In just over a week Australians shall break from our tribal hostilities to cheer as one under the glow of the Olympic flame as our quest for international glory reverts to its regular four-year cycle.
Within days we’ll be tallying up our swimming medals and hoping the gold rush transitions to land, where the acquisition of rare metals will serve as a proxy for national self-validation.
God knows we need some. The winter parliamentary session has just ended in a state of rolling conflict: bitter division over Gaza, the climate wars going nuclear and NDIS reform stalled for political LOLs.
Labor is trying valiantly to keep its hand on the tiller, buffeted by the global winds of dysfunction and a growing disdain of government that makes incumbency a poisoned chalice.
Up close it’s messy; zoom out and it’s even uglier. As this week’s Guardian Essential Report attests, the public is roundly dissatisfied with our democratic processes.
These results speak to the structural collapse of our public institutions: we are losing faith in the way our democracy is functioning, our federal parliament is a circus, political debate a cacophony of bad vibes.
These are features, not bugs, of a political system platformed by large global digital businesses whose primary purpose is to extract and on-sell our attention, feeding off points of conflict and undermining any sense of common purpose.
Most of us look at politics and either recoil in horror or sullenly disengage; those who remain activated do so as vociferous spectators or malevolent keyboard warriors.
A second finding in this week’s survey shows the low regard we hold for our elected representatives, a form of democratic self-loathing that sees three-quarters of us believing politicians are only in it for themselves.
These are brutal findings, but also a natural by-product of the politics of hyper-conflict, creating the conditions where the angry outsider becomes a credible alternative. Survey the other nations competing in Paris and we are not alone: the ranks of the disenchanted are swelling.
Even before the weekend’s attempted assassination of Donald Trump, the home of democracy appeared as enfeebled as its ailing president, while mini despots game the algorithm to control their domestic systems. Nations that never claimed to be free seem to enjoy a head start on adapting technology that, itself, aspires to the totalitarian.
Ironically, Taiwan – which does not compete at the Olympic as a sovereign nation but as the diplomatic compromise of “Chinese Taipei” – is the outlier. It has built a robust digital democracy led by the world’s first non-binary cabinet minister, Audrey Tang.
Tang’s work, covered in their book Plurality, sees democracy as an ongoing process of citizen feedback rather than a voting “event” that comes around as rarely as the Games.
A final question in this week’s report shows how few of us see ourselves as this type of active democratic participant.
Without reducing these results to stereotypes, the gender split speaks to the testosterone-charged nature of so much of the democratic contest.
When politics is a contact sport, it brings out the worst in us, diminishing our shared responsibility for the future to a series of performative cage fights.
When we start at the point of conflict, we fail to see the humanity in one another; we cast moral judgment on those with different views; we seek not just to win debates but to humiliate our opponents. And they do the same to us.
If there’s any hope in these findings it is that younger people are participating more actively. Surely, the challenge is to make the idea of political engagement a better all-round experience for them, rather than the emotion-fuelled punishment that civic participation has become.
Maybe we need to rethink politics as community sport, where we can battle ideas out and still have a drink together under the setting sun.
We all know the best part of sport is what happens after the final whistle when there is a chance for reflection and mutual respect; but we don’t get this with our civic debates because we become enemies rather than competitors.
Look at the silence that has enveloped the nation since the voice referendum; there is little space nor appetite for healing because we have diminished one another in prosecuting a fractured binary.
George Orwell famously described international sport as “war minus the shooting”. With the bullets literally flying in the US this feels like a defining moment for liberal democracy everywhere.
Can we reimagine a political contest that celebrates the healthy competition of ideas by creating the space for people to work together, organisations to collaborate, leaders to be led?
Can we find trusted sources of information to nourish our reflections, better ways for the public to deliberate and give feedback, shifting the centre of power from the national capital to the local town hall?
Can we expunge the global digital platforms that will never be good faith partners from our public square and build connections that work in our common interest?
There is so much to do if we think democracy is still a race worth running. Let the Games begin!
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