Politics

“ You can no longer expect people to act in their own best interests when they’re so disoriented they don’t know — or no longer care — what those interests are.”, says Halina Bortonowska, a human rights advocate.

A dangerous trend of oscillating back and forth from democracy cannot last forever without having a weakening impact on it. I think it’s well beyond the time we rise to the true meaning of a stable liberal democracy. The ferocity seen in the Capitol reflects the failure of democracy to address divisions in the United States of America. …

Politics

Democracy is exhausted — exhausted of tolerating us. It’s been keeping up with us for quite some time now. Though it feels the other way around to us, it isn’t. How things stand currently is just reflective of what we have become and how we have violated a system that enables citizens to lobby for their interests and limits government power. I believe, at present, democracy is merely mooching off its ancestral goodwill and is not really adding anything positive to its existing magnanimity. All because of the hypocritic way we have adopted to pretentiously save it. In reality, we all are shirking away from the hard work it will take to save democracy. Above all, it takes unity. Then some risks and sacrifices. It’s not abstract forces from above or under who will bring about the change. …

Politics

Democracy is a puzzle that philosophers and political scientists have been trying to solve for eternity, and a layperson is trying to understand it ever since. Many concoctions of democratic systems have been tried. Some have failed, others survived. Research is not conclusive enough to suggest causative relationships between factors like economic growth, development, and level of democracy or, for that matter, to indicate the effectiveness of democratic systems in general to whether they provide the best decision making for all. Nonetheless, it is worth pursuing on account of having been proven that “democracies can make collectively wiser decisions as compared to non-democracies on average — they are certainly not immune from making decision errors in particular cases.” …

Politics

Political polarization is a dramatic strategy to arouse and outrage the masses. It’s disseminated to fixate the audience on disagreements. Audiences are slow-poisoned, and their standards are lowered to make them incapable of seeing their political opponents as fellow citizens. It is based on forged claims, fictitious promises, and overwhelming provocations. It prevents and distracts people from rationally thinking about others’ concerns or having a comprehensive and wholesome understanding of issues. We need an overriding principle above the partisanship of parties to set a moral code for politics. …

Pandemic

Freedom in a democracy is subject to the freedom of one’s fellow citizens.[1] In Eleanor Roosevelt’s words, “We recognize, of course, that all those who enjoy freedom must learn self-discipline — not discipline imposed by the state but discipline imposed by themselves for the sake of the rights of other human beings.” In short, we understood the limits of freedom and the consequences that follow from being insensible and unconscientious in handling it.

History is in the making, and as we live through this historical moment, I realized that the crisis of 2020 left a deep imprint on what we do and how we do it, even on how we perceive our rights and freedoms. Our awareness about freedom and choices got sharpened during this time. We figured out how our personal choices are dominated by everything around us and are not absolute and unqualified. …

Politics

Democracies neither rise nor get destroyed overnight. Iraq's invasion did not lead to democracy immediately after Saddam Hussein was removed. Instead, it led to the realization that other factors, apart from removing a corrupt authoritarian, were necessary too for democracy to grow. Similarly, the older and more rooted democracy becomes, the tougher it gets to deracinate it. However, all democracies more or less face one thing in common — the swing between euphoria and misery.

“Japan, early twenty-first century, you would still feel like you’d won the jackpot. Greece is in more of a mess, yet it too remains prosperous and peaceful by historical standards. There are many, many grimmer places than this. The crisis was never resolved, but the worst never happened either.”, …

Politics

Political insanity and health hysteria are running through most parts of the world right now. It has become ever more common to hear about declining democracies. There’s fear that they might slowly turn into autocracies or plutocracies. Hints of fascism under false colors of overwrought nationalism exist together with democracy. The reasons behind this chaos are not difficult to guess. And the irony is, it is not the lack of something but the abundance. Behind the political insanity, it is the abundance of demagogues and populist leaders along with powerful corporations emerging worldwide. The paradox of healthcare in developed countries is that there is a lack of it despite all abundance. It is true for most developed countries — incredibly accurate for the United States. It spends twice as much on healthcare than other OECD countries in terms of the total percentage of its economy; still, it faces the lowest life expectancy rate. …

Politics

The central premise of a democracy is the shared vision of its people. Democracies are based on the conjecture of equality. Private money is causing a fundamental fracture in that very premise, provoking us to change our values and ambitions.

“Although it’s important to protect minority interests from the tyranny of the majority, the problem we face today is the tyranny of the minority.” explains Ganesh Sitaraman in an essay titled “Achieving Democracy” in a book named Democracy Unchained.

When money is denounced as the worst evil of democracy, then what is it that stops our politicians from parting with the same. Political reforms pertaining to lobbying, campaign financing, and other corporate interventions are too slow; therefore, it's easy for corporations to lobby without a hitch. It’s antagonistic to democracy and drains it of its essence. After all, corporations are neither representatives of people, nor are they benevolent to them. Money instead makes the ‘representation deficit’ in politics starker and increasingly tricky for inequality to leave the system. …