This could be a rambling one sorry.

Watching all the 'interesting' political events lately, with the Brexit vote, Australian election and the US presidential race / primaries, I have been thinking a bit about the state of play of politics in general, with a couple of points arising.

The first, is the whole left vs right divide. There is a definite feel that there is a spectrum in politics, from left to right, somewhat a legacy of the French Revolution. And people tend to have clear views as to where certain parties fall, Democrats being Left, Republicans Right, Communists Left, Fascists right etc.

However, it does seem to allow people to paint a broad brush, as there can be more similarities between democrats and republicans for example, than democrats and communists, or republicans and fascists.

The divide also seems to lead to partisanship, with people solidifying into a certain area, and becoming vehemently opposed to someone on the other side.

In some countries, we have ended up with more 'centrist' parties forming as a reaction, but are the centrist parties really that much different to the other parties, or just better at tailoring their message to the swing votes.

You can end up in situations where there isn't much difference between parties at times, e.g. the Blairite UK labour party and the conservatives (from an outside view at least), which can lead to one party dropping heavily in the polls, as there becomes less reason to vote for one over the other.

Or you can end up with others like it appears in the states, where everything is partisan, and you have politicians and voters coming out with things like 'anyone but Trump' or 'anyone but Clinton', and the thought that a Republican politician may find more in common with Clinton than Trump, or vice versa, leading to them being branded a traitor.

This leads to my second point, which is that politicians seem to be less acting on behalf of the people.

Either approach, whether centrist or partisanship, seems to be driven by same idea, that the politician/s know what's best for the people, and anyone who thinks differently must be wrong.

One of the things I like to think democracies are trying to achieve, is that everyone gets a say, and like collaborative efforts that occur within companies, between companies or between countries, people actively seek other / differing opinions to come up with the optimum solution.

Instead the Left / Right divide seems to run counter to this. It does often come across as the politicians know best, and the voters should just accept that, and the voters are ending up having to decide between multiple bad choices, knowing that once the politicians are elected, the voters basically have no control for another 4 years anyway. And due to a mixture of partisan politics and party loyalty, the politician standpoints seem to have drifted away from what the party supporters actually want, and towards what the politicians think is best instead.

In this environment, it isn't surprising to see populist politicians starting to rise to the fore, as they make people feel that they may actually have a choice that speaks to what they want, rather than between two people telling them what they should want.

I think another consequence is that polling and other sources trying to determine what an election result is going to be is starting to get further out of whack from what will actually occur, I think it is harder to get a good cross section of the populace via polling these days as the ones actually polled are somewhat self selecting, and the pollsters etc. then make inferences from the results that are incorrect.

I think Brexit was a good example of all this, from the incorrect poll predictions to the fall out afterwards.

While I think that Brexit is likely to be worse for the British people, and many of the experts and politicians tended to share that view, is it for them to decide, on in a Democracy, is it for the voting population to decide? A lot of those who were against Brexit have come out afterwards, laying into those who voted otherwise, basically saying they're wrong, or idiots, or shouldn't have had the right to vote on such a matter. Some of these seem quite incredible accusations to make in a democracy, but not surprising I guess in the partisan environment we are in.

It does seem to point to a situation though that if the majority of the politicians are in agreement on a matter (as majority seemed to be against Brexit), then pity the people if the majority of the people think otherwise.

I'm not sure what I think of Jeremy Corbyn, he seems to veer more towards pure Socialism than I would be happy with, and has had dealings with terrorists in the past, but I think the Brexit fallout in terms of him has also been symptomatic of the issues I have outlined above.

He campaigned for remaining with the EU, stated the labour party's view on this, but is now facing leadership issues, because as far as the Labour party MPs are concerned, he didn't do a good enough job in this regard.

What is a good enough job? Was there only one right vote to be made? All labour voters, because they are labour supporters, are only supposed to vote one way? Because Corbyn gave them the choice, did he do wrong? I just don't get this point of view, it seems quite anti democratic, as seems to reek of the Labour party knows best, and so the outcome of the Brexit vote was wrong, and if people voted wrong it is because the politicians didn't exert enough control over the voting process / outcome. What is their end game? Seems a natural next point would be to tamper with the election votes really, if this is their respect for a democratic outcome.

I can have strong views as to who I want to win when it comes to NZ elections, but generally if who I want to win doesn't win, I don't then think the rest of the voters were wrong, they have a different view to me, and may in fact as a majority know better than I, but I don't like the trend that appears to be occurring where the overall voting populace don't have the power to shape the direction of the country anymore (if they ever did, but that is a separate question).