[Yuki Maru Hoshi]

Originally Posted by Ammi

...I have to say that I’ve never been hugely on board with Corbyn as a potential country leader but in recent times he’s felt quite ‘opportunist’ in ways that have been quite unpleasant...anyway not wanting to get too much into the political debates.....I’m certainly no fan of the present government or leader, but I think as Livia has always said..it’s about the quality of labour as a party as well and being a strong opposition and the right opposition..rather than just taking one extreme end of a spectrum and zipping it along to the opposite extreme....?...I’m never that comfortable anyway when the leader of the party becomes ‘bigger than the party itself and what it stands for’...I think we had that to a large extent with Blair, that kind of ‘celebrity’ status...and well, look at the consequences with that...and obviously similar with the USA now...(...sorry Maru...)...and where the anti vote against Hilary has led them now...and also having an ego as a leader, which I’m not convinced Jeremy isn’t a very self ego person as well...

I miss the ye old days when we would just vote for someone who sounded fit for the job (based on qualifications), rather than simply celebrity status. That was a large defect of Hillary I think, was this sort of overexposure.

I wonder if like the's public apathy being one extreme of bad for political discourse, if there is maybe another extreme where the public have become too overly enmeshed (identity or whatever) with politics. So instead of scandals, issues or deals being hashed out in a more manageable way, we magnify the chaos and so those issues become too difficult to handle. It's easy to see why the smallest of issues can be hijacked by either side and make it very difficult to get things done. It used to be, you voted, but then you stood back and let the system do it's job (to the extent that is reasonable)... now everything is checked under a microscope. And people who have no idea the delicacy of such matters, or just simply opportunists who have an agenda, are injecting their projection of things in an effort to sabotage or manage the outcome. It makes it very difficult for a more moderate/less polarizing candidate to survive the way politics is being done today, much less to be electable...

There's this emphasis to make everything public, every public act of "treachery" punishable by way of polarizing media coverage and I wonder if our focus on being so incredibly honest and virtuous may having unintended side effects on our ability handle political discourse as a society. It seems like we sometimes shoot ourselves in the foot... because it does rob the moderates of a voice and it allows those who are truly problematic to get in-between those systems and civil discourse to push their most polarizing messages through.

I'll quote a good article that covers a lot of these complications fairly well...

We reformed closed-door negotiations. As recently as the early 1970s, congressional committees could easily retreat behind closed doors and members could vote on many bills anonymously, with only the final tallies reported. Federal advisory committees, too, could meet off the record. Understandably, in the wake of Watergate, those practices came to be viewed as suspect. Today, federal law, congressional rules, and public expectations have placed almost all formal deliberations and many informal ones in full public view. One result is greater transparency, which is good. But another result is that finding space for delicate negotiations and candid deliberations can be difficult. Smoke-filled rooms, whatever their disadvantages, were good for brokering complex compromises in which nothing was settled until everything was settled; once gone, they turned out to be difficult to replace. In public, interest groups and grandstanding politicians can tear apart a compromise before it is halfway settled.