In the West the corruptions and the inequalities also continued to grow. And the politicians seemed unable to do anything about it. Adam Curtis, Can’t Get You Out of My Head VI Are We a Pigeon? Or Are We Dancer? *****
The reality is that all these societies, not just America and Britain but China and Russia too, are exhausted, empty of any new ideas. All of them have corruption that has burrowed deep into their institutions. ibid.
What was going to emerge instead was a new system that had nothing to do with politics. A system whose aim was not to try and change things but rather to manage a post-political world. Adam Curtis, Hypernormalisation, BBC 2016
The version of reality that politics presented was no longer believable. That the stories politicians told their people about the world had stopped making sense. And in the face of that, you could play with reality. ibid.
The whole idea of mass democracy began to be questioned and undermined from inside the political establishment itself. It began almost unnoticed, hidden behind the wave of enthusiasm after the fall of communism. But a political scientist called Peter Mair has argued that what happened in the 1990s was that the old idea of democracy started to disappear in the West. And it was replaced by something else which we haven’t fully comprehended yet or even seen because it is outside the old categories of politics. Western politicians, Meyer said, literally changed their roles: they gave up being representatives of the people and instead they became the agents of a new bureaucracy which was rising up and promising that it could manage the dangerous and unpredictable force of individualism better than the politicians could ... Individualism and its drive to self-actualisation can corrode and eat away at the collective power of mass democracy. Peter Mair said the same was now happening in the West. Adam Curtis, Can’t Get You Out of My Head IV: But What if the People are Stupid?
The politicians increasingly found there was little they could do to respond to this anger. Because over the past ten years all sorts of new organisations had grown up that were deliberately designed to limit the politician’s power. Because national politics was dangerous to the stability of the global system. ibid.
Blair came to Kosovo 1999 and was welcomed as a hero. At the refugee camp Blair presented what they had done as an expression of that epic vision … ‘We are all one world simply linked together as individuals … and we the good politicians of the west have a duty to intervene to help the victims of all evil dictators wherever they may be in the world … This is a battle for humanity. It is a just cause.’ ibid.