History Main / AllIssuesArePoliticalIssues

For example, AliceAndBob are on vacation in France, and go to visit the Palace of Versailles. Bob marvels at the regal splendour of the centuries-old palace, when suddenly, Alice exclaims: 'Just think of all the misery and oppression the French people were put through so a small elite could live in such luxury! No wonder they [[TheFrenchRevolution revolted]].' Bob (and every other visitor in earshot who happens to speak Alice's language) stares at her dumbfounded, then mutters something along the lines of 'I hadn't looked at it from ''that'' angle before.'

A few weeks later, back home, Alice and Bob are out shopping when they come across a seemingly innocent billboard for a certain line of women's clothing. Alice makes a remark about how the ad is degrading to women, leading Bob to ask, 'What do you mean, degrading to women?' Alice then goes off on a long rant about the ad's supposed misogynistic tendencies.

* In ''Webcomic/MénageA3'', this trope is parodied in a FlashBack in which [[{{Tsundere}} Yuki]] calls a banana flambé 'oppressive' and the waiter who is trying to serve her this dessert a 'patriarchal phallocrat.' It's parody because she does this out of her "phallophobia", not out of any genuine feminist conviction.

* {{Homestuck}}- Kankri Vantas tends to go on long winded speeches about seemingly trivial matters that may or may not be important.

* Huey from the ''{{Boondocks}}'' always sees political conspiracies in everything. He's right roughly half the time.

Please bear in mind that, for non-RealLife examples, whether something fits this trope or not is determined by '''the reactions of ''other characters''''', not the reactions of the audience. Thus, if one character does this with an issue the audience would also feel to be political, it can still fit this trope if the other characters don't see it that way; and if most or all of the characters in a given setting see the political side of an issue which the audience considers non-political, it doesn't fit this trope. In other words, the disagreement "is this political or not" needs to occur between one character and the rest, not between the characters and the audience.

A few weeks later, back home, Alice and Bob are out shopping when they come across a seemingly innocent billboard for a certain line of women's clothing. Alice makes a remark about how the ad is degrading to women, leading Bob to ask, 'What do you mean, degrading to women?' Alice then goes off on a long tract about the ad's supposed misogynistic tendencies.

In both cases, Alice has employed this trope: she has called attention to the political side of something of which Bob, and most other people in their [[TheVerse Verse]], were hardly aware that it ''has'' a political side.

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* Inverted by the Penguin in the [[Series/{{Batman}} 1960s]] ''[[Series/{{Batman}} Batman]]'' [[Series/{{Batman}} television series]], when he runs for Mayor of Gotham City; his campaign features [[BreadAndCircuses 'plenty of girls and bands and slogans and lots of hoopla,]] [[ViewersAreMorons but remember, no politics. Issues confuse people.']]
* Britta on ''Series/{{Community}}'' does this all the time. To take one example, at one point Annie complains about how Britta once invoked the Freedom of Information Act to demand a copy of the notes Annie made in class.
* Beth on ''Series/{{Pramface}}'', repeatedly. In one episode she gets kicked out of a jewelry store because she gets into an argument about blood diamonds, in another she attempts to replace all the hymnals in a church with ''The God Delusion''.

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* In ''[[MenageA3 Ménage à 3]]'', this trope is parodied in a FlashBack in which [[{{Tsundere}} Yuki]] calls a banana flambé 'oppressive' and the waiter who is trying to serve her this dessert a 'patriarchal phallocrat.' It's parody because she does this out of her "phallophobia", not out of any genuine feminist conviction.

* Played for laughs in ''SluggyFreelance'' [[http://www.sluggy.com/comics/archives/daily/20020106 here]].

* Inverted by the Penguin in the [[Series/{{Batman}} 1960s]] ''[[Series/{{Batman}} Batman]]'' [[Series/{{Batman}} television series]], when he runs for Mayor of Gotham City; his campaign features 'plenty of girls and bands and slogans and lots of hoopla, but remember, no politics. Issues confuse people.'

* Britta on ''Series/{{Community}}'' does this all the time.

* Creator/GeorgeOrwell managed to end an essay about ''toads'' on a political note.

* In ''ReservoirDogs'', Mr. Pink gets an infamous EstablishingCharacterMoment when he explains the political philosophy behind tipping, something the other characters had always done unquestioningly. However, Mr. White counters with his own argument about why Mr. Pink's philosophy is flawed.

* Creator/GeorgeOrwell - [[TropeNamer from whom this trope's name is a direct quote]] - was truly notorious for this. His friend Cyril Connolly once said about him that he 'couldn't blow his nose without moralising on conditions in the handkerchief industry.'
** Case in point: Orwell managed to end an essay about ''toads'' on a political note.

* Britta on [[Series/{{Community}} Community]] does this all the time.

* Britta on [[Series/{{Community}} Community]] does this all the time

* In ''{{Zwartboek}}'', there is a scene in which a group of Dutch [[LaResistance resistance fighters]] drinks to the Queen; one of them refuses to drink to her, because he is a Communist (and thus opposed to the monarchy). The others don't quite see what the big deal is. This scene was probably meant to symbolise the considerable tensions that arose within the RealLife Dutch resistance movement due to UsefulNotes/{{Pillarisation}}.

This trope occurs when a character starts a political discussion on an issue which the other characters don't feel to be political at all. ('Political' here is used as an umbrella term for 'political, philosophical, economic, cultural...' - in short, everything people can get into a more or less intellectual argument about).

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* In ''The Last Days of Disco'', one character talks about how much fun she had seeing ''Lady and the Tramp'' with her little niece and nephew. Another replies by deconstructing the movie as promoting an unrealistic and self-destructive view towards relationships with the opposite sex, "imprinting on their little psyches the idea that smooth-talking delinquents recently escaped from the local pound are a good match for nice girls from sheltered homes."

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* In ''{{Zwartboek}}'', there is a scene in which a group of Dutch [[LaResistance resistance fighters]] drinks to the Queen; one of them refuses to drink to her, because he is a Communist (and thus opposed to the monarchy). The others don't quite see what the big deal is. This scene was probably meant to symbolise the considerable tensions that arose within the RealLife Dutch resistance movement due to ideological differences.

* Creator/GeorgeOrwell - [[TropeNamer from whom this trope's name is a direct quote]] - was truly notorious for this. His friend Cyril Connolly once said about him that he 'couldn't blow his nose without moralizing on conditions in the handkerchief industry.'

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* Creator/GeorgeOrwell - [[TropeNamer from whom this trope's name is a direct quote]] - was truly notorious for this. His friend Cyril Connolly once said about him that he 'couldn't blow his nose without moralizing on conditions in the handkerchief industry.'
** Case in point: Orwell managed to end an essay about ''toads'' on a political note.
* In the "science wars" of TheEighties and TheNineties, the supposed neutrality and objectivity of the exact sciences was called into question; in other words, the assumption that the exact sciences were "non-political" was challenged.
* Any country in a period of heavy political polarisation tends to do this, from the point of view of other countries. The current "culture wars" in the U.S., in which hardly ''any'' issue gets left out of the big "Liberal" vs. "Conservative" conflict, are a particularly [[{{Egregious}} egregious]] example.
* Feminism has a tendency to do this. The most well-known example is calling attention to the use of male pronouns when referring to human beings in general; decades ago, everybody did this without much thought, but then feminists pointed out that it wasn't [[MenAreGenericWomenAreSpecial very fair towards women]].
** An oft-quoted feminist slogan is "the personal is political."
** Third-wave feminism in particular has promoted the idea that one can make a feminist critique of ''anything'', even something seen as apolitical or vapid like certain segments of popular culture. There are magazines such as Bitch which specialize in this, and it's percolated to other anti-oppression movements (such as anti-racism or LGBT rights) and to the social justice movement in general, as seen with the blogs [[http://www.racialicious.com/ Racialicious]] and [[http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/ Sociological Images]].
* Marxism and the various theories and ideologies that have derived from it tend to adopt this approach. To simplify, according to these perspectives nothing can be truly apolitical since everything is informed by politics to some degree or other. As such, to be apolitical is essentially the same as tacitly condoning the status quo, since even if you disagree with the status quo by not speaking up against it in the name of 'neutrality' or being 'apolitical' it simply means that nothing's going to change. As such, many Marxist thinkers tend to disdain the supposedly 'apolitical' even more than they disdain their opponents, since their opponents are at least taking a position on things and standing their ground.
* In an interesting twist, the Social Justice protests in Israel (the local version of the ‘Occupy’ protests, named so probably because ‘Occupy’ doesn’t sound too well in Hebrew and has [[ArabIsraeliConflict troublesome connotations in English]]―which [[RuleOfCautiousEditingJudgment will not be elaborated on here]]) are often accused of being ‘leftist’; this is because political discourse in Israel revolves almost entirely around security issues, and ‘left-wing’ is almost synonymous with ‘pro-Arab/dove’. The reason for this is somewhat justified, as the protests include several groups of people that have at least a vaguely Social Democratic streak in common, and among those groups are expressedly pro-Palestinian groups that oppose Jewish settlements past the Green Line (often due first and foremost to the cost of maintaining them and the huge support they get, as opposed to moral grounds). More cynical leftist say that this attempt to connect the social protests with pro-Arab views is the result of the cynical efforts of the right-wing government, and especially PM Benjamin Netanyahu, and the rich people who enjoy having the vast majority of Israel’s wealth concentrated in their hands, to delegitimise the protests and label them as dangerous; this point, however, will [[RuleOfCautiousEditingJudgment also not be elaborated on]].

There is a sliding scale as to how sympathetically this is portrayed. On the negative extreme, Alice is an annoying pedant, making SeriousBusiness out of a trivial matter; on the positive extreme, she's the [[OnlySaneMan Only Sane Woman]] of the setting, and everyone around her is shallow and/or uncaring. Can lead to [[GoodIsBoring Good Is Boring]], as having a political opinion looks [[RuleOfCool less cool]] than [[TheSlacker not caring]].

* In the FirstTrySeries, [[Manga/{{Naruto}} Hiruzen]] decides to enact an educational reform and retest the pass genin candidates [[spoiler: after discovering extensive sabotage with the Academy.]] The other ninja village take it to mean that Konoha is remilitarizing

* Homestuck- Kankri Vantas tends to go on long winded speeches about seemingly trivial matters that may or may not be important.

* Feminism has a tendency to do this. The most well-known example is calling attention to the use of male pronouns when referring to human beings in general; decades ago, everybody did this without much thought, but then feminists pointed out that it wasn't very fair towards women.

* [[GranolaGirl Tajel]] from ''{{PHD}}'' often does this.

* Homestuck- Kankri Vantas tends to o on long winded speeches about seemingly trivial matters that may or may not be important