"Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance. Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of jackals by jackasses."

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- US newspaperman H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) helping us understand the current state of Australian and UK politics

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As I write, the world of news and commentary is alive with the sound of agitated discussion of how voters in democracies (and in particular in the democracies of the United Kingdom and Australia) are "disgruntled" and "angry".

Commentators say that the plain folk in democracies are now in the mood to savage governments and olde established political parties.

Here in Australia the disgruntled and angry simpletons of Farrer have just voted overwhelmingly for One Nation.

The people of Farrer are so aggrieved, The Conversation imagines and reports, that we should even think of their vote for One Nation as their "primal scream" of rage against whatever it is that is enraging them.

At the same time, in the UK disgruntled and angry Britons have swept Nigel Farage's Reform Party to victories galore in local elections.

One hesitates, if only out of politeness, to think of UK voters as Mencken's "jackasses" but certainly the rebarbative Nigel Farage is the kind of "jackal" of politics (a slavering, opportunistic carnivore) Mencken is thinking of.

With us at this moment, dear Mencken (he has been a journalist-columnist hero of mine for 60 years, bless him) would be pointing at how UK voters' ignorant worship of Farage captures the absurdity of the comedy of Democracy.

The same disgruntled and angry Britons who voted for Brexit because their Nigel demagogically told them to are now even more disgruntled and angry because of the ways Brexit has helped make their Britain an awful place. But now UK voters are feeling so embittered that they........

© Canberra Times