The WSJ published an article on Friday, based on last week’s elections, rightly titled: Americans See a Government That Can’t Solve Their Problems. Here’s the opening line: “U.S. elections are sending a consistent message: Americans are deeply frustrated with their government’s inability to solve problems.”
This is a theme I’ve been writing about for a decade or so now, based not just on what’s happening in the US, but with democratic governments across the West. There has been pervasive dissatisfaction with government, no matter which parties are in power, for the last 10-15 years across most Western democracies. Governments no longer seem able to deliver for large segments of their populations on the economic, social, and cultural issues many of their citizens consider most urgent.
At least two phenomena that characterize our democratic era have emerged from this pervasive dissatisfaction. One is that politics has become extremely turbulent, as voters regularly throw out of office those in power in the search for alternative parties or figures they believe will deliver needed change. Second, voters are drawn to political outsiders and more extreme options on both the right and the left.
The appeal of Trump and Mandami is surely a reflection of all that. In addition, the communications revolution is almost certainly central to their success. It’s hard to imagine Donald Trump winning in 2016 without cable television and Twitter (as it was known then). Similarly, social media was the dominant messaging tool of Zohran Mandami’s campaign.
Here are some thoughts from the closing of one of my articles, Democracies in the Age of Fragmentation, on these issues:
With so much attention on misinformation, we do not yet recognize that the new information age has helped make political fragmentation a defining feature of, and a major challenge to, democracies today. This fragmentation is both the effect and cause of the perceived inability of democratic governments to deliver effective governance.
Perhaps this fragmentation is a temporary fact of democratic life. Perhaps, though, our era will be one in which new technologies will enable many more people to engage in forms of politics, individually and in groups or parties. Opposition to government action, or demands for the government to act or act differently, will be easy to mobilize and constant. Politics and government will be continually turbulent, but less able to deliver effective responses on the issues roiling the day….
[T]he importance of effective government is often ignored in political and legal theory. But if democratic governments cannot overcome the profound challenge political fragmentation now poses and deliver on the issues their citizens find most urgent, dysfunction and distrust could give way to worse.