a people without rules

For half a century now Americans have been rebelling in the name of individual freedom.

Voters pretend to rebel and politicians pretend to listen: this is our political theater.

What’s happening behind the scenes is something quite different. As the libertarian spirit drifted into American life, first from the left, then from the right, many began disinvesting in our political institutions and learning to work around them, as individuals.

The political target of new American populism is ‘government’.

Survey after survey confirms that trust in government is dissolving in all advanced democratic societies, and for the same reason: as voters have become more autonomous, less attracted to parties and familiar ideologies, it has become harder for political institutions to represent them collectively.

This is not a peculiarity of the United States and no one party or scandal is to blame.

Representative democracy is a tricky system; it must first give citizens voice as individuals, and then echo their collective voice back to them in policies they approve of. That is getting harder today because the mediating ideas and institutions we have traditionally relied on to make this work are collapsing.

There are many reasons for this, some of them perverse consequences of reforms meant to make government more open and responsive to the public.

New committees and subcommittees were established to focus on narrower issues, but this had the unintended effect of making them more susceptible to lobbyists and the whims of powerful chairmen.

Coalitions broke apart, large initiatives stalled, special interest legislation and court orders piled up, government grew more complex and less effective.

And Americans noticed.

Not recognizing themselves in the garbled noises coming out of Washington, unsure what the major parties stood for, they drew the conclusion that their voices were being ignored. Which was not exactly true. It’s just that, paradoxically, more voice has meant less echo.

Roundup:

Americans are and have always been credulous skeptics.

They question the authority of priests, then talk to the dead; they second-guess their cardiologists, then seek out quacks in the jungle. Like people in every society, they do this in moments of crisis when things seem hopeless. They also, unlike people in other societies, do it on the general principle that expertise and authority are inherently suspect.