Parsing the politics

I have long been puzzled by our media commentators' failure to grasp the full import of current political activity by the far Right in Australia. That is, of course, speaking of commentators other than those employed by Murdoch – the agenda there is clear.

But for the rest, the mystery remains.

It is, I suppose, a 'woods for the trees' thing.

You don't get the sense of a sentence through defining one word from it. Words say nothing on their own; each clause lends meaning to the next.

Neither do patches become a quilt until sewn together.

A dot is just a dot until it's joined with all the others.

And you do not get a sense of politics and the directions they move in by taking each statement, declaration or policy outside of context.

Quite some time ago, Aristotle said: 'The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.'

Yet so many are unwilling to parse the sentence, complete the quilt, see the whole picture, add the elements together. It is - in this age where it is uncool to discuss ideology - an exercise in logic that is assiduously avoided.

And so opinion-makers fail to discuss what's behind political policy, are puzzled by the coming together of a hundred thousand Australians under banners decrying many policies.

Yet context is all.

Put all this together, for example: