Ethics forced on politicians

In a news item about the coming municipal elections (the item was about Toronto) it was said that people are trying to bring provincial issues to the municipal level. As one spokesperson put it, people are trying to force municipal governments to assume ethical leadership. That reminded me of how people seem to have come to care less than ever, in recent memory, about political world events; the perception has grown that politicians will play their games and wage their wars, and so it doesn’t make much difference who the particular politician happens to be; what is important, according to this view, is that politicians be forced to do things and pass legislation that people want. Political organization seems more and more aimed at lobbying than at the support of representative democracy. People care less than before about “what is happening in the world?” and more about “what can I do about what is happening in the world?”; but they realize that individuals or small groups or even million-strong demonstrations cannot affect world politics significantly, so they get involved in local, tangible policymaking, where small groups can make a difference. The word “ethical” in the spokesperson’s comments may be just the right word; people may at last have come to realize that to be a politician is synonymous with being entirely free of ethics; hence their efforts to impose ethics from below.