Sir, – Further to "How to fix western democracy" (Opinion & Analysis, October 8th), parties that Jane O'Meara Sanders does not like are getting elected; ergo, democracy must be broken and needs "fixing", so that the people can go back to selecting politicians from the same uninspiring political gene-pool as they did in the past.
Dr O’Meara Sanders is “an educator” who believes that “democracy depends upon an educated populace”. The implication is that the more people find out about neoliberal globalism – as practised by the European Union, for example – the more they will realise how wonderful it is. She can’t seem to grasp that the opposite may be also true – that the more people educate themselves about the direction of the established political order, the more they might find that it no longer represents their own beliefs.
Describing countries which are “moving in the wrong direction”, she lumps Hungary (a functioning western democracy where the ruling party has just been freely elected with over 49 per cent of the popular vote) with Saudi Arabia (a monarchical theocratic dictatorship), China (a totalitarian one-party state) and Russia.
She (quite rightly) condemns previous US interventions in Chile, Iraq and Iran but does not mention Syria or Libya – two countries destabilised on Hillary Clinton’s watch as US secretary of state. She is distraught about the election of Donald Trump even though Mr Trump has, thus far, avoided any such imperialist jaunts and was, in fact, elected on a platform of no more doomed foreign military adventures.
It is true that people are turning to “populist” parties in Austria, Hungary, Poland, Italy, Sweden and elsewhere. Even in liberal, progressive Canada, the little-known CAQ (Coalition Avenir Québec) party was elected on Monday as the ruling party in Quebec with a platform opposing Justin Trudeau’s open borders, globalist vision. Nowhere in her article does the author stop to wonder why it might be that people in the West are voting this way. It’s far easier, after all, to just conclude that democracy itself must be at fault.
None of these populist organisations would have been reinvigorated without the condescending attitude of the established political order so well articulated in Dr O’Meara Sanders’s article – be it the permanent administration (ie “The Swamp”) in the US or the cabal of unelected officials in the European Commission who are blundering inexorably forward with a globalist project that many European voters simply do not care for.
Just because someone whose political views do not align with yours gets elected, it does not mean that the entire democratic system must be rejigged to make it easier for your preferred candidate to win at the polls next time round. It does not mean that democracy is broken. On the contrary, it means that democracy is in rude health. – Yours, etc,
SIMON O’NEILL,
Dublin 3.
Sir, – An excellent article by Dr Jane O’Meara Sanders. A timely prescription for countering the coarsening of democratic life. – Yours, etc,
MARY BYRNE,
Bray,
Co Wicklow.