We may be beginning a return to the original Athenian democracy where strength of conviction and argumentation shaped policy rather than outdated party loyalty and subservience to a party machine.

Democracy is undergoing fundamental changes throughout the West that offer hope, but also risks.

The dominance of the long-standing parties in those western democracies is now under far more challenge than they have ever been before, as those parties undergo a process of disappearance of significant difference with each other. That has been driven by a wide range of factors, not the least of which is the dominance of a narrative in those democracies created and sustained by the few oligarchies that are increasingly coming to infect the public information space. These castrated democracies have in the last thirty-five years allowed themselves to be dominated by an ideology commonly called Neo-Liberalism that metastasised like a cancer from the popular organs of information - both media, academic and political - to the population at large.

The mainstream parties from the Left and Right came to believe that their only opportunity for power would come from buying in to this ideology to a greater or lesser extent. Neo-Liberalism changes the focus from the communal to the individual and from the Public to the Private. It is an ideology that essentially focuses on greed and self-interest as the primary motivators of human behaviour.

This narrowing focus upon these base motivations has turned these “democracies” into “markets” where everything is for sale, including your vote.

Add to that the pernicious effects of the superficial messages increasingly pervading the public space generated by a public relations and advertising industry that was at its inception, more appropriately named as propaganda. Here you have a recipe for the disappearance of substantial differences between the mainstream political parties as they compete on that limited ground set for them by the dominant oligarchies.

Add again to that the changes in communications technologies that have arisen from the digital world. The legacy media are struggling mightily with diminishing revenue streams and diminishing audiences, to retain their control of the public mind. Their efforts are however fruitless as the digital world and its opportunities for instantaneous influence over that public mind proliferates like mold on a laboratory plate. The combination of these sites with the mobile devices that are now ubiquitous and their ability to shape belief and conviction, multiply beyond human control and leave normal human opinion formation at the whim of the internet.

These forces have combined to create a vision aptly summarised by Margaret Thatcher when she coined the “TINA” meme. “There is no alternative” has now infected the public space and has brought about a political world in the Western mainstream parties that George Galloway of the UK Workers Party has described as “two cheeks of the same backside” to demonstrate the miniscule difference in policy positions of the Labour and Conservative Parties in the UK. On a substantial range of important issues the same seems to be true of Australia. This policy consensus of the mainstream appears to be the same in the US and much of Europe.

This lack of substantive difference in each case has led to the growth of Greens and Independents who can represent the views of particularly the young and those who are increasingly disaffected by the often nonsensical mainstream consensus.

Of course due to the specific characteristics of the US system, there is little to no chance of the emergence of such parties into a position where they could exercise such influence. This propensity offers real hope that sane policies that seek to represent the real interests of the populace, rather than the interests of the elites, may yet recover our failing democracy.

The influence of these groups in Australia have widened rapidly as voters increasingly dispense with long standing party loyalties. We may be beginning a return to the original Athenian democracy where strength of conviction and argumentation shaped policy rather than outdated party loyalty and subservience to a party machine.

It is vital that we support this emerging reality if we are to return to a democracy that reflects any of the values of the original and truly reflects the public will.

Of course we also need to recognise that the young are shedding their indifference to politics as a result of the utter failure of their parents and grandparents to deal with the overwhelming existential crisis of climate change.

They recognise that it is their world that we are putting at vast risk and they are moving to the other parties in large numbers in order to force the mainstream to act.

We must also be careful that this fracturing of party loyalties does not promote the rise, as in some European countries, of far right or far left movements whose intentions may be less than democratic.