The March for Democracy, from Philadelphia to Washington DC, April 2016
With questions about the state of democracy around the world, the University of Birmingham’s Unfiltered series features two leading analysts, Professor Nic Cheeseman and Dr Niheer Dasandi, to consider if democratic systems from the US to the UK to Europe, Asia, and Africa are better in theory than in practice.
While democracy has an idea of political fairness at its heart, it doesn’t always have an idea of economic fairness. The idea, the critique that Trump put against democracy in America was really about an out-of-touch elite, which was kind of hitting home against this economic inequality.
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That’s a common feature of ideologies. The problem with (liberal) democracy is that its most vocal defenders sell you one thing while they really mean another. People’s will matters, except when a judge thinks otherwise. Or an NGO deems it problematic. Also, don’t you dare move out of these narrow parameters of debate we have set out for you. That would mean deMoCRaCy dYinG in DaRkNeSs.
It’s great that old dogmas about the system are finally being slightly questioned. Hopefully we’ll get more scrutiny on the media-academia Brahmin class and its role in steering the show. Regarding who has the say in “democracy”, too much attention is being given to those who vote and virtually none to those who control the flow of information available to them.