For 30 years of working as a reporter, I am steeped in disappointing facts about self-government. These experiences have not undermined my childhood faith in democratic possibilities but rather tended to confirm it. How could a lifetime of experience with how miserable the political process effectively changes the world for the better? For a lifetime observing its horrors, how could you not just become agnostic at best, but more democracy is the answer? It's a strange view. Yes, it's very similar to cults that predict the end of the world and then find out they were wrong.

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