Not to be an annoying centrist here, but theory without practice is bad, but so is the opposite - one of the problems with 'just fix the potholes' is that the common sense you ascribe to shifts behind our backs and if you don't have a language in which you can articulate how that happens ...
Totally - practice without theory or a coherent belief system is also bad - but there's a level of recreational abstraction in some online politics that feels like it has no connection to reality whatsoever & which makes it all the more dangerous when politicians parrot those guys.
I mean, in Ireland there's a strong argument we might need more ideology not less... but ideology with no connection to real people's real problems is kind of futile.
Illustrating your point in a very literal sense, there are guerrilla “just fix the potholes” YouTube stunts that invariably use a diy bag of cold tarmac repair, which is fine for your driveway but won’t last a week on a public road.
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There’s an interesting meta question here: how on earth have we ended up with ironic poseurs setting the political weather?