![]() “In the 21st-century media, the intensity with which an opinion is held has come to serve as a proxy for its value in a debate. Confected outrage, a phenomenon hitherto confined to the tabloids, has now begun to infect liberal outlets. He writes, too, of “outrage inflation” – the impact of social media on contemporary political discourse. ![]() He writes amusingly and perceptively of those he dubs “Brexit Bolsheviks” and “grievance miners”. His only plea is that rational, sensible people should not disengage from the political process As a young journalist around the turn of the century, he cut his teeth as a correspondent for the Financial Times in Moscow, where he had a first-hand view of a dysfunctional society in which democracy is an alien concept. Born and bred in Finchley (Margaret Thatcher’s constituency), he is the son of a Jewish family who migrated to the UK by way of Lithuania and South Africa. A voice of reason in an otherwise polarised world. ![]() A distinguished Guardian (and formerly Observer) political commentator, he writes with elegance and honesty and his judgments are balanced. Though not without strongly held opinions, the author is very firmly a creature of the centre. Democracy, says Behr, is in danger of becoming “fracked” by hyper-cynicism, causing many sensible, decent people to disengage. Politicians, never high in public esteem, now rank lower than ever. In recent years the centre ground has become an increasingly lonely outpost.
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