Glory Of Democracy

The Fallout From The UK Election

It's interesting watching the aftermath of the Tories getting the boot. Just as the LNP Coalition got a firm rebuke from the electorate, the boot that go planted in the rear of Rishi Sunak's government was pretty decisive. The prevailing opinion seems to be that the combination of BoJo the Clown and his party-in-a-time-of-Covid scandal, together with Liz Truss' historically disastrous 49 day term as Prime Minister sunk the conservative vote. That might be underselling the impact of Brexit and the mishandling of the COVID  pandemic on top of the cuts made to NHS that made the entire experience much more miserable than it needed to be. 

I don't know how the UK conservatives come back from this defeat. Then again, I don't know how Peter Dutton and the Liberal Party have come back in the opinion polls after their defeat in 2022, given that he is peddling nuclear power as the panacea. Maybe in one election cycle's time, the Tories will be back peddling some insane nonsense and somehow be competitive in the polls. These things are unknowable given that we're already well down the road to Idiocracy. Stupid is more prevalent than ever before. Even though the Tories got thrown out resoundingly, there's every chance that Starmer's is a one-term Labour government. The Murdochs would be on a mission to make it so, one imagines. 

One can only hope that the Tories got thrown out because it became painfully obvious that conservatism had no place in dealing with the world as it is today. 

China Laughing At The Presidential Debate

If the debate had every progressive on the planet running for the hills, then there's one nation that took immense delight in the debate - China. From their point of view, America has a choice between the demented Biden and the psychopathic Trump. They can't laugh enough at how weak and stupid democracy is as a system. I get their point of view. After all, it must be reassuring to know they are stuck with Xi Jinping as their dictator because hey it beats having an actual debate on anything. 

For my two cents, this is exactly what is wrong with China. China's never had a proper election. Its people have never had to stare at stark choices like a demented Biden versus a psychopathic Trump. A Boris Johnson versus Jeremy Corbin. Or closer to home, a manic Mark Latham and a closet-fascist John Howard. A rebounding Kevin Rudd versus an unhinged Tony Abbott. A voter has to think about these choices and weigh them up. They might resort to just ideology or family tradition or a mountain of prejudices, but think, they must. 

When I think about the candidates I voted for in a bid to remove John Howard's government from office and the decade it took to see him gone, I can tell you each and every vote was important. It might have looked hopeless to have Kim Beazley or Simon Crean or Mark Latham as the choice against Howard, but our democracy survived those moments. We, the Australian people negotiated those terrible choices. Democracy is great, even when your side loses. In the voting booth, your vote feels puny in the face of whatever electoral reality is swirling around you, but everybody's vote counts. We the people, can - and must - own every outcome from all these elections, the good, the bad, and the ugly. 

So right now America has a choice between Biden and Trump, and that looks really bad. Sure. Yet there are ructions to say the Democrats might want somebody else that is not Biden. As bad as the optics were from the Presidential debate, democracy has every chance for renewing itself. We may not be having Biden representing the Democrats in November. Hope springs eternal. The Chinese have no such hope. They are indeed hopeless on this front. 

So I say Glory be to Democracy.