Why bother to vote?
Joanna Bourke: Democratic rhetoric, institutions, and practices did not arise out of universal, timeless moral truths. They were invented slowly, unevenly, and with a great deal of backtracking followed by revolutionary leaps. While it took a century for our current democratic rules to assume their present form, it would be a naive person indeed who claimed that the ideals of democracy (fairness, pluralism, and equality, for instance) had been realised. It is not that we have “lost” democracy but we never fully possessed it. British citizens can muse on the forces leading up to the war in Iraq while Americans only have to conjure up the 2000 election. Ironically, this instability and cynicism provide the most convincing impetus to voting. Our melancholic despair with democratic institutions is to be celebrated, not mourned. If we shrug off our disillusionment, the injustices inherent in our political system would become truly normalised. Democracy is an ideal that is always “in progres
