Politics is the way a group of people orders itself.
Partisan is the intentional support of a political party.

We often get these ideas confused.

It seems that nine out of ten times, when a person says something is political, they really mean partisan.

And of those nine times, nine out of ten times they think all things political actually are partisan.

People frequently decry things as being “too political”: as if the idea that we are trying to figure out how to order ourselves must be taboo.

This isn’t simply a problem of communication. Without addressing how political it is to ban political conversation, we can’t address why we don’t understand each other. Because the problem resides underneath our positions on political issues which lead to partisan legislative priorities. It is in the nature of how we understand our community.

If we can’t get clear on what words mean, then we actually can see how the politics will play out: behind the scenes. And democracy, our stated preference for ordering ourselves, thrives when the people control how we order ourselves.

Misunderstanding what politics actually is is deadly for democracy.