You The People....

Treść źródłowa

Democracy, we read these days, is under threat from people like you and me. Or at least something labelled “Democracy;” whether it’s defined as an ideology, a series of procedures, or just not really defined at all, is under threat from people like us voting for the wrong political parties. The German media is freaking out this week about opinion polls showing the AfD gaining even more support. The French political elite claims that Democracy itself would be under threat if anyone were to be irresponsible enough to vote for the Rassemblement national. Indeed, for much of the European media and much of the political class, there is only one significant subject in politics today: talking endlessly about the need to stop the “extreme Right.”Now I’m not going to offer you yet another diatribe on the hypocrisy of a political system which claims to believe that democracy can be saved only if people are prevented from voting in particular ways. I don’t do diatribes very well, anyway. Rather, and faithful to this site’s basic premise of treating politics as engineering and looking at forces, stresses and processes, I want to try to set out how I think we have got into this Ubuesque mess. But since the kind of confused and often aggressive rhetoric we are seeing about “defending Democracy” comes out of somewhere—it always does—it’s worth first of all trying to see where that somewhere is, and then going on to look at some of the deeper underlying forces which have brought us to where we are.******************These essays will always be free, but you can continue to support my work b…