Now here is what a serious long-term challenge is. The populism of course. I do hear well-educated, reasonable, clever, efficient, good people sometimes wonder what’s so bad about populism! I mean no kidding. Yeah, thatz right, power to the people, bitch!
What would you say to that? Apparently, what you, we (me), have been saying, some very best ones writing in smooth-to-the-touch-covered book and school books, is not enough. Didn’t you hear? Power to the people! So how do you respond? Seriously!
Representative democracy? You already have the power? Democracy is not necessarily the power of vote – it is rather a right and opportunity to influence decisions and have your say?
How come people, like “people” with “no” power, do not experience it in their everyday life? And if they don’t, they don’t believe it exists – is this it?
When we in the post-Soviet came across this issue in the 1990s, we knew the answer perfectly well, didn’t we. We still do, wake me at three in the morning. The legacy of the decades of totalitarian oppression, intimidation and deprivation.
Well, this is not the point, because this traditional East European mantra fails to explain the power-to-the-people-bitch sentiment in the torch bearing cultures of the UK and US. Of course not.
The point is to wake up to what the power-to-the-people people actually mean with their mantra. Is it really just the right to exceptionalism, exclusiveness and privileges to disregard rules and other people’s needs and rights?
I am leaving it open. There are tons of questions like this. At the end, they all seem to meet at “disregard” and “disrespect”. Now how respectful is this? And if you choose to dis-whatever, what are you doing? Divorce the EU like the UK just did, or the world like Russia has been doing since 2000? Can you really?
Does it make sense? I mean as an answer to the question why “power to the people” sux?