Sinn Féin offers a very palatable variation of a doomed theme but gone are the days when Sinn Féin offered radical (as they need to be) solutions. A sacrifice to the god’s of electoral success. They shan’t return as the quest for electoral success is one which never ends. By it’s very nature it can never be a means to a revolutionary end.
The vast majority of people who bother to vote will only ever vote for a variation of a theme, never for a new story. Out of fear for the unknown, and because of the manipulation of vested interests. It seems to me that a democracy like ours kills radical thought. Electoral success is like a drug. Once taken you want more and more and will do anything to get it.
A party starts off radical, gets some degree of success. Then the “toning it down” begins. Then the “moderation”, then the “compromise” as the radical “core” principals are diluted and hidden from view in order to “appeal more to voters” – with the reassurance to the party faithful that “once we’re in” they’ll be wheeled back out and implemented.
Then you get more electoral success. As a result you get more people joining this new “moderate” party – people with disdain, or rather an amused tolerance for the “extremists”. These people don’t have the core principals that people who joined years ago would have had. They’ve bought into what you were told was just a “front” for electoral success.
Thus the party has been ravaged from the drug that is electoral success. Much like those distressing “before and after” pictures one sees of people who have taken crystal meth, the party is almost unrecognizable compared to what it once was – look hard and you can see some reassuring familiar features but they are barely visible. There’s just enough there though to delude some of the more gullible “extremists” from the early days. The “decent people still in the party” former comrades would call them.
However most of the “extremists” from the early days have probably done one of three things:
1. Given up on politics and gone home.
2. Joined another party like theirs “used to be” in order to repeat the cycle.
3. Gotten elected or a job within/for the party.
The party is unrecognizable compared to what it once was. The new way is abandoned for a variation of the once despised theme they wanted to do away with. The radical ideas and solutions have been sacrificed in the pursuit of the electoral success needed to implement them.
The Status Quo prevails.
One would almost think the system was designed to insure this.
xxxxx
Saoirse geo Deo 26.11.2012
It's a Political World 
It is, however, mandatory that one considers the possibility that people choose this as the better of a number of evils.