No group has a right to be listened to by the government simply because it claims to represent a ‘community.’
By the end of the 20th century, the postwar ‘golden age’ of party democracy in the West was fast receding. Gone were the days when mass political parties spoke directly to an engaged social constituency. The political party, once a bridge between citizen and state, was now increasingly fused with the state. They relied more and more on public funds rather than private donations; they owed their enduring positions more to privileged access to the national media than any compelling message. Turnouts fell. By the noughties, a new elite, itching to remake society, found itself woefully bereft of any base of popular support from which to do so. As political scientist Peter Mair’s book title famously had it, it was now “ruling the void.”
