That Essential Difference

Western societies including our own are becoming increasingly dysfunctional - and I'm not talking about soap opera families. It is not just the mutant version of capitalism with which we are afflicted and which functions for the benefit of speculators, bankers, other disloyal outfits and the top few percent of the population, but our political system too.

One absolutely vital ingredient of a democratic political system is having the right amount of difference - i.e. that the options placed before the electorate represent real alternatives that would lead to different trajectories and outcomes for society. But these days in this country you can hardly get a tissue paper between the major policies of the main parties. There is a sense in which they work together too much - rather as an informal political cartel forever looking over their shoulders and using the same focus group approach equally devoid of principle, courage or even a sense of economic history.

What does it matter who gets elected if the policy choices are austerity, austerity or austerity? And of course it will not work. Cuts push the domestic economy down and as countries, being each other's export markets, pile on the misery it is no use looking abroad. That only works if the others have different, more sensible and effective policies on which we can take a free ride. That isn't going to happen. Instead we have national and international economic prescriptions equivalent to the 18th century medical 'cures' of leaches and bleeding. If the patient isn't recovering - then bleed some more.

For our distant cousins in the United States of course the political situation is the reverse. Their political system has been rendered dysfunctional by the capture of the Republican Party and much of the media by elements holding extreme right wing views and fat wallets. Checks and balances built into the constitution produce policy deadlock when faced with idiotic policies and a relentless refusal to compromise. Their Founding Fathers did not like the idea of political parties - you can now see why - and did not foresee the blight of doctrinaire intransigence with which their system is now afflicted.

The big worry is that short of a catastrophic upheaval here and elsewhere there is no evident solution to all this - not even in the medium term. Elections need to matter, the common good should be to the fore and loyalty to community and country should permeate our economic as well as our social life. That's the essential difference we need today. Can it really be too much to ask or has the mutation taken that deep a grip?