Worked better or was perceived to worked better because the people that got screwed over by the system had no voice?
Good question, but I already thought about that one... long ago. The Rush song "The Trees" is a rock anthem about the social order. If people are happy with it, then then are. Agitation will 'wake up' the oppressed to unfairness.
The quality of politics is something about how we engage, as a constituency, our points of concern with each other mentally and emotionally. Progress, seems to me, to mean getting better at that politics on BOTH the emotional and mental axes.
"No voice" is hyperbolic, absolutely speaking. Even the French had "a" voice after James Wolfe won Canada for the British. Native Canadians too.
As I think about this question, I realize that I have thought about it in other realms of life, such as civic life or culture. I realized it when I went back to my hometown (smalltown Ontario) and realized that it had "grown" which necessarily meant getting better AND worse, but wiser. My town now has a sushi restaurant, a theatre (NOT a cinema) with viable presentations of touring shows, a Starbucks, quaint bookstore and record store. It also has methadone clinics, and a problem with major drugs. It grew up.
The model for all such "growth" was given to us in the bible with Adam and Eve. They chose to eat the apple because they wanted to learn, and become real. As with children who want to grow up too soon, or small towns that want to grow, or Charlie Parker's sidemen who tried heroin to try to be inspired like him... they made the leap and they learned.
I'm thinking out loud in text here now....
I am going to try to find coverage of an old political discussion from the 1980s of relevance and I suspect I will see this:
- More in-depth discussion, and more time/care to discussion of important matters
- Less fractiousness and more objectivity
- Exclusion of fringe points of view
- Naivety, or lack of knowledge of what we know now