This.
Earlier this week, The Times columnist Rachel Sylvester revealed that the Conservatives have identified eight key groups of voters to target. Although Downing Street quibbles with some of the names, from the Anxious Aspirationals to the Disaffected Tories, the pen portraits add up to a subtler version of Britain in 2013 – and in particular of the swing voters in battleground seats who will decide who wins power.
Each of these groups, the Tories believe, will be vitally important to building the coalition of interests that will help them win the next election – and each one will be persuadable of the case for David Cameron only if they are targeted in the right way.
And if you don’t live in one of those marginal seats, your opinions and your vote are worth fuck all. Democracy is at best, the least bad of all the possible means of government so far devised. That does not mean it is good or that we should aspire to it. It stinks and so do the politicians who abuse it for their own ends.
Democracy doesn’t scale. At all. It only works at the local – or, at most, regional – level.
Furthermore, the origins of Democracy (in the original meaning of the word) date back to ancient Greece, which was just a loose collection of city-states at the time. Those cities were *tiny* by modern standards. Democracy worked at that level, but at a national level? An international one? The larger the democracy, the less value an individual’s vote has. I’ll go out on a limb right now and predict that China will never, ever, have a true democracy. (It may get a fake one, like the UK’s and US’s, but its people will have no more true representation in government than they do today. They’ll just be *told* they do.)
Homo Sapiens cannot handle societies larger than about 200-300 people at most. Any more than that and the community automatically divides into sub-groups. This is true even on the Internet: active forum members and blog commenters tend to be a tiny, tiny fraction of the total number of readers.
We are an inherently tribal species and there is little point trying to deny it.
(This is why I have no time at all for “political correctness” and its bastard siblings. I’d much rather have a shopkeeper call me a racist epithet to my face than have them merely think it behind my back. “Freedom of Speech” doesn’t mean “Freedom from Consequences” and the latter usually affects both parties. I get offended – big deal; I’m sure, with sufficient* counselling, I’ll get over it eventually – and he loses my custom. Win-win!)
* (i.e. none whatsoever)
Which is why the French commune system works so well – electorates number in the tens rather than the hundreds.