Focus-Group Democracy
70s,80s,90s was a period of profound rise in inequality in US and UK, but economic governance looked easy at those times, the reason in large part was labor movements were gutted. The effect of this was to destabilize and undercut US and EU fabric on which modern democracies are based. We removed the [basis] of civil society. If anyone believes focus-group democracy, the curse of our present, is not enough, that leaders should do more than simply reflect the preferences of their individual voters, it was social democratic politicians who always believed in the educated function of democracy. Because you couldn’t take what ordinary people thought at its face value because it was full of non-sense which they acquired through capitalist media [..]. If anyone opposed fake news and insisted on fact based argument, it was left historically that did that. And if we want to understand this superstitiously irrational politics which flooded into the space of democracy in the last decade or so, we need to reckon with effect of that process through which the guts of democracy were torn out”.