There is something deeply unsatisfying about being asked where you sit on the political spectrum. The question presumes a linearity that does not hold up to the complexity of real life, as though the rich tapestry of one’s convictions about the economy, education, immigration, the environment, healthcare, and social justice can be meaningfully collapsed into a single coordinate on a line stretching from left to right. I want to propose that there is another way of thinking about political orientation, one I call “post-politics,” which is not a retreat from political engagement but rather a commitment to pragmatism, evidence, experience, and dialogue over ideological loyalty.

The term “post-political” has been used before, most notably by theorists like Chantal Mouffe (2005) and Jacques Rancière (2007), though typically as a critique. Mouffe, in On the Political, warns that the post-political consensus of centrist liberalism suppresses genuine democratic contestation, creating what she calls a dangerous illusion of agreement that masks power and drives citizens toward populism. I take her warning seriously. What I am proposing is not the technocratic managerialism she rightly criticises, the bland assertion that we are all “beyond ideology” while covertly enforcing one. Rather, post-politics as I conceive it is an active, deliberate refusal to be captured by either camp, a commitment to letting the issue, not the tribe, determine the position.

Consider the polarisation that has come to define political life in the twenty-first century. In the United States, the partisan divide has widened to a degree that the Pew Research Center (2024) has described as historically unprecedented, with members of each party viewing the other not merely as mistaken but as a genuine threat to the nation. In Australia, while the chasm is less dramatic, the culture war dynamics imported largely through media and digital platforms have produced a similar tendency toward tribal thinking (Davis, 2019). On the left, there exists a powerful impulse toward moral certainty, a conviction that one’s positions on social justice, climate, and inequality are so self-evidently correct that dissent signals not disagreement but moral failure. On the right, a parallel certainty operates, one grounded in appeals to tradition, individual liberty, and the market, which treats any call for collective action or structural reform as an assault on freedom. Both sides are, in their own way, monocular. They see clearly with one eye closed.

Post-politics begins with opening both eyes. It insists that the world is too complex, too contradictory, and too resistant to neat categorisation for any single ideological framework to capture adequately. Anthony Giddens (1994), in Beyond Left and Right, argued decades ago that the traditional categories of political thought had been overtaken by the transformations of late modernity, that globalisation, ecological crisis, and changes to work and family life demanded a rethinking of political identity that moved past inherited ideological commitments. While Giddens’s own “Third Way” project ultimately became entangled with Blairite centrism and attracted legitimate criticism for its accommodation of neoliberal economics (Mouffe, 2005), his foundational insight remains sound. The problems we face do not respect ideological boundaries. Climate change is not a left-wing issue. Mental health is not a right-wing issue. The question of how best to educate children does not belong to either camp.

This brings me to what I regard as one of the most instructive examples of ideological capture damaging real outcomes: the so-called “reading wars” in education. For decades, the teaching of reading in English-speaking countries was dominated by an ideological battle between proponents of whole-language approaches and advocates of systematic phonics. Whole-language pedagogy, influenced by Kenneth Goodman’s characterisation of reading as a “psycholinguistic guessing game,” emphasised immersion in rich literature and the natural acquisition of reading skills (Kim, 2008). Phonics instruction, by contrast, insisted on the explicit, systematic teaching of letter-sound correspondences. The conflict was never purely empirical; it was deeply ideological. Whole language became associated with progressive, child-centred philosophies of education, while phonics was coded as conservative, traditional, and didactic. Teachers and researchers aligned themselves not merely with a method but with an identity.

The consequences were devastating for children, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds. As the National Reading Panel (2000) and subsequent research made clear, systematic phonics instruction produces significantly stronger early reading outcomes, especially for children who do not come to school with the print-rich home environments that make whole-language approaches viable for more privileged learners. In Australia, the 2005 National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy endorsed systematic phonics as an essential foundation, and the more recent adoption of evidence-based reading instruction across Australian states reflects a hard-won, research-driven consensus. Yet this consensus was delayed by decades because the question of how to teach reading was treated as a battleground for educational philosophies rather than as an empirical question amenable to evidence. A post-political orientation would have asked from the outset: What does the evidence say? What works for the most children, especially the most vulnerable? And it would have been willing to integrate elements from both traditions where the research supported doing so.

This is the heart of post-politics: a willingness to let go of the identity that comes with political affiliation in favour of what is needed, what is supported by evidence, what is grounded in experience, and what works. It is, in a sense, a pragmatism in the tradition of John Dewey (1927), who argued in The Public and Its Problems that democracy is not a fixed set of institutions but an ongoing experiment, a process of inquiry in which communities test ideas against experience and revise their commitments accordingly. Dewey understood that dogmatism, whether of the left or the right, is the enemy of democratic life because it forecloses the inquiry upon which genuine progress depends.

Post-politics does not mean having no values. It means holding values with sufficient humility to recognise that one’s preferred solutions may be wrong, that the other side may have identified a real problem even if their proposed remedy is disputed, and that compromise is not capitulation but the difficult, necessary work of living together in a pluralistic society. It means being willing to say, as a person who cares about social equity, that a particular welfare programme may not be achieving its goals and needs rethinking. It means being willing to say, as a person who values economic freedom, that unregulated markets produce outcomes that demand collective intervention. It means recognising, as Mouffe (2005) herself insists, that political life is inherently conflictual, but channelling that conflict toward productive disagreement rather than tribal warfare.

The danger of the current moment is not that people disagree. Disagreement is the lifeblood of democracy. The danger is that disagreement has become identity, that what one believes about a given issue is read as a signal of who one is, which tribe one belongs to, and whether one is a good or bad person. Post-politics resists this collapse of belief into belonging. It asks us to think issue by issue, to follow evidence where it leads, to engage with those who see things differently not as enemies but as people who may have something to teach us, and to hold our own positions with the kind of critical openness that genuine intellectual life demands. It means being willing to talk even in discomfort.

This is not a cosy position. It offers none of the warmth of tribal belonging, none of the certainty that comes from knowing one is on the right (or the left) side of history. But it may be the most honest and the most useful orientation available to those who care more about outcomes than about allegiance, more about what helps than about what feels ideologically pure.

References

Davis, M. (2019). The land of plenty: Australia in the 2000s. Melbourne University Press.

Dewey, J. (1927). The public and its problems. Holt.

Giddens, A. (1994). Beyond left and right: The future of radical politics. Polity Press.

Kim, J. S. (2008). Research and the reading wars. In F. M. Hess (Ed.), When research matters: How scholarship influences education policy (pp. 89–111). Harvard Education Press.

Mouffe, C. (2005). On the political. Routledge.

National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy. (2005). Teaching reading: Report and recommendations. Australian Government Department of Education, Science and Training.

National Reading Panel. (2000). Teaching children to read: An evidence-based assessment of the scientific research literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction. National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

Pew Research Center. (2024). Political polarization in the American public. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/

Rancière, J. (2007). On the shores of politics. Verso.