http://www.liverpooldailypost.co.uk/liverpool-fc/liverpool-fc-match-reports/2002/04/10/bayer-leverkusen-4-liverpool-2-d-post-64375-11775145/

I agree with this although I don’t think the two points are contradictory. A more realistic politics and a more responsible media might contribute to a culture that focused more on finding contentment in our lives as they are rather than always wanting more – whether it’s money, celebrity, sex etc.

I write about another angle of the problem of finding sensible solutions against a hostile media in my blog later this morning

Thanks

Thanks for this. I added some brackets to try to be clearer. 5-0 eh – you must be fantasy land. Apparently I was on MOTD on Saturday night sitting next to Adrian and Frank. WBA were woeful. Mowbrey says he doesn’t want to compromise his footballing principles but what principle is it that a team should spend 90 minutes in a home match against another struggler without having a single shot on target? Hope has gone so at least my summer holiday from football anxiety has started early.

“But one of the reasons the new world will see the West decline and the East rise is that, all in all, the citizens of the East have a more realistic and sustainable (which to some extent means humble and resigned) idea of what life involves. The simple fact that most of the West consumes more than it produces while most of the East produces more than it consumes is a powerful symptom of cultural difference.”

Our problem is that we’ve had a model of politics and democracy in which candidates have had to pander to the semi-populist climate that has arisen out of a political space that is not an agreed one? Rather than discussing politics in the context of ‘public service’ media, we’ve had to do so in the demagogic environment shaped by the commercial mass media.

Perhaps that environment is now collapsing? Perhaps a space can emerge where the relationship between voters and politicians isn’t the ‘advance auction of stolen goods’ that de Tocqueville outlined?

Perhaps it’s one where politicians can be judged by their ability to make decisions and to involve us in those decisions in an appropriate way? I can’t see that there’s ever been an intellectual defence of elections based upon mandates and detailed manifestoes.

The way that consumer choice has driven politicians has led to irresponsible and unsustainable government. No politician would have dared to kill-the-golden-goose that the financial services sector has been imagineering for the last couple of decades even if they’d had the capacity to understand that it was a fraudulent thing.

Surely it’s time for politicians of all stripes to ask themselves what the circumstances are in which they can deliberate effectively and make the best decisions with a democratic legitimacy?

We know that civil society requires some of it’s parts to be conversational and some to be adversarial. The dogs in the street must know now that there are bits that are adversarial that should be conversational and vice versa, and it is this that could be fixed relatively easily if the question were asked properly – or is that over-optimistic?

I’d suspect its a more straightforward question than seeking an undefined cultural change of mind from the whole populace?