Well At Least Someone’s Working on The New Democracy
Posted on December 3, 2006
Filed Under Channels and Content |
I wish these two initiatives were European, Irish even. It is to the constant credit of the United States that while you get a Bush and a Rumsfeld (first typed it as Rumsfled, at last) you also get people beavering away at the big issues.
Bloggingheads and meaningoflife are related through Slate magazine, another place where Americans make better sense of what’s going on around them. They’re also slightly linked to the Huffington Post which recently got $5 million of VC money to develop the blog-to-journalism website that is Huffpo.
I’m trying to think of European equivalents. 18 Doughty St in the UK….? We suffer a democratic deficit based on apathy and a lack of ideas’ engineering, by which I mean the inability to think and say something new.
My guess is the end of Bush will signal also the kind of collective angst that brought Thatcher and Reagan to power in the late 1970s/early 1980s. Then it was too much power to the workers, frustrating big corporates who implored Government to give back to them the right to manage. Well, that’s been roundly abused and executive power has been shown up as a license to do extreme politics, so what’s next?
There’s no point second guessing a revival of any kind of egalitarian politics, though recent reports suggest America’s middle class are beginning to suffer economic hardship and that’s what lit the blue paper at the American mid-term elections. But the idea of a new politics based on principles that include anything like sacrifice for the common good are about laughable by now. Green politics is a necessity and will differentiate no political party after 2008. Technological innovation…. Been there. Education? Failed that. Health. Too messy.
Scary, but politics could come down to meaning, fundamental meaning as in religious meaning which for those of us who don’t put on any particular type of religious cloth might indeed mean a return to ideas and principles. Must change blog title.
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