You live in America, a country founded, originally, in 1607 by charter from the Crown of England. 13 years later, a group of religious extremists seeking to escape the influence of The Church of England found another colony 500 miles away from the first one. Over the course of the next 160 years these two colonies explode in population, pushing the people who lived here originally further west. Colonization mostly stops at the Appalachian mountains until the early 19th century. Because of this, the East Coast of the US is more densely populated than anywhere else. You live in the ashes of politics.
When the wealthy landowners who constituted the political class of the colonies overthrow the authority of the Crown of England, they draft a system whereby the judiciary has the power to overturn acts of the legislature, and the chief executive is separate from that legislature, in order to limit the power of the legislature's sovereignty, a system wildly unusual for the time. As a result, social change can be artificially held behind by lifetime-appointment judges for decades or generations beyond popular opinion or desire. You live in the ashes of politics.
The New Deal programs bring millions of white Americans back from the edge of starvation. In order to garner support from Dixiecrats, the Roosevelt Administration specifically excludes Black and Hispanic Americans from these programs. Housing programs are the most affected by these, allowing whites to accumulate wealth via land ownership and real estate on a massive scale. When Black and Hispanic citizens are able to purchase property, they are systematically excluded from the most desirable areas, a practice known as redlining. This systematic segregation of wealth snowballs over generations. You live in the ashes of politics.
During World War II, automobile manufacturers are given billions of dollars to build materiel for the military. Trucks, Jeeps, ambulances, airplanes, rifles, bombs, radios, and hundreds of other things. The automakers use profits from this to design and later market automobiles not just as a luxury, but as a necessity. Over the 50s and 60s, use of public transit declines. In the 1950s, the Eisenhower administration creates the Interstate Highway System both to encourage Americans to drive and to move war materiel in the event of a conflict with the Soviet Union. These massive roads require massive amounts of space, and when they are run through cities, they are overwhelmingly built on top of prosperous Black and Hispanic neighborhoods, often bisecting and isolating them. You live in the ashes of politics.
This is by no means an exhaustive list of the ways your life is affected by the politics of men long since dead. But you live, every day, in the ashes of politics past. You just don't think about it. Everything about your life, from where you live, to where you work, to the way you get to the supermarket, to the fact you have as supermarket, is political.
