Tuesday, April 15, 2008
How Democracy Works
In Italy you get the revenant Berlusconi, in Nepal you get Maoists (democracy in Nepal, bad idea), and in Kenya and Zimbabwe you get the guy you didn't vote for. Still - what's the alternative?
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A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
In theory, democracy promises so much, but in practice it delivers so little. The biggest problem with democracy, as I see it, is that it is being asked to do a job it can't do under the circumstances. For it to work well, in what is an increasingly complex and confusing world, requires a level of political and social awareness that few of us have time to acquire and fewer still have the inclination. Consequently, a great many people think they are making a simple choice when they cast their vote, when in fact there are no simple choices. And of course there are many others who are so out of the game that they believe they have no choice to make at all ("they're all the same" brigade) and so don't vote or vote indiscriminately.
ReplyDeleteHere we get a PM we didn't vote for either. And a governing party which, according to some of the feverish speculation, seems to think that ditching him for some other unelected apparatchik will improve matters.
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