We may be beginning a return to the original Athenian democracy where strength of conviction and argumentation shaped policy rather than outdated party loyalty and subservience to a party machine.

Democracy is undergoing fundamental changes throughout the West that offer hope, but also risks.

The dominance of the long-standing parties in those western democracies is now under far more challenge than they have ever been before, as those parties undergo a process of disappearance of significant difference with each other. That has been driven by a wide range of factors, not the least of which is the dominance of a narrative in those democracies created and sustained by the few oligarchies that are increasingly coming to infect the public information space. These castrated democracies have in the last thirty-five years allowed themselves to be dominated by an ideology commonly called Neo-Liberalism that metastasised like a cancer from the popular organs of information – both media, academic and political – to the population at large.

The mainstream parties from the Left and Right came to believe that their only opportunity for power would come from buying in to this ideology to a greater or lesser extent. Neo-Liberalism changes the........

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