a brief introduction to the new politics of a 50 percentile

Across the more developed democratic world, voting systems are in crisis. In the UK and US, we are not far off seeing 50 percent of the eligible electorate stay away from the ballot box, and these trends are increasing across the international board, and without any inbuilt demographic potential for reversal. The young and affluent -a society's trendmakers - are even less likely to vote than the the old and poor, and so the speed and cultural kudos of this behavioural trend appears only likely to increase. Democracy - for whatever reason, and with whatever type of voting-system (First-Past-The-Post, or PR etc) one employs to deliver it - is dying. This is our first essential premise.

Our second premise:
The 50 percent of non-voters is not, as might be contended by previous generations of democratic-idealists, ill-educated and depoliticised, but the reverse. It is rational and idealistic. Rationally speaking, the 50 percent has grown up through two generations of consensual politics, and sees little of interesting debate between the various factions of democrat/republican/labour/conservative. During the formative years of the 50 percent, the language of the once-left and once-right has converged and hybridised to the point of political banality, and so the 50 percent sees nothing of inherent interest in granting any one faction its vote. Rationally speaking, the once-left and once-right has enacted over two generations' worth of the same agenda: to neo-liberalise the marketplace, handing power straight from the elected representatives of the majority people to the unelected shareholders of a minority corporate body. In so doing, the once-political politicians have reduced their own role to that of economic tinkering and media-management, while the once-voting majority people have become non-voting consumers. We consume because at least our purchasing power promises achievable ends. We may not like the marketplace, but we dislike much more the hypocrisy and emptiness of spin-doctory and false debate. It is not the 50 percent that lacks idealistic ambition, but the political elite that created them.

Our third premise:
The Ideals of the 50 percent have yet to be truly decided on. There is reticence on the part on the 50 percent to truly begin its own necessarily naieve debate. We are tabula rasa, but daren't yet start drawing up our agenda. The Twentieth Century (a century of soured ideals, and big political divisions) still hangs its deathly shadow over this early and exciting part of our new century. We are the grandchildren of fascists and communists, and believe the very act of political idealisation to be murderously dangerous. Our parents -thank the gods of once-democracy- waved the white flag on political idealisation, and so allowed their children, us, a golden period of peace and prosperity previously unimaginable to any. We would surely be mad to open this pandora's box of ideals once more. And yet we also know that the most pressing problems of our time - chiefly the degradation of our environment - cannot be solved by the now omnipotent neoliberal marketplace. The Marketplace cannot exist without constant economic growth, and yet the environment cannot be saved from its degradation without immediate retraction. The Marketplace will fail where Democracy has failed, because constant economic growth is simply and scientifically incommensurable with a reversal of our global environmental catastrophe.
THE PANDORA'S BOX OF TRUE AND VIGOROUS POLITICAL DEBATE MUST BE RE-OPENED (and the 50 percent - the idealistic and rational 50 percent - already knows this).