Us against them is populism. It clarifies passions, encourages clear collective identities, and such a shame those clear collective identities by themselves alone and unaided usually fail to manifest a clear and civilized discourse which results in productive compromise. A pretty story with color pictures and happier endings isn't the answer, nor a bland monotony of color, faith, height and diet. Never has been.
Why? The last rational person who gave serious consideration to time for us people being a linear concept was August Comte, the father of Sociology and he died in 1857 when he was 59 years old, lucky chap. Instead of a line, wiggly or otherwise, what we have to maintain a vibrant, open and free democracy is an enduring, tragic, conflicting, messy pluralism of competing hegemonic interests in conflict with each other and those interests occasionally changing places without ever achieving a solution. There is no closure, there is no straight line, there is no boldly going where no man has been before. Society is a series of institutions one of which contains the process for determining leadership.
One argument suggests you can't institutionalize conflict unless the adversaries, however many there may be, are deemed legitimate. Should one party invest forty years in de-legitimizing the other party, then, as the old saying goes: "there's trouble at mill."
Chantal Mouffe's position on the central role of passion and conflict in the democratic process is clear. She does not see a working liberal democracy as a committee of the ruling class, but suspects that's what democracy may have been replaced with. Her Agonistic Pluralism which provides the theoretical framework for an understanding of a liberal democracy that works more effectively to represent us people accepts conflict between groups, not reason, as both a cohesive and clarifying driving force that produces constructive expressions and welcomes "trouble at Mill." Agonism, Mouffe's position, as opposed to Antagonism, describes the enemy as a legitimate adversary against whom to mobilize. Passion is the driving force of mobilization, a passion to vote, not a duty to vote.
The Mill in question is a settling power structure attempting to return to a "work or starve" mindset that encourages the uncertainty of fear in a society, not hope. This produces a degree of obedience, but also it results in increasingly short term, ill-considered, yet given the circumstances apparently reasonable if temporary solutions to enduring problems.
The Skeptic Cicero, looked for Virtue, Justice and Wisdom in a Statesman. He liked to see dignity, temperance, generosity and a magnanimous heart in a political leader. Mark Antony, a would be emperor, had him killed, which just about sums up the power hungry
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