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Showing posts from July, 2013

Language of Democracy and Inability to Talk to the Youth

Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them. -Paul Valery   A friend of mine recently remarked that while he agreed with the idea of the struggle of democracy in its present avatar, he also failed to understand why the youth, the catalyst of change, talked in the language that they do with respect to the political space. He expressed his concern on the short memory and confrontational attitude that the youth possessed with respect to the ideas and issues that affect everyone. In my opinion, much of this has been due to the failure to incorporate the youth into the mainstream. It also has much to do with the failure of political language used to converse with the youth. Arnold Kling has recently written a book called the ‘ The Three Languages of Politics’, which offers some interesting perspectives as discussed by him here . Kling has stated that the three schools of American politics – republican, libertar