Join the new world

Politics in the eUS has often been a blood sport. A simple disagreement can quickly deteriorate into personal attacks, attacks on another person’s party, and before you know it someone’s patriotism is being questioned. With the propensity for immaturity on the eUS forum these arguments often get crude, or just plain stupid, fast. Now this may sound terrible, and it’s certainly not a good thing, but for the most part people cool down and forget about it within a few days and no real harm is done. Lately though, a new trend that isn’t really that new has been showing up. I’ve seen it before, and it usually shows up in times like this when the country is having a hard time with some hard issues. In the past it has been dangerous, and I worry that it will be again.

Cause…
For the most part political parties stand for nothing. They’re really just a grouping of people who usually work together and all share a title as a platform for political candidacy. Whether you’re in the APF, Libs, SEES, Feds, UIP, SFP, or any other party for that matter, you can be conservative or liberal or moderate or whatever you want to call yourself, but you have to be in a party if you want to run for Congress, which of course is the most common office. Real life parties usually stick to one ideology or another, but as we’ve heard a million times, real life is not eRepublik. This massive difference is what makes politics in eRepublik hard. It’s hard because if you’re being honest with yourself you can’t just write someone off because of what party they belong to. If you’re a Democrat in real life then it’s easy to make assumptions about someone who is a Republican, and vice versa. In eRepublik politics are far more personal, and the only real way to know what someone believes and stands for is to check out the things they’ve said in the past. This takes time, and it’s time that most people would rather not spend. So we have the tendency to treat eRepublik political parties like real life political parties and assume that all the members of an eRepublik party have similar beliefs to one another, like they would in a real life party.

People want to think that they’re in the party that is doing the most for the country. It’s natural, because people want to think that they made the right choice. It’s also a personal issue, because as I’ve already said, political parties in eRepublik are communities. You become friends with the people in your party, because you work with them a lot, and there is a decent chance that you joined the party you did because you liked the people in the party. Of course everyone wants to believe the best things about their friends, so this only enforces the feeling that you picked the right party. Unfortunately this often leads people to the thought that other people picked the wrong party.

Holier Than Thou
Some people have to find a way to justify this thought. They take up a “Holier than thou” attitude where they act as though people in a particular party aren’t trying as hard for the country as people in the party they’re in. They try to back this feeling with claims about the good their party is doing. They point out how much damage their party militia is doing, or how many blockers they’re contributing, or how many ATO voters they have, or how many voters they deployed oversees. Now don’t get me wrong, all of these things are great efforts by political parties and by individuals. The problem is when people use these efforts to suggest that another party isn’t patriotic. At one time or another just about every party has done it. They’ve gotten angry at another party because of something that other party is doing, or something they think that party is doing, and they’ve tried to make a big show of how that party isn’t working for the good of the country. They’ve generalized about all the members of a party, usually casting them in a negative light. Some call this politics as usual, but have we ever thought about the effect when it becomes extreme enough that the party being attacked actually has its reputation damaged?

…And Effect
I said earlier that this isn’t a new trend. I remember the last time that I saw it this dramatically was during the war against France. Not the one that most people these days remember, I’m talking about Operation French Toast, roughly a year ago. At that time the war was a sore issue, and many people thought that we shouldn’t have gone to war at all. Many of them were part of the USWP, which I was also a part of. Though I never witnessed it myself, it came out that some of the leadership of the USWP had encouraged some people not to fight against France, and had even started talking to France about a possible peace deal. I have no doubt that their intentions were good, but when this came out the other four parties of the top five pounced. They called the USWP traitors, they called them zombies, they called them everything they could think of. For a week almost every article in the top five was either attacking the USWP as traitors or the USWP trying to defend itself. The end result changed the country in ways that we can never fully know. The USWP was undoubtedly scarred, they lost members, as well as many potential members, people were turned off politics in general, and a few even left the country.

Now, we can never know what would have happened if this political firestorm hadn’t happened. Perhaps someone would have joined the USWP and because of the people they met their led the nation to a great victory. Perhaps the USWP would have made some other mistake that caused them to fall from grace. Perhaps the USWP would have used the power they still would have had and damaged the country. We will never know, and the possibilities are endless, but the nation had gone from mild hostility towards the largest party to a “Holier than thou” attitude that stayed with us for months. This article is already too long, so I’ll sum my point up quickly. Writing off entire parties, as we seem to be inching towards doing again, helps no one. We should all view it as exactly what it is, a power play by those who think they can gain from damaging another party. We would all be well served, as individuals and as a nation, to judge people as individuals instead of based on the labels that we can apply to them. Thanks for reading, and I promise, I’ll try to keep the next article I write shorter.