"Everything Is Political"

04 Oct, 2026

Before starting to babble, I find it quite essential to mention that I’m not American, nor do I live in the US. I was born and raised in Europe, in a country with a distinguishably different mentality than the US has. This doesn’t mean that I fully follow this country’s mentality; there are many points of view that I don’t partake in.

In the meantime, you might wonder why there is the need to clarify my origins and that’s a valid question. The reason is simply because not being American makes me automatically observe America as an outsider, while looking at the whole picture from further than if I was born and raised in that Western part of the world.

At the same time, what I’m talking about in this post has to do with a phenomenon that takes place mainly within American society, but is also spreading abroad. My perspective is formed by the exact fact that I don’t have much to do with the American mentality—at least to a certain extent—although I’m being affected by it, whether I wish it or not.

That being said, let’s dive into a topic that has caused and still causes major debates: the phrase “everything is political.”

This phrase is being repeated very often, for different reasons. Usually, to justify privacy invasion and to give people the illusion that democracy is legitimate and not at all corrupted. However, it’s a matter of high complexity for its multifaceted nature to be degraded into a simplistic perception.

Indeed, everything can become political if we politicize it.

Nowadays, anything gets politicized with much ease, since every action has the potential to become a statement of some sort. Yet, we cannot say that "everything is political", without simplifying reality. Everything has a political aspect in it—but that is an entirely different message.

The way people live in a society is defined by a political system and in that regard the way they operate in it is because of politics. At the same time, though, there are things beyond that, such as faith, science, or art. While art, for instance, can be used to convey political messages and the Church and the State are in some countries joined together, it doesn't mean that religion and art are inherently political. No, and again, no.

Now, if you tell me that Monet’s landscapes are political because of politics being the reason he was able to exhibit his paintings freely, I'm not sure what to answer to this. Not because I feel defeated by this argument, but because it seems that relativism is so commonly used, that, in this case, we can't talk about anything that is not what you'd like to hear.

Being European, I feel that interpreting reality as if everything was political is a very American way to understand societal structure, although the ideology itself was, funnily enough, born in Europe. However, it has been adopted by the US and has been actively weaponized to brainwash not only Americans but also people from other western countries. This, of course, is not the first time such a thing has happened. In many cases, several ideologies and lifestyle philosophies were even born in the US and were progressively adopted—or quietly imposed—to other parts of the world through soft power. In some countries it has worked more than it has worked in others.

Undoubtedly, America is a country which, at different times during its relatively short history, decided to advocate (way too much, I would say) on behalf of other countries that didn’t ask for it, in Asia or in South America, among others. However, I don’t wish to enter into historical details in this post. But let’s keep in mind that during the 19th century “many Americans believed that they had a special responsibility to modernize and civilize the Chinese and Japanese.”¹ A country that was created, metaphorically speaking, yesterday felt the need to civilize cultures that were here before America was even conceived as an idea? Pretty odd.

Anyhow, the reason I’m mentioning all this is because I wonder if, nowadays, the same could be happening. The answer is probably yes. But maybe the correct question to ask is: did it ever stop?

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During the 20th century, a feminist slogan was largely used, saying that “the personal is political." This is almost identical to “everything is political." It’s true that women’s rights and social position were affected by politics back then, and by politics they were changed. However, it's risky to generalize something that applies only in specific cases—by doing so, we lose the line between the personal and the public, which are, in the end, two separate spaces. Nowadays, there is no distinction between these two, because they have made it so: there's now the need to always pick a side, decoding the political message in absolutely everything people consume, and then support it or reject it.

Thinking about current worldwide events, how can someone advocate for freedom and at the same time boldly state that “everything is political”, without this being slightly contradictory? This is a statement whose core is not freedom, quite the opposite. When everything truly becomes political, we get fascism and totalitarianism, where everything is the State and there’s no differentiation between the public and the personal. History has provided enough examples so far to prove this.

I constantly come across contradictory behaviors, confirming that people are very often ready to blindly adopt already-made ideas, without giving the matter absolutely any thought. Social media don't help much with that, if not reinforce the problem, which expands to countries where people think and act differently. I've grown weary of being perceived, both on an individual level and on a collective level, as a tabula rasa on whom whatever kind of ideology should be engraved for the sake of American Exceptionalism.

There are signs that the cage is tightening: the fact that every aspect of an individual’s life is so blended that we cannot discern anymore what is personal, private, public, and external is one of these signs. Yet, people seem to be running on a hamster wheel, chasing an illusional sort of victory. In the meantime, according to some, whoever chooses to stay outside the chase should feel guilty and irresponsible. Doesn't this remind you of Covid-19 times?

If you ask me, I want to be able to enjoy things without automatically being labeled or put into a box because of my choices. What I describe is not escapism, it's invasion of personal space. There are worthy things out there that have the power to positively feed our minds and elevate our spirits. I don’t wish these things to be stained with sick political ideologies, or with the very existence of an ideology whatsoever. There are times when I just want to gather with my close ones and spend time laughing and talking about stuff that doesn’t belong to any “side”.

In the country I was born and raised in, even if something belongs to one side or the other, the human aspect gets prioritized—all this doesn't matter because people don't obsess so much over hatred. At the end of the day, people gather all together, remembering what truly matters. And I hope no America changes that.

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