The information that every ninth resident of the Republic of Serbia is a member of the Serbian Progressive Party can also be viewed from a brighter angle: it means that eight out of nine citizens of Serbia are not members of the SNS. Why does that not comfort us at all?
In the search for an answer, we will not be out of place to remember the one-party communist regime, if we are old enough to remember it. In a country of twenty-two million inhabitants, there were about two million members of the League of Communists. Thus, every tenth or eleventh citizen of Yugoslavia. Were the remaining nine tenths of the population in the status of "second class citizens"? Formally and declaratively no, but with one small note: membership in SK allowed you access to positions of power, it was a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for participation in the management of the country, from the household council or the workers' council in the company to the federal Presidency. The vast majority of "members of the party", of course, did not have any real social power, but that is not the point, but rather that all those who had power were "members of the party" (CP). You could have been a socio-political nobody and nothing as a ČP, but as a non-member of the party you were certainly a socio-political nobody and nothing because you were simply outside the system, an individual from the mere biological mass.
Overall, it looks like? Yes, with some differences. In the mature socialism that I remember - and which I am not at all inclined to idealize, which is in vogue in some places today - competent and honest people became members of the CP because they needed that "chaga" to advance, and the Party, on the other hand, needed such people, though not in the highest positions, reserved mostly for useless party barons. The barons dealt with "ideology", and the competent lower and middle echelons of public administration and society dealt with real life, i.e. normal functioning of cities, public transport, water supply, urbanism, etc. And that mostly worked, much better than today, although in a technologically scarcer era.
So what's the difference? Today's barons no longer even have an ideology, and competence has never graced them. And a typical ČP from the middle and lower echelons is no longer someone who knows, knows and wants something useful, important and valuable, but someone for whom ČP membership serves as a substitute for an impressive absence of virtues. That's why everything wherever the eye can see is either falling apart due to ignorance and carelessness, or suffocating in kitsch and the intrusive ugliness of vulgarity.
And then someone is surprised that "Locksmith was better" is written on the walls. Well, that bar really was a locksmith! And he needed those who were not.
Bonus video:
