abbott’s own accounts, the essay concludes that there is no indication he was married prior to the accident. Understanding this aspect of Abbott’s personal history provides insight into the man behind the political figure, emphasizing the role of love, support, and resilience in shaping his life.

How it works

Greg Abbott, the Governor of Texas, has long been a figure of interest not only for his political career but also for aspects of his personal life. Among the inquiries surrounding Abbott’s past, one question that frequently arises is whether he was married before his life-altering accident that left him paralyzed. Addressing this query delves into the personal history of a public figure and offers insight into the man behind the political persona.

To begin with, it is essential to acknowledge the tragic incident that reshaped Greg Abbott’s life.

In 1984, at the age of 26, Abbott was struck by a falling oak tree while jogging, resulting in a spinal cord injury that left him paralyzed from the waist down. This event is pivotal in understanding Abbott’s trajectory, both personally and professionally. However, the focus of this inquiry lies before this life-changing event: was Abbott married prior to the accident?

While there is limited public information available about Abbott’s personal life before his accident, there is no evidence to suggest that he was married prior to the incident. Abbott married his wife, Cecilia Phalen, in 1981, three years before the accident. Their enduring partnership has been a cornerstone of Abbott’s journey, providing support and strength through the trials and triumphs of his life and career.

Furthermore, insights from Abbott’s own accounts and public records reinforce the understanding that his marriage to Cecilia Phalen predates the accident. In interviews and biographical accounts, Abbott often speaks of his wife and their shared experiences, indicating a continuity in their relationship that predates the accident. Additionally, official records such as marriage certificates corroborate the timeline of their union.

While the question of whether Greg Abbott was married before his accident may pique curiosity, the available evidence suggests that he was not. Abbott’s marriage to Cecilia Phalen has been a steadfast anchor throughout his life, preceding and enduring beyond the defining moment that altered his course. Understanding this aspect of Abbott’s personal history adds depth to our perception of the man behind the public persona, highlighting the role of love, support, and resilience in shaping his journey.

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Guest Essay

Men Fear Me, Society Shames Me, and I Love My Life

By Glynnis MacNicol

Ms. MacNicol is a writer, a podcast host and the author of the forthcoming memoir “I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself.”

I was once told that the challenge of making successful feminist porn is that the thing women desire most is freedom.

If that’s the case, one might consider my life over the past few years to be extremely pornographic — even without all the actual sex that occurred. It definitely has the makings of a fantasy, if we allowed for fantasies starring single, childless women on the brink of turning 50.

It’s not just in enjoying my age that I’m defying expectations. It’s that I’ve exempted myself from the central things we’re told give a woman’s life meaning — partnership and parenting. I’ve discovered that despite all the warnings, I regret none of those choices.

Indeed, I am enjoying them immensely. Instead of my prospects diminishing, as nearly every message that gets sent my way promises they will — fewer relationships, less excitement, less sex, less visibility — I find them widening. The world is more available to me than it’s ever been.

Saying so should not be radical in 2024, and yet, somehow it feels that way. We live in a world whose power structures continue to benefit from women staying in place. In fact, we’re currently experiencing the latest backlash against the meager feminist gains of the past half-century. My story — and those of the other women in similar shoes — shows that there are other, fulfilling ways to live.

It is disconcerting to enjoy oneself so much when there is so much to assure you to expect the opposite, just as it is strange to feel so good against a backdrop of so much terribleness in the world. But with age (hopefully) comes clarity.

Fifty is a milestone. And the fact my 50th birthday lands on or around some other significant 50ths has brought some things into focus. Last year was the 50th anniversary of Roe v. Wade. This year is the 50th of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, which may be less well known but remains significant: It allowed women for the first time to have bank accounts and credit cards in their own name, not needing a male signature.

That my birth date landed between the passing of these two landmark laws makes it easier for me to see that the life I’m living is a result of women having authority over both their bodies and their finances. I represent a cohort of women who lead lives that do not require us to ask permission or seek approval. I have availed myself of all the choices available to me, and while the results come with their own set of risks, they have been enormously satisfying.

The timing of my birthday also helps me see the violent rollback of women’s rights happening right now as a response to the independence these legal rights afforded women. Forget about the horror of being alone and middle-aged — there is nothing more terrifying to a patriarchal society than a woman who is free. That she might be having a better time without permission or supervision is downright insufferable.

My entry into middle age certainly had the makings of an unpleasant story.

Like many, I spent the early months of the pandemic by myself. It was the type of solitary confinement that popular science, and certain men with platforms, enjoy reminding us will be the terrible future that awaits a woman who remains single for too long. I went untouched by anyone. Unsmelled, too, which you might think is a strange thing to note, but it’s an even stranger thing to experience. Unseen except by the building exterminator and the remaining doormen of the Upper West Side who gave distant friendly greetings on my evening walks around Covid-empty New York.

Alone, unmarried, childless, past my so-called prime. A caricature, culture would have it, a fringe identity; a tragedy or a punchline, depending on your preference. At the very least a cautionary tale.

By August 2021, I was desperate — not for partnership but for connection. I bought a ticket to Paris, a place where I’d spent much of my free time before the pandemic and where I had a group of friends.

Paris, I reminded myself, prioritizes pleasure. I dived in. Cheese, wine, friendships, sex — and repeat.

At first it was shocking. I was ill prepared to get what I wanted, what it seemed I had summoned. There were moments when I wondered whether I should be ashamed. I had also never felt so free and so fully myself. I felt no shame or guilt, only the thrill that came with the knowledge I was exercising my freedom.

These days, generally speaking, there is little in cinema or literature, let alone the online world, to suggest that when you are a woman alone (forget about a middle-aged woman), things will go your way, as I have often experienced.

There have been better times. In the 1980s, sitcoms were stacked with starring women for whom men were a minor-character concern — “Designing Women,” “Murphy Brown,” “The Golden Girls” — all of which, if they premiered today (and that’s a big if), would feel radical. Later there was “Girlfriends.” Even “Sex and the City,” with its often regressive marriage plotting, remains surprisingly modern in its depictions of adult friendship and sexual mores. In each case, just as it looked as if these narratives might begin to fully take root in the real world, the women largely went back inside (or into body bags, in the case of many “Law & Order” plotlines). By the early aughts we were housewives again, real and imagined.

I suspect that a lot of this backlash is connected to the terror that men experienced at discovering that they are less necessary to women’s fulfillment than centuries of laws and stories have allowed them to believe. That terror is abundantly apparent today: From Harrison Butker’s commencement speech suggesting that women may find more fulfillment in marriage and children than in having a career, to the Supreme Court once again debating access to abortion to the push to roll back no-fault divorce laws: All are efforts to return women to a place where others can manage their access to … well, just about everything.

It’s in this light that my enjoyment begins to feel radical. Come fly with me. There’s no fear here.

Glynnis MacNicol is a writer, a podcast host and the author of the forthcoming memoir “I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself.”

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