When you get dressed for a night out or for many people just getting dressed at all, there is the core outfit you assembled, colors and shapes that reflect the mood, your tastes, and the style you best thinks fits for the events to come, and then in addition there are accessories, rings or pendants, watches, and little elements of flash that accentuate the overall ensemble but are not essential to its completion. Politics, what we believe and what we support, either with our votes or with our time, toil, and treasure, is much the same.

We have the core elements of political philosophy, those things that are at the very center of what we believe, that reflect our understanding of the world and in a very real sense our understanding of what it means to be human. (This is why all narrative art is at some level also political art because it reflects an understanding of people and that requires a judgment as to what people actually are and that is always a political judgment.) Ideally, at least in my opinion, that core political fashion should come from careful consideration and deliberative thought about what is and isn’t permissible though I suspect for many it is born from desire, from what is wanted personally rather than any carefully constructed framework. No matter the origins, the core political fashion is the driver and essential nature of a person’s political actions, how they vote, how they expend time, toil, and treasure is the only true indicator of what they believe and hold valuable, everything else is an accessory and ultimately discardable.

But what about those accessories that you own but never wear? Watches, bracelets, and accentuations that you tell people you like, that are valuable to you and yet when it comes time to choose an outfit you never select one for which those are complementary, what about those items? Your actions and your choices make it clear that those items, no matter the protestations that they have emotional value, are valueless and the same goes for political accessories.

Everyone has a grab bag of political positions, very, very few people forge a political identity solely from cool, reasoned, principles. Because so many people have this odd-ball collection of positions, some become the ignored watches and bracelets of their political philosophy, items of claimed value that never influence their time, toil, and treasure. This is a natural byproduct of the compromise that lies at the heart of political action. Politics is the realm of the possible not a lofty idealized system divorced from the realities of human frailty, limited resources, and enemy action. However if there positions that you never vote for, if your own desires and need always outweigh those of your fellow citizens as their rights as assaulted, as the freedom is abridged, then perhaps it is time to admit that those concerns really are of no importance to you, that what really matters is getting your and too bad for others who lose in the process.