Well, a little more than five years have passed since I started writing this blog. Despite the efforts of a number of agents for social change, we are as far away from living in a veritable democracy as ever.And it's not for a lack of trying. At the provincial level in Canada, there have been four referendums on changing the voting system to make it more democratic, one in the UK with the same objective, and a referendum on independence in Scotland. Each democratic initiative did not pass.
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As for me, I chose to go way of the courts to challenge the constitutionality of the first-past-the-post voting system only to have the Supreme Court of Canada refuse to hear our case for reasons unknown.
I found the whole process to be a farce because in order to gain status before the courts to question the constitutionality of the voting system, I had to demonstrate that I was personally affected by vagaries of the voting system in question. In the lower court, we gained cause and were allowed to proceed. Thereafter, having participating in the electoral process as a candidate for the Green Party was then used to sufficiently demonstrate that my democratic rights were not impinged upon by the very fact that I could become a candidate.
Talk about a Catch 22 situation. Gain the right to bring the question to court because I was a candidate for a small political party, but then have the question tossed aside because I had been a candidate for a small political party. All the evidence that we brought to the Court was not even considered. The judges couldn't be bothered even to address a single one of our arguments to show that we had erred. WTF? The fix was on.
Now that a couple of years have passed and the dust has settled, I can see things more clearly.
What I notice is that throughout the Anglo-American Empire there really isn't much of an appetite for democracy. That being said, it is an impossible task to try to graft onto a body politic a set of cultural values that are foreign to its core set of beliefs.
From top to bottom, the societies of the Anglo-American Empire are all about the accumulation of material wealth. From time to time, prosperity is shared on a wider basis, but it usually takes a series of catastrophic of events, like the Great Depression followed by Second World War, to bring about this state of affairs. Most of the time, in most of the countries within the Empire, the rich get richer while the poor are lucky if they can tread water and keep their heads above the poverty line.
Let's not kid ourselves. Democracy is quintessentially an egalitarian ideology. The market is not. So, when doing a survey of the countries with the Empire, it should not come as a surprise that they are all market-based political economies.
For the most part, the entire population buys into this set of beliefs. Yes, there are a few individuals that would prefer to live by a different set of values, but each political system in the Empire has a political system rigged so that alternative views to free market thinking never gain traction.
In fact, the composition of the societies in the UK, the USA, Canada, and Australia are remarkably similar. At the top is the rentier class, the top one tenth of the top one percent of the population, who can never get enough because they are always struggling to maintain face in the social sphere of extreme ostentatious consumption: no yacht, no mansion, no private jet is ever good enough. Beneath, come the petit bourgeois of the lumpen professional class. If they intermarry, they can earn enough to send their children to the best of schools so they can perpetuate their socio-economic advantage. Further down, we have the vast majority who try as best they can to hang on and not fall into the ranks of the destitute. Oddly, within this class we find a massive instance of Stockholm syndrome in which huge numbers of the population actually identify and empathize with their crony capitalist captors, accepting the free market cant as if it were gospel while watching their quality of life deteriorate.
Forget about trying to bring about democratic reform in these countries within the present socio-economic context. The super rich own the political process which controls the armed forces; the smart ones are only looking out for themselves: and those who would have the most to gain be living in a democracy are simply too fucking dumb to know any better.
So, what is a democrat to do? Suck it up and try to live one's life so one doesn't feel soiled at the end of the day? Maybe, it would be better to simply move on to somewhere where people actually get and value living in a democratic society.
I wonder if I could claim status as a politic refugee and become a citizen of one of the Nordic countries?