The likes of Suella Braverman, Jacob Rees-Mogg and 30p Lee astound me. They believe, with some justification, that they can win a General Election by appealing to the lowest common denominator of a small base of supporters on the far right of the Tory Party. They chose Truss, for God's sake, and are more than willing to support the arch liar, Johnson.
As a means of government, democracy is a relatively young phenomenon, with some form of despotic feudalism having been prevalent since we left our caves and created civilizations. Democracy is fragile and depends heavily on engagement, trust and accountability.
Accountability comes through institutions, but what the far right of the Tory Party wants to do is to utterly demolish any institution that holds parliamentarians, and especially government, to account. This paves the way for a brutal and genocidal totalitarian regime like that of Putin, where even the official opposition (and the Orthodox Church) is an arm of the state and is allowed to say nothing without Putin's approval.
Trust in politicians is at an all-time low, and a certain Boris Johnson led the charge in that respect, being utterly incapable of telling the truth. Unfortunately, all politicians have become tarnished with the same brush, which is a dangerous state of affairs.
Whenever someone says something is 'obviously true' or 'unambiguously irrelevant' (the latter in respect of Johnson's WhatsApp messages and diaries as pertaining to the Covid inquiry), you can smell a rat. Something may well be true or irrelevant, but adding the words 'obviously' or 'unambiguously' means the burden of proof is on those who use those weasel words and someone impartial has to be the arbiter. The subject of the obviousness or unambiguity rarely is so.
The fake War On Woke that the right is engaged in is not only ludicrous but hypocritical. I heard last week that a recognised expert on chemical, biological, and radiological warfare, who was invited to speak at the world Chemical Weapons Demilitarisation Conference in the UK, was 'cancelled' by the Tory government because he had criticised them in the past. So much for the Tory far right's support of free speech and legislation against 'cancel culture'. What they mean is that they only want certain types of free speech - the type that supports their ideology.
DeSantis in America appears to have gone the full fruit loop in the War on Woke and is making himself appear a complete tool by cancelling everything, yet people support him - and Trump.
Democracy is always fragile everywhere because it depends on the will of citizens to protect it and, when they become scared and it becomes dangerous for them to defend it, it can go badly wrong very quickly. Democracy cannot succeed unless those who express their choice are prepared to choose wisely and don't become depoliticised. The real safeguard of democracy, therefore, is not only education, but engagement.
It would seem that the internet is partly to blame, as it allows Village Idiots from widely dispersed areas to congregate in a manner in which they have hitherto been unable to accomplish. This makes them a force to be reckoned with.
The young too, according to polls, appear to favour authoritarian regimes to democracy and some two thirds have shown a preference for a Strong Man leader. Many political philosophers believe western style democracy is slowly edging toward totalitarianism and it's on open display here in the UK, Hungary, Poland, India, Israel, Turkey, America, Uganda, etc. The young no longer read books or listen to the mainstream news (the MSM), preferring to obtain their information from the internet, where some pretty insidious algorithms determine what they see - and thus believe.
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