The current presidential campaigns in the US has exposed the underbelly of American democracy which should force us to re-think some of the assumptions we have about ‘mature democracies’ and ‘democratising states’. The classic assumption is that in mature democracies elections truly reflect the will of the electorate, with little or no ‘hanky-panky’ or ‘mago- mago’, while in the ‘new’ or ‘democratising societies’ authoritarian impulses and manipulative tendencies prevail. American democracy is over 200 years old – whether you start counting from the country’s ratification of its constitution in 1788 or the time its first elected President George Washington took…

Mothers! God bless them. Mothers are definitely the most sacred of all creatures. It does not matter what non-conformists and products of counter culture may say, there is no substitute for mothers. Mothers are God’s chosen vessels for growing the population. Even those who chose to turn tradition upside down and chose instead that man should marry man and woman marry woman still believe, [do they have a choice?] that a child must come through the blessed womb of a woman. Mothers are unique. They are specially equipped with the knowledge, art and act of caring and nurturing. They are…

Something interesting has emerged in voting patterns on both sides of the Atlantic: Young people are voting in ways that are markedly different from their elders. A great divide appears to have opened up, based not so much on income, education, or gender as on the voters’ generation. There are good reasons for this divide. The lives of both old and young, as they are now lived, are different. Their pasts are different, and so are their prospects. The Cold War, for example, was over even before some were born and while others were still children. Words like socialism do…

All over the world today, there is a sense of the end of an era, a deep foreboding about the disintegration of previously stable societies. In the immortal lines of W.B. Yeats’s great poem, “The Second Coming”: “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world… The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity… And what rough beast, its hour come round at last Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” Yeats’ wrote those lines in January 1919, two months after World War I ended. He instinctively felt that peace would…