The Politics of Care
Most democratic parties are built around an underlying ideology that drives not just their appeal, but the principles guiding their decisions. Conservative politics is, at its core, about conserving the status quo – slowing change, maintaining what exists, keeping control of the conditions. That's a coherent position. Labour movements emerged as a direct counterweight, built around workers' rights at a time when labour had been so devalued it amounted to exploitation on a massive scale. They played an essential role in shifting that dynamic.
But neither has kept pace with where we actually are. Labour parties globally have drifted toward the ideological centre, adopting positions that would have been considered conservative a generation ago. Greens parties, despite the accelerating urgency of environmental collapse, have largely retreated from big-picture environmental vision into skirmishes around niche social issues. What we're left with is politics ground down into hot-button fragments – not clashes of ideology at scale, but point-scoring over small targets. The big picture has gone missing.
Adam Curtis made an observation in his recent work Shifty that keeps coming back to me: that over the past few decades, political parties of all stripes voluntarily surrendered the levers of power they once held, ceding them to the market. The result was something like a new aristocracy – not based on land or title, but on the accumulation and control of capital. Money as the organising principle of society, with politics increasingly in its service rather than the other way around.
So what's the alternative ideology? What's the rallying point?
The word I keep landing on is care.
Not care as a soft sentiment, but care as a hard political principle – the idea that the economy exists to serve people, not the other way around. This isn't a new idea, but it's one that's been systematically marginalised. The Scene on Radio series on democracy made this stark for me: the model of democratic governance, particularly in the American tradition, was never really built around 'people power'. It was built around the protection of property, those that owned could vote and participate in demorcacy. Those that were owned couldn't. While in the US it might be more explicit - property rights sit at the foundation of "Western" legal, political, and economic systems in ways that have become so naturalised we barely notice them anymore.
Property not people.
What if we inverted that? Not to attack property as such, but to subordinate it – to insist that property should serve people, that life is more important than ownership, and to build policy from that foundation upward.
The implications are significant but not radical in the way that word usually implies. Tax reform that ensures the wealthy pay in proportion to what they extract. Living wages and genuine support systems. Healthcare as a service of care rather than a commodity. Education built around human development rather than economic output. And critically, infrastructure recognised for what it actually is – the shared foundation that makes private enterprise possible at all.
For example, Amazon cannot exist without a road network. If a business benefits from public infrastructure, public systems, public education, and public order, then the question of what it contributes back isn't ideological – it's just accounting.
I think there's genuine appetite for this kind of politics. What seems to be missing is the willingness to name it clearly and build around it – to say, without apology, that empathy is not a weakness, that care is not naivety, and that the capacity to organise collectively around shared problems is one of the things humans actually do best. The alternative – every person extracting whatever they can, consequences be damned – isn't freedom. It's just exploitation with better branding.
The world is literally burning while capital flows into AI investments and data centres, away from the human and environmental systems that underpin everything else. That's not an accident; it's the logical endpoint of an ideology that puts property before people.
The question then is do we care enough to change?