Democracy rules

Today the council elections in the North of Ireland were coming in and the extremist parties have taken over the political landscape for the most part. The - now - smaller parties don't seem sure footed anymore, wondering why so much support is waning from them and wondering which way to turn for a rehabilitation of their vote. This is not the best way to reform a political philososphy, if indeed a reformation is needed at all. Obviously, there will need to be self-reflection by the UUP and the SDLP, but also obviously, there will be a few wrong turns before either party gets truly back on its feet again.
The SDLP has made itself more republican in a bid to appear more 'green' to its supporters who have abdicated to Sinn Fein. However, historically the SDLP has never placed the question of constitutional arrangements as the number one consideration, viewing the dirth of other fundamental civil rights as a more glaring omission to turn our collective attention towards. Here they were on sound democratic ground as it is not controversial in a civilised society to require equal treatment in terms of housing, jobs, religious tolerance. Neither is it controversial to argue for the right to a 'position' on the constitutional question - whether it be for an United Ireland, Union with Britain, or - as my younger brother advocates - independence from both. But what is controversial is which choice one is obliged to take for the purposes of civil rights - indeed it is not clear that any choice has any 'natural' advantage in this regard. What we are left with is a balance of personal allegiance to tradition, and if a choice is made it would be for the simple reason of simple democratic majority. My american histroy is pretty non-existent, but I imagine that at the time of the war of independence it was not fought on the basis of fifty-fifty allegiances.
However, what history has taught us is that regionalism, within a positive wider context of federalism or unionism, is what tends to the best safeguarding of the rights of those who live in that region - where the checks of wider, legally enshrined, civil rights constitute a healthy national/international background. For example, an as counterpoint, look at Saudi Arabia. It can only get away with what it presently commits in terms of injustices because of the compliance of the American military-industrial-political foreign policy. So genuine internationalism is essential to an healthy regionalism. However, there is the question of the right to self-determination of a people. But complexly, here in Ireland there is no one people; indeed there is only a dubious distinction of two specific groups anymore - but it can be argued that they still exist on the two sides of the constitutional divide. But before getting on to any changes in constitutional politics, I think there has to be some way where politics can transcend the constitution division through the normal working at local level. The more this is done at a grass roots level, the more it can be thematised at the policy level where we can talk about the policies that we 'share'. But it seems to make integrated politics essential intractable by making the constitutional question the main one to define a 'middle' party by, for this is exactly what the extremists feed off and so the other parties would be sucked into the vortex of the constitutional debate away from what should be their main focus - the hard and fast fundamental civil rights we need to see progress with. Every Republican in the European Union is a 'Unionist' in some sense and an 'Internationalist' in most senses, and every Unionist at Westminster is striving after some sort of identity among diversity. The middle parties need to promote ways within themselves where these positive historical and emergent common realitites have a chance to be fostered, and where genuinely respectful democratic politics, where the force of truth is the only one used, can once more be reborn.