I know this is somewhat a hefty point, but given what the world's been going through in the past few year, "degrading" isn't that much of a stretch. I mean, with the global financial system, a potential nuclear showdown and an impending economic meltdown of magnitudes from which the world may not recover, politics and reality seem to have wavered drastically apart. The persistence of the political binary of left and right and their extreme variants on one hand, and an foreign policy that doesn't seem to have changed much on the other makes one wonder if politics, especially that of commoners like us has any realistic influence over our fate.
It seems as though there's a general decline of rationale, and a sense that society's collective conscience's been smeared with hysteria, stifling the operation of common sense, inducing a lack of responsibility towards other human beings with which we share much of the planet's resources. Instead, we've left our own job at the hands of bureaucrats whose agendas are unknown to us, and this in turn won't take long to prove irreversibly detrimental. Thanks to the nature of today's political atmosphere, particularly in America and Britain, being in a state of gridlock, where's it's rendered mightily difficult to issue policies that serve the needs of the public who constitute the majority, said countries, more than any other time, risk descending into civil unrest.
One can't help but recall Socrates's analogies of the sun, cave and line, three concepts that metaphorically illustrate the dynamics of power, good and knowledge in Socrates's version of a state . The light of the sun is that which makes intellectual matters visible, the cave analogously paints a picture of a democratic republic to be governed by political manipulators who systematically exclude the light of the good, putting in its place, illusions. Such cities/states become places afflicted with what he calls "shadow battles", and corroded with struggles for political power. In order to predict the future of modern politics, one needs to observe the power dynamics within said states, after all, none would so much as contest the idea that power has a mighty influence over class relations, him/her who possesses unparalleled power dictates our values, beliefs, lifestyle and rights. Power is the law just as much as the powerful is the law, and our modern political environment personifies that paradigm, not necessarily always through direct force.
Given the fact that the public has largely deserted political matters at the hands on shady bureaucrats, of which there are the irresolute and the self serving, who tend to be looked at as the states' crux of political expertise, where their success is driven by the strategic assertion of monopoly over technical knowledge within the structure and is what German sociologist Max Weber termed "domination by virtue of authority". The aforementioned dynamics of power whereby the vital circles of decision making moves up from the bottom of the structure to the top, escaping the grasp of the public is indicative of a larger reality, that is, politics and with it, societal stability is leaning diagonally towards obsolescence. As power becomes increasingly centralized, and its corridors narrower, perhaps, the backlash will be felt a lot sooner than some predict.
