Political choices matter: rivalry among competing groups is inevitable, but one function of politics in a multiethnic society is to adjudicate such competing claims.
Nor is the revived interest in Brecht merely a function of politics and poetry.
The power and perhaps the function of politics is not like that.
Since 2 July, Canberra time has stretched and slowed, a function of politics being pitched into an extended period of irresolution.
The working class belongs to no one: its orientation, far from predetermined, as the left liked to think, is a function of politics.
How strange it is, then, this new breed of self-hating politicians who want to make a healthy living in politics, while at the same time insisting that the only function of politics is to get out of the way of private enterprise.
Republicans have rained contempt on science and secular expertise, pushing a kind of yahoo postmodernism in which truth is always assumed to be a function of politics, making facts - about, say, global warming, or the failure of abstinence-only education, or evolution - immediately suspect.
The push to reform is a function of politics, business and public pressure.
Spin is part of politics.
"I simply cannot allow partisan politics to stand in the way of the basic functioning of government".
Boring Washington had never looked so sleek, politics never so sexy, and the regular, if dastardly, functioning of government never so possible.
