Many people cherish that moment of turning up at the voting booth and casting their vote, its akin to receiving the political equivalent of the sacrament. When the world was less sceptical the political process was more akin to belonging to a club. The Tory Club stood for one thing the Labour Club for something else. Meetings held on a Sunday night or in a room hired above a pub were the essence of Socialism whilst the Tories were inclined to the more ornate surroundings of hired rooms in the local town hall.
Which ever venue it was, the talk was man to man, sometimes overheated, usually passionate and largely representative of the class structure which existed in those days. Political ideology ran deep in the psych and although turbulent, ran to a set course and could best be summed up as, 'them and us'.
Today the ideology has been displaced by a sense of 'what's in it for me' and the historical text of societal justice has been driven underground by short-termism, a perfect breeding ground for propaganda and the pigeon holing through the massive data collection on segments in the society who are thought likely to be swung by persuasive, targeted story telling, where 'facts' are a poor substitute for 'fiction'.
The gathering of data and its analysis became the work of companies such as Cambridge Analytica used in the States to give Donald Trump victory over Hillary Clinton and in the UK, the Brexiteers over the political establishment. The segmentation of the voters and the targeting of each segment with a message they wanted to hear was immensely powerful and whilst it's what politicians do, the manipulation of whole swathes of the population in this way has nothing to do with old fashioned oratory but more the prompting of a subliminal psychosis which revealed itself in the data sets mined from the historical profiles kept in Facebook on the individuals who use this platform.
The question, "is democracy dead" has to be understood in this ability to feed specifically profiled people with hundreds if not thousands of messages, planting a seed and then irrigating it with more and more propaganda.
This was the wholesale mechanisation of politics perched on and within an interactive social platform which was deemed innocuous to the user, a trusted companion in their daily search for friendship. Mixed in amongst the chit chat lay the messages, the adverts, the fake news about both the political contestants profiles which once created left an indelible impression which then was added to each day built to confuse realistic dialog with a tailored mosh mash to make black seen like white and day like night.
This is not what the democratic process is supposed to be about, rather perhaps the implementation of a dictatorial state where controversy divides and rules turning well meaning people into ideological zealots.
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