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Rafael Behr is a political journalist who had a massive heart attack a few years ago - mainly due to genetics and poor diet, but at least partly down to stress and anger induced by what was happening in British politics.
#books #politics #2023Books
An alternative title might be The Centrist Dad's Manifesto
It's an argument for parliamentary democracy, practicing politics on the understanding that sometimes the other person is right, or at least sincerely wrong, that losing sometimes is better than destabilising the system and sliding into the abyss (of Hitler, Putin, Stalin...)
He's honest enough about some of the failings of this approach - that centrism in practice is often just drift, a void around which technocrats and insiders orbit, stable in times of economic growth but lacking answers to critical problems. "Trust the experts" rings hollow after an economic crash, or as we sleepwalk into climate crisis.
The book is well written, but always better on the weaknesses of the alternatives than as positive prescription.
@raycunningham but the weakness of the alternatives is always the ace card of those who advocate parliamentary democracy.
@IanMoore3000 that's true, but it doesn't make for a call to arms. "Be politically engaged - so you can calmly steer a course between extremes towards... well, there is no towards, just stay in the middle somewhere."
As he says himself, his political baseline is the Blair years, when the economy was growing and there were no political crises. First, the Iraq war, and then the financial crash, showed the limitations of that kind of decision-making.
@raycunningham that's true, but I think Brexit showed the limits of the "Don't trust the experts" model of decision-making.
@IanMoore3000 Behr is pretty good at acknowledging that, for all that the Leave campaign was dishonest, it was given its opening by a political system that was self-contained and out of touch. Of course, the Trump, Johnson, Putin governments are even worse.