Re: Brexit: Beware: It’s All Starting to Stink of Something Else Archived Message Posted by dovetailjoint on March 15, 2019, 9:01 am, in reply to "Re: Brexit: Beware: It’s All Starting to Stink of Something Else" One of the advantages of 'good old' representative democracy, is that it creates a kind of barrier or breathing space, between the 'will of the people' and the creation of policy. There are good reasons for this. It seems one can criticise a lot about society, only criticising 'democracy' itself, isn't one of them. This is rather new, as for most of history the worship of democracy, democracy as close to a dogma, didn't exist. Democracy was seen as a dangerous idea and a threat to social stability, in a society and economy with massive structural inequalities. I think that today, as we've created a society with massive structural inequalities once more, democracy is once again being seen as... 'problematic.' Too much democracy can he a bad thing, but who gets to decide what's too much? Can there be too much democracy? I don't like referendums very much, especially about incredibly complex and controversial issues. They are far more trouble than they are worth. In smaller societies, with a tradition for compromise and consensus, perhaps; but in the UK? no thanks! Watching the political meltdown in Westminster, surely doesn't look like referendums are a great idea, on the contrary. The UK system is one were the manority in parliament crushes the opposition and rules effectively. That's what the system was configured for, after all. Only now the referendum has severely undermined representative democracy and paradoxically at the same time given immense power to tiny or small groups in parliament, who aren't particularly representative, like the DUP and ERG, but who hold wildly disproportionate power because they hold the balance of power between the two, or is it four or five sides? Brexit has been incredibly destructive and created as huge rupture and schism in politics, a symbolic battlefield where people can symbolically take sides and express their feelings about all that's wrong with their lives. That the ruling class actually created a political 'civil war' was extraordinarily reckless and profoundly damaging and stupid. Message Thread: Brexit: Beware: It’s All Starting to Stink of Something Else - Tomski March 15, 2019, 1:03 am Re: Brexit: Beware: It’s All Starting to Stink of Something Else - Raskolnikov March 15, 2019, 6:09 am Re: Brexit: Beware: It’s All Starting to Stink of Something Else - dovetailjoint March 15, 2019, 8:04 am Re: Brexit: Beware: It’s All Starting to Stink of Something Else - dovetailjoint March 15, 2019, 9:01 am Communist fish - Keith-264 March 15, 2019, 9:18 am Re: Communist fish - dovetailjoint March 15, 2019, 9:45 am Thery can talk (and talk...and talk)! - Gerard March 15, 2019, 10:10 am   Searching