How do I educate myself on politics?

Start reading Karl Marx.

I once read “Free To Choose” by Milton and Rose Friedman. It’s basically a libertarian primer. Some people say it’s been discredited by the corporate greed and related events causing the Great Recession. That may be true, but there’s still some valuable insights to be gained by understanding the theories of free choice and non-coercive regulation, IMO.

First off, start paying attention. To what? To everything. Soak in information, even if it doesn’t seem relevant at the time. Later on, it might be important. The more you know, the more you can pick out bullcrap when someone tries to pass it off on you.

Second, read and listen to what people are saying about politics. Listen especially to predictions, and if you can, remember them: see if they come true later. The people whose predictions come true most often, keep watching them, and listen to their reasoning, and check it with other sources.

Third, do research. Not everything people say is true. Knowing some primary sources to go to for information is a Good Thing. (I wrote a lot about that, and some other good stuff, in my answer here).

Fourth, read a wide variety of sources. Read news (real news, not the sensational crap on the nightly broadcast.) Read the left, read the right, and see who spends the most time backing up assertions with evidence, who who just rants crazy-style. Read sources from outside of the United States (assuming you’re living in the U.S.) to get the view from the outside.

Politics and news never ends. You just gotta jump in the moving stream sometime and start. Perhaps you can pick issues that matter the most to you, and start looking at what people say about them. Other issues that you didn’t care about might become more important, the more you know about them. Politics and news is like the biggest soap opera ever – just addicting, once you start following the storylines, only this matters a lot more than Jersey Shore. These folks can change the circumstances under which you live your life.

Follow up the Marx with some Bakunin, and for a more recent addition maybe some Chomsky.

Start with the classics and recent important books rather than focusing on the stuff going on today. It helps a great deal to have a foundation to interpret what you hear when you hear people arguing about things on the news.

The Prince – Machiavelli, really short, and the first book I read on politics.

Collapse, and Guns, Germs, and Steel – Jared Diamond relatively new books that help you understand humans in groups.

Some of the others have also recommended Marx.

I didn’t vote for Obama.
Read news. Take economics courses – politics and economics are joined at the brainstem, after all. Research names and ideas.
Try to weigh everything fairly. If you have a proper moral foundation, see how they fit with it.

Follow the advice that the above members gave you, but also, read yourself.
Where do you stand on certain political topics, what moral rights do you think are important, which changes in policies do you think are worth fighting for?
It’s one thing to pick a political party or -streaming and check what they want to establish, but an other thing to find out what you want and then find a party that comes closest to that.
Pity that when you are in the USA there are just two (main) parties to choose from…

Read, Watch, listen.

Okay, fine. Read Free to Choose, Das Kapital and Bakunin and see which one makes sense.

And don’t vote for candidates or pick up other political fads “because everyone I know is doing it.”

Get a subscription to Time magazine and Newsweek, and watch Nightline, it you get it in your area.

History is a great teacher. There are few political issues that are really new. And you’ll never really understand an issue unless you can effectively argue both sides.

@Jaxk Excellent point. History is highly instructive, and I’d add to that that getting just the approved version of history is probably not the best idea. The OP should probably look at some critical historians. @Imadethisupwithnoforethought‘s suggestion of Jared Diamond is a good idea, and perhaps also some Howard Zinn. Oh, and another good resource is books like James Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me. I’m sure I’ll think of more sources in the next couple of days, too.

@incendiary_dan thanks. Lies My Teacher Told Me is a great recommendation.

Problem with this question is there are so many good ones you don’t want to overwhelm the poster. I almost want to go to the social section of the site and ask for more exhaustive recommendations

Research various ways to govern: dictatorships, democracies, socialist states, communist states etc. Read up on the history of government and how we got to where we are. Research social movements such as the union movement, the women’s suffrage movement and the civil right’s movement.

But most importantly don’t use the nightly news as your only source of information. By all means watch it (or read it) but use it to jump off to other areas to research. Research all sides of any given issue using every source you can find.

Let me break it down for you. This is how the journalism industry works. First off, I’ve written for the Southwestern College Sun many times and have been taught by a Journalism Purists. There are entities that do intensive investigations, real reporting, truth seeking and backed up by balanced news. These journalists typically write for print. Print news is the last good piece of journalism around. Everything else is backed by the need to fulfill audience quota. Now, print does need to make quotas too, but since they are based locally and not so much network tv wise, they are usually backed well amongst private businesses within its community and survives off that. You have got to read the print entities. No well investigative piece will be shown on tv. For instance, compare a short segment of a local news station, compare it to an article on say, the New York Times. The article is way more juicier in statistics, facts, and sources. I would recommend the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, LA Times, SF Chronicle, Washington Post. Feel free to check out some Fox News every now and again, just to get the perspective of what Fox likes to feed its crowd. And compare that to what the New York Times likes to feed its crowd. You’ll be amazed at the power of reading. And yes the stories are the same from online and the actual paper.

I took a political science class and it helped me understand a lot of things about politics that I didn’t understand before. It also gave me the oportunity to ask questions and discuss politics with other people who were interested in that subject. I’ve been keeping myself up to date on politics by listening to a local radio station that only deals with political issues. I think it’s great that you’re interested in learning how it all works. The more informed you are, the better decisions you make.

If you’re going to start reading newspapers, though, be careful to mind the difference between the “news” sections and the “opinion page,” which doesn’t have to be factual. It’s been said for a long time that the Wall Street Journal’s news pages tell the Right what they need to hear, and the Opinion page tells the Right what they want to hear. The New York Times isn’t quite as bad; they accept opinion writing from all over the place, but you may wish to check out the way the writer leans, in order to better understand where they’re coming from.

I’d also be careful with political call-in shows (on radio or TV, or blogger comments), as it’s come out lately that some of the callers and commenters are paid plants.

Mostly, keep asking questions and listening critically to the responses, and questioning those, too. Don’t believe everything you hear or read. Examine sources.

Really, if you’re going to educate yourself on politics, then you need to also educate yourself on history, math, geography and culture and religion, too. It’s not easy, but it is worthwhile.

First be sure to have a working understanding of philosophy so as to understand the necessity of values and moral principles,after which I would begin by reading the works of John Locke.
Next,the Constitution of the United States and Declaration of Independence.
I used these two things because they are the beacon of reason and the first time in human history that man,through these documents,created a system of government which upheld the right of the individual as paramount over the state.

I think combining political science, and philosophical logic will make you become a terror in understanding the realm of politics!

@dreamwolf ;)

@laureth Same with news reporting; that same lean that skews opinion pieces will also distort attempts at rendering fact. Sometimes it’s a lack of professionalism, but just as often it’s an unconscious thing. Broad samples and critical thinking are crucial. As a rule of thumb, most news is slanted leftwards.

Nullo, I would also say that where one stands on the spectrum also skews one’s view of the news. Righties will say that the media is skewed left, while lefties say much of it is skewed right. Slate and Politico are also sites that I hear lean left (from righties) and right (from lefties).

I think it’s a little bit like the sun. People in the Northern hemisphere see it in a different direction than do Southern hemisphere people, but that doesn’t mean the sun actually changes.

Deeper knowledge of history is a necessary but not sufficient condition to educate oneself about politics. Also, listen to NPR, watch PBS, and read high quality magazines such as TIME.

@mattbrowne I dunno; anything that accepts donations and grant money has been compromised as an unbiased source.

Using multiple sources can avoid this problem to some extend.

@Nullo – do you include advertising revenue as a skewing influence, then? I would. Please also keep in mind that if an audience pays a higher cover price for the news they want to hear, that’s what will be printed, too. What source of income do you then advise for a minimally-skewed news source, if you don’t want to read several, as suggested?

@laureth I do, though to a lesser extent. Donated money typically comes with a social agenda; ad money is given in hopes of getting more money back, which doesn’t usually require political motivation, leaving less room for leverage. This could change, of course, if anybody really tried.
The best hope for reporting unbiased by ads would be news via internet – blogs, if you’ve got a professionally-trained blogger. Space is cheap-ish (free, if you’re not picky about who actually runs the site), and access is easy. Pitfalls here are credibility and circulation; you could be the world’s best reporter but if nobody knows it, there’s no point.

On the receiving end, education in the ways of journalism and public relations could help to identify and counteract spin that might encounter in your media.

Interesting. I would think that the greater the number of people paying for a site, the more evened-out the agenda would be. NPR (for example) receives donations from lots of people, whereas Jimmy Joe’s Politics Blog receives its funding largely from Jimmy John, and will reflect his views alone.

No matter how careful they are, everyone has their biases. You just have to know the biases when you watch the news and listen to more than one source. For example, everyone knows that Fox is biased to the right, and CBS biased to the left. NPR is probably the least biased because they don’t have commercial interests tugging on the purse strings, but they’re biased too (but probably more at an individual newscaster level rather than an organization level).

Found this, thought of the thread. Enjoy!

@laureth You need to consider what sorts of people would put funding behind public radio, and where they’d fall on the political spectra.

After some time listening to NPR, I’ve realized that they are often critical of [whoever is in power], because that’s who needs the most criticizin’. This is why, at one point, Hillary Clinton called NPR (paraphrasing) ‘part of the vast right-wing conspiracy to being down” her husband, back in the ‘90s.