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Reader question: Please explain this sentence: “Politicians must embrace the shifting sands of democracy.” Shifting sands of democracy? My comments: In a democracy, politicians win power via an election, i.e. by getting the most votes from the voting public. Hence, public office seekers in a democracy have to follow public opinion. If, for instance, most voters want to allow gay marriage, vote seekers say they, too, support gay marriage. If opinion polls show that most voters are against abortion, then they say they’ve been against abortion all along. If voters want illegal immigrants to be deported, then they say they are all for it. Then the next election comes around. This time, most voters are against gay marriage, for abortion and of the opinion that the more immigrants the better, legal or illegal, the politicians will change their tune also, going out of their way to explain that they have, in fact, always felt the same way. Then the next election comes around, and voter opinion changes again. No doubt, politicians have to change their positions one more time, inventing new stories of how they’ve held the same ideas, beliefs and principles since the day they were born. As a result, sooner or later, some sooner others later, politicians are all exposed as inveterate liars, i.e. people who lie all the time and cannot stop doing it. All kidding aside, this gives you a hint of what the shifting sands of democracy feel like. Here, swinging public opinion is likened to the shifting sand dunes in, say, the Sahara desert. Those sand dunes, though stationary to the human eye from a distance, are in fact moving (shifting) – little by little under the influence of the wind. | 
