A Proposal For Change

It is fair to say that the West is going through a period when faith in politicians and the  political system is at a very low point. Whatever one thinks about the UK’s decision to leave the European Union or Donald Trump’s election to the presidency of the United States, these are, by any standards, unusual events. As were the Front National’s Marine Le Pen winning 34% of the vote in the French presidential election in May (double what her father achieved in 2002) and the AfD winning 1 in 8 votes in the Bundestag last month.

And as faith in politicians has declined so has faith in religion; outside the USA, Christianity is dying in the West and the indigenous population of Europe and North America is not warming to the latest aggressive and intolerant version of the Abrahamic delusion that has poisoned Western society since the fourth century.

People are at once cynical and ill-informed about politics – witness the enthusiasm for Jeremy Corbyn among people in their 20s and 30s. Some of Corbyn’s most ardent fans support his plan for large-scale nationalisation but also want to want to stay in the neoliberal EU. Both of these positions are intellectually valid but they do tend to be mutually exclusive – you simply can’t have both. Look at the way Greece was treated by the EU when it was forced to sell off state utilities to pay debts to international banks. There was no ‘bailout’ for Greece, only for the banks – privatised profits but socialised losses.

It is time acknowledge that the democratic institutions of the West are in need of a thorough overhaul. I have written before about the debt the West owes to the Classical Greece and Rome rather than to so-called ‘Judeo-Christian’ values. One of the key ideas I think can revitalise democracy and end the domination of the neoliberal Establishment (by which I mean all the main political parties in the West) is sortition – the selection of public officials by lot.