One's preferred flavor of ice cream is apolitical. But anything that involves more than one person, and actual or potential conflicts between people, is political. Status quo, as a whole, is political.
And that constitutes a much larger part of our lives than is traditionally acknowledged. Which is itself, also, a political matter, because designating a subset of actual politics as "officially politics", and then marginalizing that subset, is one way to slow down further political developments in that department.
I don't think your comment is entirely true. For example I think a lot of purchases of the Bernie Sanders flavored ice cream from Ben & Jerry's had nothing to do with the actual taste of the ice cream.
That's like saying that if everything is physical, then nothing is. "Everything," by which we mean many things, is political in the sense that it has political aspects that should be recognised, but those aspects are very different from one thing to another. Political means pertaining to the distribution of power and resources in a society. But what kind of power/resources, which society and what form of distribution vary greatly. That many things have a colour doesn't mean the concept of colour is meaningless, nor that it draws its meaning from things that don't have a colour, because colour is an aspect with many hues. In short, "everything is political" means learning to look at the political aspects of things. The goal is not to distinguish between the political and apolitical, but between the many different shades of the political.
> "Everything is political" is literally the working definition of totalitarianism.
No, its not.
"Everything must be directed by the coercive power of the state" is. The former does not imply the latter (the scope of the coercive power of the state is, itself, a political issue.)
Certainly not, because the question of whether a government ought to be involved in some interaction is, clearly, a political question, and asking that question is clearly not equivalent to saying that the government ought to be involved in all interactions.
>and asking that question is clearly not equivalent to saying that the government ought to be involved in all interactions.
Yes, actually it absolutely is. Putting everything up for grabs for state (or in modern day; the mob) control is literally totalitarianism. People who "don't understand" this are either abysmally stupid or are power mad imbeciles who are pretending not to understand for Machiavellian reasons.
Saying "everything is political" is putting everything up for grabs for state (or mob) control whether you said it aloud or not. Doesn't matter if it's a tyranny by some generalissimo or amorphous mob of twitter gibbering nitwits or tiki torch bearing numskulls.
If "everything is political" there is no room for private life, which is the only life that matters.
No, as I said, the statement "the government should not be involved in your private life" is very clearly a political statement, because it relates (directly!) to the policies and actions of the government. And that is, of course, the opposite of totalitarianism.
If you define “political” in such a way that nothing can be “apolitical” then the word “political” completely loses its meaning. The whole point of any adjective is to distinguish between things. It’s a tautology.
