A Quote by Barack Obama
I was elected because I believed in what we call "grassroots politics," politics from the bottom up, not the top down.
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If you look at social movements in Latin America, there are spaces where alternative politics are thought about on the ground, at the grassroots level, but they are always under threat. The problem in North Africa and the Middle East is the politics of oil. It means that the spaces for truly grassroots politics, involving those masses of people excluded from high politics, are very quickly closed down. They are not really allowed any kind of autonomy to develop, and that seems to be the real problem, which gets us back to the neo-colonial relationship.
Or they'll talk about fear, which we used to call politics- job politics, social politics, government politics.
The politics of personal destruction, the politics of division, the politics of fear, it's all there. It helps you to define the politics of moderation - the politics of democratic respect, the politics of hope - more clearly.
I think there are lots of ways to exercise ambition and accomplish things using leadership without going into elected politics. So, categorically, I have no intention of going into elected politics. None.
The belief that politics can be scientific must inevitably produce tyrannies. Politics cannot be a science, because in politics theory and practice cannot be separated, and the sciences depend upon their separation. Empirical politics must be kept in bounds by democratic institutions, which leave it up to the subjects of the experiment to say whether it shall be tried, and to stop it if they dislike it, because, in politics, there is a distinction, unknown to science, between Truth and Justice.
I'm fed up with the top-down style of politics, where discussion in our party is stifled because of sectarianism and tribalism.
Since we're each unique, if we've shared many experiences, then it probably has something to do with power or politics, and if we unify and act together, then we can make a change. Revolutions that last don't happen from the top down. They happen from the bottom up.
We need a new kind of politics. Not the politics of governance, but the politics of resistance. The politics of opposition. The politics of joining hands across the world and preventing certain destruction.
You need a Democratic Party which is a grassroots party, which makes decisions from the bottom on up, not just from the top on down.
Trans activism in the US has most frequently been grassroots, centered on poverty and criminalization, and often oppositional to the exclusionary "mainstreaming" threads in gay and lesbian politics and feminist politics.
Politics is not predictions and politics is not observations. Politics is what we do. Politics is what we do, politics is what we create, by what we work for, by what we hope for and what we dare to imagine.
Politics was put in front of me. I do politics because it's the vehicle for change and because I happen to be good at it... I had this sort of calm fearlessness, that some would call foolishness.
I was previously involved in local and state politics, but not national, because grassroots democracy starts at the bottom. This was the breaking point for me, though - and it made the case that in order to fight locally, we have to fight nationally; we can't afford to neglect any area of life in this democracy.
The United States Constitution builds politics right into the process of selecting federal judges. This third branch, the judiciary, is designed to have a longer view. To have individuals who are more insulated from politics. They're not elected directly. They're appointed for life. So, politics enters, but it's also, controlled. And if you bypass this process, I'm not sure what we do.
Trouble is, we call politics a game, but it isn't one. There is no referee, and the teams make up the rules as they go along. You can't cry foul or offside in politics. Almost anything goes.
When we win on an issue we call it leadership. When we lose, we call it politics. Practicing politics simply means increasing your options for effective results.
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