Media reports and public conversations are monopolised by furious jostling and frantic speculation. All else - policymaking, problem-solving, reason itself - grinds to a halt. Unsurprisingly, when the frenzy is over, we discover we have solved almost none of our problems.
An election is a device for maximising conflict and minimising democracy. Parties gain ground by sowing division and anger, often around trivial issues. At the same time, as the big players seek to appease commercial lobbies and the billionaire press, they converge disastrously on far more important issues, such as austerity, privatised public services, massive inequality of wealth and the unfolding genocide in Gaza. Many of those who seek election manipulate, distract and lie.
Communities are set against each other. The parties reduce complex choices to a brutal binary.
Vast questions, such as the environmental crisis, the spiral of accumulation by the wealthy or the resurgent threat of nuclear war, remain unresolved and generally unmentioned. All that is left to us, except for a 10-second action every five years, is to sit and hope. We end up with a highly unrepresentative parliament and a perennial sense of disappointment.
General elections such as the one the UK now faces could be seen as the opposite of democracy. But, as with so many aspects of public life, entirely different concepts have been hopelessly confused. Elections are not democracy and democracy is not elections.
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