7/20/2023 0 Comments Youtube fracked![]() ![]() “In the 21st-century media, the intensity with which an opinion is held has come to serve as a proxy for its value in a debate. Confected outrage, a phenomenon hitherto confined to the tabloids, has now begun to infect liberal outlets. He writes, too, of “outrage inflation” – the impact of social media on contemporary political discourse. He writes amusingly and perceptively of those he dubs “Brexit Bolsheviks” and “grievance miners”. His only plea is that rational, sensible people should not disengage from the political process As a young journalist around the turn of the century, he cut his teeth as a correspondent for the Financial Times in Moscow, where he had a first-hand view of a dysfunctional society in which democracy is an alien concept. Born and bred in Finchley (Margaret Thatcher’s constituency), he is the son of a Jewish family who migrated to the UK by way of Lithuania and South Africa. A voice of reason in an otherwise polarised world. A distinguished Guardian (and formerly Observer) political commentator, he writes with elegance and honesty and his judgments are balanced. Though not without strongly held opinions, the author is very firmly a creature of the centre. Democracy, says Behr, is in danger of becoming “fracked” by hyper-cynicism, causing many sensible, decent people to disengage. Politicians, never high in public esteem, now rank lower than ever. In recent years the centre ground has become an increasingly lonely outpost.
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