Have we reached the expiration date on democracy?
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Do you know that game you used to play when you were little? At children's parties, where all the kids would sit around the table and one kid would whisper a sentence into the ear of the person next to them, and whatever was said would then have to go from ear to ear until finally the last kid in line would have to tell what the last person told them.
And then if the initial sentence was, for example, "John likes cake", the final product would resemble something along the lines of "Mary wears shoes".
Lately I've gotten the feeling that democracy, be it parliamentary or otherwise, is pretty much doomed to live the same process. Especially looking at American politics makes this painfully clear: politicians left and right dogmatically drum up quotes from the Founding Fathers without any understanding of the context in which they were written. These quotes then get reinterpreted and adapted to mean whatever they should mean to the situation at hand. A good example here is Benjamin Franklin who so frequently gets misquoted during political debates, especially 2nd amendment discussions, that I am left wondering if he would've even said anything at all if he had known beforehand his words would be abused so.
In Europe we are still pretending that our countries are being run based on values established during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Yet who knows what Liberalism is, where Social Democracy finds its roots, why Monarchy is positioned within our political system the way it is, or why other countries have abolished it entirely. Few know, because there are fewer still left to explain it.
Contemporary politics are, to me, mostly a matter of people being entirely out of touch with the system they are so desperately trying to defend. And I admit freely that I too am guilty of that. I've proposed my fair share of solutions to problems, or stated in general what my political philosophy is, but in hindsight I see it's mostly a collection of individual takes on individual situations without any underlying foundation. And while I'm certain that I will be met with "speak for yourself" on this, I am nonetheless convinced that many, many others including some of the prominents on this forum have made similar errors.
It is easy to proclaim that you are X or Y, politically, and then, in retrospect, to try and reconcile your ideas with the political philosophy of your choosing just so you can claim to be acting consistently. But that's exactly the process that appears to be corrupting democracy at its very core.
If we presume that every individual Western democratic nation that exists today was founded on very specific notions of ethics and thus by extension politics and economics, then we can only conclude that it is in our very best interest to keep those notions alive as much as possible. Yet how can we? We're all people, and thus all fallible, and given enough time any sort of opinion that was originally supported by a specific group of passionate people will be watered down and reinterpreted so much that very little of its original essence remains.
The thing with democracy is that it relies on the lowest common denominator to participate. It's a government by the people, for the people, where we're supposed to act based on what we think is best for ourselves. Yet with a society inevitably consisting of many people of varying intellect, there is no choice but to explain rather advanced concepts in simple ways so as to not confuse anyone and allow for maximum participation. Yet so much gets lost in translation that now, in some country's cases a few hundred years down the line, it takes a very specific study of a nation's history and political philosophy to still get an idea of what the founding ideals were.
Because you're not going to get them from Fox News or MSNBC. You're not going to get them from any form of media as the media is often not only politically biased but inherently incapable of upholding the highest political standard simply because there's no financial gain to be made.
Taking a critical look at the state of my country and many like it, I'm seeing societies devoid of a foundation. What was once reasoned debate has given way to the overwhelming need for simplicity and has thus devolved into screaming and yelling. And not only the media does this (with their ridiculous nonsensical 24/7 news cycle in some countries), but political parties themselves are equally without basis. I'm supposedly a liberal voter and while I'm still a fan of Mark Rutte (our current prime minister) I don't exactly get the feeling that Liberalism is practiced as much as it is preached by the VVD. Nor do I get any warm fuzzy feelings when I see Greens leader Femke Halsema resorting to pure politics by arguing against things that she's supposed to agree with just because they're being spoken by the opposite party.
Maybe I'm overly critical, maybe I'm pointing out a serious problem. I don't know. I'm expecting a lot of the same old faces to disagree with me regardless of whether this is true or not simply because they feel they must. I don't really think that I wrote this from any position of political bias. I love Western Europe, Northwestern Europe in particular and I have said many times before that this is the best place in the world to live and I still think so. I'm blessed to have been born in the Netherlands and would've been just as blessed to have been born in Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, England, you name it it doesn't really matter.
But there are problems that we're facing and they're not inconsiderable. How can a system work without a foundation? We live in a time where democracy's interpreted as "he who screams the loudest will get the most support" and that can't possibly be a good system. And I don't care if the loudest screamer is right wing or left wing or whatever. If it's populist it can't be good.
Am I advocating a return to monarchy or what have you? No, not necessarily. Maybe we should stick with what we have. Maybe we should stick with what we have and finetune the system a bit. Or maybe we should overhaul the way our countries work and try and come up with a new system, something better and rooted in a philosophy that we won't allow to be eroded by public discourse.
It's honestly no wonder Europe's not been at war with itself since World War 2. There's very little to disagree over if you don't know what you stand for.
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Originally Posted by C-Rob
