| Edit: to the above. I am being overly negative - like "half the population are fools !". It's not that. Democracy works well (ish) with political parties that are more or less well intentioned - they may have their favourite in groups and be more or less corrupt but as long as one party is not trying to sink the ship, then "the people" do not have to pay much close attention. The difference in policies between most major parties in any country is small and the difference across counties is much smaller than you would think. So if you vote on "traditional party lines" you more or less get forward progess. But if one party actually wants to harm the democracy / state then you get Hitler elected (ok very special case he already had a 3 million person country wide organisational apparatus) but you get my point - if politicians are actually intent on sinking the boat they can slip through if we are not careful. That seems to have been the 2016 case - europe, Brexit, Trump. Wolves appeared in sheep's clothing and people just picked between sheep. it's not clear how to fix the problem other than to accept that sometimes we will self harm, and we will need to pay the price, not of electing someone who will promise to fix it for us, but to do the hard work as citizens and become educated, informed, engaged. I think something like citizenship tests for not immigrants but natives might be an interesting start. USA has an odd head start in you learn to swear allegiance to a flag and a reply bloc every day as kids. That makes some kind of diffeeebce. |