“Politicalism is the belief that if we simply select good leaders within a framework of representative democracy, we can leave it up to these politicians and experts to put optimal policies and laws in place for us.”
More from Kohei Saito's excellent SLOW DOWN.
“However, this is the effect of narrowing the field of political action to elections.”
Kohei is an efficient writer and rather than dance around the point he wants to make as is common in much writing undertaken by academics, he gets right to the heart of the matter.
“Representative democracy cannot expand the purview of democracy itself and cannot effect a revolution across all society. Electoral politics always reaches its limit when faced with the power of capital. Politics does not exist separately from the economy—rather, it is subordinate to it.”
Indeed, the only time in America where major policies were undertaken to the benefit of the greater general public was under Franklin D. Roosevelt in the wake of the Great Depression, after the power of capital had already led to its own implosion. Still a case where politics was in essence subordinate to the economy.
The same thing should've ideally happened in the wake of America's 2008 financial crisis (otherwise referred to as the Great Recession), but that's not quite how things worked out despite the ballot box tipping in favor of the socialist-seeming candidate of African American heritage.
“This is why the field of political possibility must be expanded through a social movement that confronts capital directly.”
Kohei Saito, SLOW DOWN: The Degrowth Manifesto.