Democracy is supposed to be about the small insignificant stuff. Big principles like freedom liberty, individual rights should not be up for grabs and determined by majority rule, to be voted away by the biggest gang, dignified by the word constituency. One's life and inalienably concomitant rights should not be up for public auction,sold off to the highest bidder. But they are and freedom and liberty is consequently in mortal danger.
When was there last a debate about what the state should or should not be allowed to do.what's its proper role is, its limitations and scope? Absent such a debate authoritarianism has made great advances,unchecked by any counter argument,any call for restraint and delineation of the state's desired parameters. There is no end to people's demands and calls on the state to interfere and meddle with human activity,there is no limit to the reach of the unchecked state in pursuit of its ideological goals.
Such is the parlous state of today's political culture where all discourse is fed through the narrow prism of restricting liberties in pursuit of egalitarian goals.
Hence the dismal and dispiriting non debates of the present election where principles are absent and the candidates are vying for yet more control over their demoralised subjects and where one special interest group is cancelled out by a bigger one and all are left frustrated and impotent, dimly aware that they have been cheated, that their destinies and lives are not in their control but in the control of distant forces that patronise them every 5 years and inveigle them to vote against their own long term interests,sullied and tainted by a corrupt system that has robbed them of their personal autonomy, that they themselves have enabled and foolishly given their moral sanction.
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