The Ultimate Undoing Of Governance?

It’s easy and apropos to blame politicians, the media, academia, what have you. But is something else behind all this constant conflict?

Please  consider the analysis presented in “The Rise of the Ungovernables” (from Quillette, March 1, 2018, emphases mine):

…[T]here is another explanation for liberal democracy’s troubles that is much less talked about and, in my view, more powerful—the fact that voters have become more difficult to govern.

Many attribute that difficulty to voters protesting against the slings and arrows of economic stagnation or cultural dislocation. It is argued that voters are victims of everything from inequality and austerity to immigration and multiculturalism; that they are just responding to adversity. But something more fundamental is going on here. The nature of the voters themselves has changed.

Obviously, in evolutionary terms human nature cannot change in a few decades. But attitudes and expectations can change rapidly, and this has happened in ways that have transformed democratic politics. Compared to voters in the decades following World War II, voters of the twenty-first century have an increased sense of entitlement, a higher regard for themselves and their opinions, and a less tolerant view of others. They are more demanding, more vitriolic and more thin-skinned. And it is not just millennials and Generation X. These changes apply to the baby boomer generation as well.

I’m not saying that modern voters are poisonous egomaniacs. My point is simply that they are relatively more self-entitled, self-opinionated, intolerant, and prickly than earlier voters. And these relative changes have made it harder to govern them in a liberal democracy. What has caused these changes? A series of major developments throughout the last half century from the ascendancy of liberalism to the arrival of social media. Individually most of these developments have been very positive for modern society. Nevertheless, they have also brought about, indirectly and in different ways, changes in the attitudes and expectations, and therefore the behaviour, of voters….

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Successful democratic politics requires informed citizens and something at least approaching an agreed set of facts on which a meaningful contestation of views can be based. Agreeing the facts among today’s voters is an increasingly problematic task. It is further complicated by the rise of feelings over facts as a measure for analysing issues.

Thirty years ago, politicians took the pulse of the nation through meetings with voters and tracking “old media.” Now they stumble about in a shifting online world to distil what the voters want. In a virtual firestorm of demands and warnings, outrage and indignation, their priority is often survival rather than communication.

Liberal democratic politics have never been so difficult. So next time you’re complaining about how politicians are leading us astray and destroying the democratic process, remember the self-entitled, self-opinionated, demanding, and prickly voters they have to deal with.

Read the entire essay HERE. There is more — much more than excerpted above. Please take time to read the entire essay!

So, then, what can be done to turn this tide of unrealistic electorate? Or is it already too late?