2. The Pact

When a child is born in Britain, as in most other developed countries, its parents must register his or her birth. It is not made clear why this is necessary, but it is legally obligatory. At the local council website, it is politely explained that a new parent is required to register a birth; it is not stated—anywhere—why. You are, however, told that you will receive—free of charge!—a short birth certificate. Failure to register a birth is a criminal offense, and can incur a hefty penalty.

It is an ornate and archaic ritual. The harried parent must put aside diapers and bottles in order to attend the local register office, which can be many miles distant. When the appointment takes place, the registrar will enter parents’ and child’s details into a thick ledger, a heavy book weighty with portentousness. In my case, the registrar had a bulbous fountain pen with which to inscribe the birth date, location and other minutiae. She took an evident pleasure in wielding this instrument, carefully unscrewing the cap and lovingly poising the pen above the thick vellum page for a second, the better for her, and me, to contemplate the gravity of the registration moment.

In Britain, government first instructed its subject populace to register births, deaths and marriages in 1538. The purpose then, of course, was to monitor the population in order to maximize the collection of tax. Today, if it is stated at all, the implied rationale for such registration is the protection of the citizen.

The presence of government at these cardinal moments of life—its beginning, its end, the entwining of one’s life with another in marriage—is rarely questioned, but assumed. In this way, government inserts itself into the very foundation and fabric of our lives. With self-assessed taxes, the individual is required to declare to government almost every significant event of their lives.

Reading the registration form for my children (they are twins), I noticed an odd question: Was the child, at birth, alive or dead? I questioned the registrar. She confirmed that, indeed, parents of still-born children are required to register their births. The deadline—six weeks—is the same as for the births of living children. If the parents of a dead child do not meet that deadline, they too must pay a fine.

“We are the ones we’ve been waiting for” was a compelling slogan from the presidential election campaign of Barack Obama. It captured something about his promise of change, but also, more subtly, spoke to our deeper anxieties about the troubled state of democracy today. It yoked these two ideas together to evoke, in eight words, the suggestion that collective mass action by us could alter things at last. The problem, however, is that the slogan contains a profound but unaddressed contradiction: Even led by a man as enlightened and sophisticated as Barack Obama, government is not about mass collective action; only getting someone elected is.

During the campaign, Barack Obama gave a speech in a sports stadium in Denver. Invesco Field, named after its corporate sponsor, had been chosen over other smaller venues in anticipation of the enormous demand to hear him. Only John F. Kennedy had managed to fill a stadium at such a moment. This time, over eighty thousand people filled Invesco Field, while thousands of others watched on huge video screens outside the stadium and millions watched the event on television around the world.

The New York Times published an extraordinary panoramic picture of the stadium crowd, composed of several shots taken over a short period.[36] The picture deserves iconic status: It has an almost religious quality, like a fresco on a cathedral ceiling. The photograph shows a vast and diverse crowd, young and old, black and white: an astonishingly vivid snapshot of Americans animated as never before in this generation by the election of one man, the first African-American with a chance at the presidency, the first Democrat after eight years of George Bush’s Republicanism. The picture is moving and awe-inspiring, a visual testament to the political energy and enthusiasm Obama’s candidacy unleashed.

During Obama’s campaign, reportedly over a million people volunteered to work for his election. This was a larger number than recorded for any previous campaign. Obama raised $650 million for his campaign, the largest amount ever raised; and also, significantly, from the greatest number of donors. However, only a small proportion of Obama’s funding came from small individual donors. The vast bulk of the largest donations, as usual with contemporary politics, came from the rich and corporate donors, including banks and corporations like Goldman Sachs, Microsoft, Citigroup and Google.[37] After his election, the Obama administration, following traditional Washington form, appointed over two dozen of the largest donors to the Democratic presidential campaign to choice overseas ambassadorships.

The Denver crowd and the extraordinary mass effort mobilized by Obama’s campaign spoke of a hunger for change and a willingness to contribute to it without precedent. The enthusiasm did not end with his election: An astonishing ninety thousand people applied for the three thousand or so political appointments in his administration.

Epitomized in the slogan “Yes, we can,” Obama’s campaign played upon people’s desire for change as well as, crucially, for involvement in politics. Both during the campaign and since, Obama urged people to become involved in their communities, to volunteer and themselves help fulfill the political promise of his election. But in this message there was unadmitted contradiction. For what Obama was asking for, first and foremost, was not for volunteers to improve their communities, but for volunteers to campaign for his election. As if to highlight this awkward fusion of objectives, one group—Obama Works—was set up for people to volunteer for local activities in the name of Obama’s campaign. Obama’s campaign call to local action was a secondary if necessary moral buttress to his primary appeal for voters’ support. The political end of his campaign was not change itself, but for him to be elected to deliver change; a subtle but crucial distinction, and the disjunction at the heart of representative democracy.

The night of Obama’s election, a great roar could be heard across Lower Manhattan when his victory became apparent. But the party atmosphere soon dissipated. After Obama’s election and the excitement of his inauguration, you could almost sense the air going out of the balloon.

With the government’s encouragement, volunteering fairs were held across the country. And while attendance was high, it was noted that this enthusiasm was less a function of a new surge of political activism, but more one of the rampant unemployment of the post-election months. In Brooklyn, a few hundred turned up to a volunteering fair, where thousands had been hoped for—in a borough numbering millions. Tellingly, the fair was described as seeking to exploit energy “left over” from the campaign.[38] Obama Works went into “hibernation.” Since then, there has been no revolution in volunteering and community organizing. The conventional model of politics has remained largely unchanged. As usual, attention focuses on the intentions and utterances of a very small group of people in the White House and a slightly larger group in Congress, where the betrayals, ethos and peccadilloes of a small number of representatives and senators determine the nature of legislation imposed on a country of three hundred million people. Everyone else is left to rant about their doings on websites or, more commonly, simply get on with their lives with a shrug of the shoulders. It seems like the ones we’ve been waiting for wasn’t us after all.

Some attribute this passivity to the inherently idle and feckless nature of ordinary people: Some politicians I know are inclined to this supposition. But in truth, the reason is that conventional representative democracy, where the many elect the few, rests on a pact between voters and government: We vote, they act; we get on with our lives, they protect. This is the pact in which the parent must enroll their baby after birth. It endures until death. This pact is rarely examined nor is it anywhere clearly or fully stated; it is rarely admitted to, though its effects are profound.

The pact has several layers. At the most fundamental, the pact implies that government will protect its citizens; it will provide for their security and safety. In return, citizens agree to limit some of their freedom: They accept the rule of law, and with it, various restrictions on their behavior. To government is reserved certain extreme powers and rights, which are denied the rest of us. These include the power to deny freedom to others, to imprison and to punish. In some countries, like the U.S., this includes the power to kill in the name of justice. All 192 member states of the United Nations have agreed to a code to govern this right to wage war, the UN Charter. But the charter is a voluntary document and infringing it does not invoke automatic punishment, especially if the infringer is a powerful state.

Domestically, the government’s commitment to provide security means that government takes responsibility to preserve peace, prevent crime and disorder, and to save the populace in times of grave peril, say, after military attack or natural disaster. So far, the pact is familiar, and echoes the theories of political philosophers down the ages, from Locke and Hobbes, and earlier still, Plato.

Less familiar is the second layer of the pact, one that is less often mentioned than the first, but one with more insidious effect. In addition to protecting the population, government makes a further commitment—to take care of society’s problems, including education, in some states health care services, care for the elderly and disabled, protection of the natural environment, including now the globe’s atmosphere, and above all, providing for growth and employment—to take care of the economy. This commitment—and its consequence—are almost never explicitly stated: Government will take care of these problems, so we don’t have to.

Instead of admitting this pact, politicians instead declare policies and promises to manage these problems, much as Barack Obama did at Invesco Field. But by declaring government’s intention to address such problems, a politician is sending a powerful if concealed message: If government is willing and able to sort out these problems, we the populace do not need to worry. In Barack Obama’s case, the message was carried a step further: I the politician need your active involvement—to campaign, raise money, etc.—in order to get elected, then I will be able to address these problems.

Indeed, Obama raised the stakes a notch further: The mass involvement he was able to activate through his candidacy exploited the massive political energy and frustration of the progressive electorate: the millions who volunteered for his campaign. His implicit message was “Mobilize to elect me and I will deliver.”

But the effects of the pact can be witnessed in what followed the election. The mass of volunteers who mobilized to campaign for Obama by and large threw away their badges and stayed at home, their job done. There was no dramatic upswing in volunteering for social causes. Even in electoral politics, hard-core party activists found that the “Obama effect” had little long-term benefit in recruiting volunteers to fight elections at the more local level. The long-run trend in volunteering for social causes remains, as Robert Putnam and others have attested, resolutely downward.[39] In general, we are doing less and less. And here is one message that issued unintended but with subtle and powerful force from the millions watching that one charismatic man at Invesco Field. That vast crowd is watching, not acting. For most of us, politics is a spectator sport—we observe, they do.

The trouble with the pact is that it is breaking down. National governments are less and less able to tackle the transnational and global causes of the various problems that confront us. At the most basic level of the pact, government is unable to guarantee protection against terrorist attack; it is unable to provide an effective response to prevent climate change; it is unable to manage the global causes—and effects—of economic volatility. In society, government is unable to slow the seemingly inexorable rise in “antisocial” behavior, a trend evidenced, for example, in mounting attacks on bus drivers, but apparent in other innumerable ways including the subtle yet palpable tension in our public spaces. CCTV cameras on every corner do little to curb this discomforting trend, though they provide ample proof of our absence of trust in one another.

As a result, trust in politicians, never high, is declining. In Britain, a well-known television presenter called the prime minister “a cunt” in front of a studio audience. Such disrespect is now commonplace in many established democracies. In America and virtually every democratic country, there is widespread disillusionment if not disgust with the political classes, and with politics itself. In Germany, polling before recent Bundestag (parliament) elections indicated that 18 percent of voters would vote not for regular politicians but for a comedian playing a politician.[40] The election campaign was dominated not by discussion of education or economic policy, but by a scandal over a politician who had used her government car to be driven on holiday to Spain. Commenting on elections widely seen as “boring,” one voter said, “There’s just no belief that anything is going to change.”[41] In Iceland, widespread disillusionment after the catastrophic impact of the financial crisis saw a professional comic elected mayor of Reykjavík. In the U.S., antipathy toward politicians manifests itself mostly, as in most issues in America, in partizan terms: The other side’s politicians are venal, corrupt and self-serving; the manifest failings of ours are overlooked.

The disintegration of the pact is exacerbated by a further damaging phenomenon: the deepening chasm between voters and their representatives. The evolution of democracy has been, in general, one from direct democracy to representative democracy; from people collectively deciding their affairs, to electing others to do so on their behalf. But as representative democracy has evolved, so too has the distance grown between voters and the decisions that affect them.

In every national democratic system, individual participation has been reduced to mere occasional voting to choose legislators or the executive (in the British system, these are one and the same election; in the U.S. and other systems, they are separated). Today, the executive, in cahoots with the legislature, manages society and the economy and the country’s international affairs. These highly complex decisions are taken not by the population collectively, but by a small executive often comprising only a few hundred people. This pyramidal, top-down structure produces several inherent and thus inescapable features.

The competition to become one of the elite is intense and antagonistic, and sometimes violent. It costs an estimated $1.5 million to win a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives; in the Senate, $9 million.[42] Once in power, legislators join lobbyists in ferocious competition to gain the executive’s attention and influence their decisions. The evidence for this is clear in the growing professionalization of this process, both of politicians and the industry established to influence them. In Britain, many politicians have spent their whole professional lives practicing nothing but politics, starting as researchers to Members of Parliament, then graduating as MPs and sometimes government ministers. David Cameron, elected Britain’s prime minister in 2010, has never had any job outside of politics, unless one counts a brief stint working in public relations. The leader of the opposition, Ed Miliband, likewise. In Washington, every politician claims to be an “outsider” as they try to ride the antipolitics wave, but in reality very few are.

The contest to secure political influence has become increasingly professionalized and has assumed the characteristics of an industry, with professional associations and its own group interests: There are now lobbyists representing the interests of lobbyists. In Washington, the number of registered lobbyists has more than doubled since 2000, to nearly thirty-five thousand in 2005.[43] While the recession may have thinned their ranks, the ratio of lobbyists to legislators remains, incredibly, hundreds of lobbyists to every member of Congress.

At the European Union in Brussels, an increasingly dominant source of legislation affecting economic interests worldwide, no one seems able to give precise numbers of professional lobbyists; most estimates, though, place the number at about fifteen thousand. A former commissioner for the EU’s most expensive and wasteful policy, agriculture, described Brussels as a “paradise” for lobbyists.

One reason for the proliferation of business lobbyists is all too clear: It pays to invest in influence. BP helped Liberal Democrat European Parliament member Chris Davies draft climate change legislation that secured a €9 billion subsidy from European taxpayers, covering the entire cost of new technology to convert from “dirty” coal-fired power stations, saving energy firms from having to pay for it themselves. The industry later gave Davies an award. Davies was at least open about the process he conducted to prepare the new European laws, justifying his actions by using a famous quotation often misattributed to Otto von Bismarck: “The public should never be allowed to see two things: how sausages are made and how laws are made.”[44]

If this is the reality of the supposedly democratic legislative process, it is unsurprising that popular enthusiasm for conventional politics is waning. Membership of political parties, one measure of popular participation in conventional politics, is in steep decline in all major Western societies.[45] Global surveys confirm that while people in general prefer democracy, they are less and less happy with the practice of democratic government.[46] Voter turnout has been in long-term decline in almost all democratic systems. In the last parliamentary elections in France, for instance, turnout was the lowest ever recorded. The European Parliament elections of 2009 suffered the same ignominious outcome—fewer voters turned out for them than in any election since the parliament’s inception. In the United States, 25 percent fewer people vote in elections than they did in 1960, when John F. Kennedy was elected

Despite the promises of politicians to limit the lobbying industry and its influence, it has continued to grow. Its pernicious power—an inherent function of the reductive pyramid from voters to deciders—seems greater than them. One of President Obama’s first acts in government was to appoint as deputy defense secretary a longtime lobbyist for Raytheon, a top weapons contractor, despite Obama’s campaign commitment to prohibit any such appointments. In New York State, the successful Democratic candidate for governor in 2010 proclaimed his forthright opposition to special interests and lobbyists throughout his campaign, yet the bulk of his campaign funding came from organized labor, real estate firms and related industries like construction, the health care sector and lobbying firms.[47]

In 2010, the Supreme Court, in its misleadingly named “Citizens United” ruling, decided to allow commercial companies to pay directly for political advertising, absurdly defining companies as having the same rights as individuals, and overruling the existing feeble limits to curb their influence. The ruling permitted corporations and other types of organizations to raise large amounts and run political campaign ads without revealing the source of funding. Sure enough, the 2010 congressional elections saw large influxes of money from these unaccountable bodies, tilting the races for many seats. Professor Lawrence Lessig has argued that the mutual dependency of lobbyists and legislators is now so profound, and corrupt, that legislation is enacted with the sole purpose of extracting rents from corporate interests. Former senators have admitted the same thing: that all legislation is made on “K Street,” the infamous Washington street where lobbyists have their offices.[48] One observer estimates that the lobbying industry spent $3.3 billion in just one year (2008).[49] Private companies that run prisons now employ lobbyists to press for legislation requiring judges to impose longer sentences.[50]

In Britain, the corrosive influence of lobbyists is better concealed and less acknowledged. In a system where vast power is concentrated in the prime minister’s office, many of Tony Blair’s advisers left office for highly paid executive positions in companies that had substantial political interests in their earlier incarnation. One senior adviser joined Morgan Stanley’s investment banking division as a full-time senior managing director. Another left her job in Blair’s inner team to work for the oil giant BP.

Several of Blair’s press advisers formed a PR group on Blair’s departure from office that now enjoys lucrative contracts with businesses, many of which had clear interests in legislation delivered by the Blair administration. After leaving office, Blair himself was awarded a position as “senior adviser” to investment bank JPMorgan for a salary of half a million pounds a year, a role to which he gave rather less publicity than to his position as a peace envoy in the Middle East for the so-called Quartet group of countries.[51]

Within the political class in Britain, there appears to be a tacit understanding not to criticize such obvious conflicts of interest, perhaps because other members of that class wish to leave themselves that opportunity in future. The self-serving excuse, which can often be heard sotto voce in Westminster, is that such rewards are a just payoff for the supposedly poor pay and hard labor of a career in politics.

A similar unspoken understanding is clearly at work in Washington too, where politicians “retire” from their legislative duties as elected officials to sell their contacts and networking expertize as lobbyists. When former Democratic majority leader Senator Tom Daschle was scrutinized by Congress to lead President Obama’s health care effort, it was revealed that he had earned over $5 million as a lobbying adviser to various industries. Notably, it was not this blatant influence-peddling that provoked the criticism that met his nomination, and ultimately forced him to withdraw, but his failure accurately to declare for taxes the gratis use of a limousine—one client’s form of payment for his services.

Meanwhile, former American ambassadors, after their years of public service, sometimes return to Washington to act as paid lobbyists for the very countries to which they used to represent U.S. interests, a naked breach of ethics, not to speak of the risk to national security.[52] Two senior officials from the Clinton administration, including the former president’s legal counsel, later ended up as paid lobbyists for Laurent Gbagbo, the former president of Côte d’Ivoire, whose refusal to relinquish power after losing elections in 2011 led to widespread violence costing hundreds of lives. These well-connected American officials lobbied the State Department and White House on behalf of the worst of tinpot dictators.[53]

Given the pernicious forces at work in the current political system, it is unsurprising that the decisions produced are often grossly divorced from the needs of electors, or even of the state itself. In the United States, where the lobbying industry is most developed and where politicians are highly dependent on campaign contributions, these effects are most noticeable. For instance, members of Congress in 2009 demanded that the government purchase seven extra F-22 fighter aircraft, at nearly a quarter of a billion dollars each, which the Department of Defense itself had not requested. At this point, the U.S. was at war in two countries—Iraq and Afghanistan. Although by that time already in USAF service, the F-22 had not been used in either conflict. In the UK, the government has been convinced by the defense industry to purchase two enormous aircraft carriers to “maintain Britain’s ability to project force,” even though the carriers offer a far greater capability than Britain has enjoyed for many decades, if not ever.

Trade sanctions are commonly instituted by the U.S. to pressure countries that have committed some grievous breach of international peace and security, or stand accused of “state sponsorship” of terrorism, like Iraq, Libya or Iran. Some American companies, however, have managed to win exemptions to rules preventing trade with these countries. Unsurprisingly, most are large companies with a commensurate lobbying presence in Washington. Kraft Foods, Pepsi and some of the nation’s largest banks have secured thousands of exemptions for their products to be sold to countries like Iran, allowing them to do billions of dollars of business despite tough measures to prevent commerce with states that sponsor terrorism. Wrigley’s chewing gum was classed as “humanitarian aid” and thus exempted from sanctions, permitting millions of dollars of sales to Iran and other sanctioned countries. One official later admitted that while the government debated whether chewing gum counted as food, and thus would be exempt, lobbyists too had played their part: “We were probably rolled on that issue by outside forces.”[54]

On another patch of the carpet, the oil giant BP revealed that it had “expressed concern” to the British government about slow progress in diplomatic negotiations between Libya and Britain on the transfer of prisoners, on the grounds that it might negatively affect BP’s oil exploration contracts with the Libyan government. These contracts were worth $900 million. The company claimed that such an expression, and indeed its concern, had nothing to do with the incarceration of the Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, whom Libya was campaigning to have transferred to Libya from his Scottish prison, where he had been sentenced to life imprisonment for the 1988 Lockerbie bombing, which killed two hundred seventy people.

BP admitted its intervention on the prisoner exchange issue only after al-Megrahi’s transfer to Libya and following a public outcry. The delay in the negotiation had been caused by the British government’s insistence that the Lockerbie bomber be excluded from the prisoner transfer agreement. It backed down, and no exclusion to the agreement was specified. Al-Megrahi was transferred, much to the outrage of many of the families of those killed.

Thanks to pressure from lobbyists and agricultural special interests, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has spent millions of dollars, under both Republican and Democratic administrations, encouraging the consumption of cheese, including the promotion of extra-cheese Domino’s pizzas which contain 40 percent more cheese than “regular” pizzas. Pressing this foodstuff upon consumers is directly contrary to the interests of citizens themselves, whose consumption of cheese, and with it saturated fat, has tripled over the last thirty years. Other parts of the government, including the Agriculture Department’s own nutrition committee, meanwhile, are busy telling Americans to reduce their consumption of highly saturated fats.[55] Perversely, the government’s promotion of cheese is a direct consequence of consumers’ growing preference for low-fat and nonfat milk and dairy products. This has created vast surpluses of whole milk and milk fat, which the dairy industry turned to the government to help offload—as high fat cheese. Thus, even as consumers exercise their own choice to eat less fat, the government, pressured by cheese lobbyists (hilarious but true), exploits the consequence—unused high-fat milk and cheese—to persuade the consumer to eat more of it.

In a similar case in Britain, the government in 2011 published a list of healthy eating guidelines, including the advice that consumers should eat no more than 2.5 ounces of red and processed meat per day. The Department of Health produced a list helpfully indicating several meaty items alongside their respective weights. Alongside a cooked breakfast and the Sunday roast and other common meals, only two branded products were mentioned by name: Big Mac and Peperami. It just so happened that both items came in under the limit. The previous November the government had set up five “responsibility deal” networks with the food business to come up with health policies. At the time, this was criticized as being akin to letting Big Tobacco draft smoking policy. Two of the companies were McDonald’s and Unilever, who happen to be the manufacturers of the Big Mac and Peperami, respectively.[56]

The political space is more and more occupied not by citizens, but by big business and the wealthy. Not content with the purchase of lobbying power in our nations’ capitals, oil companies are using the political techniques of environmental activists to promote their own interests, in this case to prevent curbs on carbon emissions. In a memo leaked in 2009, the American Petroleum Institute, which represents the U.S. oil industry, wrote to its member companies asking them to “move aggressively” to stage up to twenty-two “Energy Citizen” gatherings, mostly located, it turned out, in districts of representatives with slim majorities. Without irony, the memo declared that the objective of the demonstrations, which would be organized and funded by API, would be to “put a human face” on the impacts of “unsound” energy policy, i.e., efforts to limit climate change.

Elsewhere, wealthy philanthropists use their foundations, and financial pull, to promote their political preferences. The foundation of Wall Street billionaire and Nixon administration Commerce Secretary Peter G. Peterson, for instance, is seeking to address the issue of taxes, deficits and fiscal responsibility, using advertising and public appearances by foundation experts to educate the public and increase engagement on the issue of the fiscal deficit. The foundation’s website offers sample op-ed articles and letters to public officials and editors, some of which have appeared in newspapers. All members of Congress received a copy of a report by the foundation.[57] This is an interesting twist on the traditional understanding of philanthropy; some foundations now act—with tax-free benefits—as a kind of “force multiplier” for the political preferences of the “philanthropist.” These activities may be beneficent, such as Bill Gates’s efforts to improve school curriculums, or malignant, but either form of influence shares one common characteristic—it is accountable to no one.

It is not only big business that engages in the lobbying business. To compete in the overcrowded and cacophonous halls of modern “democratic” legislatures, anyone with an ax to grind has to follow the same tactics. At international conferences, invariably there are now “NGO forums” to accommodate the scores and sometimes hundreds—as at the Copenhagen climate conference—of organizations with views to present. There is no assessment of the democratic legitimacy of these groups: Some represent many millions of members; others are tiny, and represent nobody apart from themselves. The more skillful use direct tactics to get their message across to legislators: The National Rifle Association, one of the most accomplished at this practice, maintains an online roster of the voting patterns of members of Congress, “scoring” them according to their support of—or hostility to—pro-gun positions. Such tactics are now becoming commonplace across the political spectrum.

The number of nonprofits in the U.S. has increased by over 30 percent between 1996 and 2008, to well over 1.5 million.[58] Such organizations are today more likely to be located in Washington and have a subscriber base of members who pay dues but do not attend or participate in local meetings. There have been similar trends in Britain. Such organizations are in effect turning political activity into a business, what some have called a “business of protest.” The organizational model for many contemporary political nonprofit organizations now resembles that of a commercial business, which defines its target audience, purchases relevant mailing lists and advertising to reach that audience, and asks minimal participation (usually just membership fees) from them to achieve their lobbying goals.[59] Whereas active participation in community organizations correlates with political participation, there are no such “positive externalities” of paying membership dues to a nonprofit. In essence, we are contracting out politics to be done by others.

Common to these interest groups is that they are in general focused on single, narrow issues: gun rights, fuel taxes, environmental protection, abortion rights. Their aggressive tactics and sheer numbers fill the domestic political space and have created a new culture of politics, where legislators are confronted with a panoply of groups and lobbyists, erecting a kind of wall between them and individual voters.

Such groups also contribute to a growing and unpleasant extremism in political debate. Adept at one-sided presentation of the evidence, these groups advocate black-and-white positions with aggressive vigor and armfuls of one-sided research—often representing those who oppose them as foolish and sometimes evil. The compromises inherently necessary in political decision making thus become harder; deadlock becomes likelier. Facts and reasoned analysis are invariably the victims.

One effect of these trends is the polarizing rise of partizanship. Many have commented on the growing ugliness and vituperation of public debate. For the first time in living memory, a lawmaker shouted, “You lie!” at the U.S. president when he spoke to both houses of Congress. It is a long way from the method of the Indian “talking stick,” introduced by the Iroquois to Ben Franklin, and reportedly used by America’s Founding Fathers, which requires participants to be able to articulate one another’s position before having a chance to speak.

At the conservative National Review, which had prided itself on its high-minded and thoughtful debate, the columnist Kathleen Parker received eleven thousand e-mail messages when she argued in an article during the 2008 presidential campaign that Governor Sarah Palin was unfit to be vice president. One message lamented that her mother did not abort her.[60] On the Internet, which some extoll for its invigorating heterogeneity and debate, it is clear that the opposite is also true: Online, people tend to choose views that confirm their own.[61] There are even dating sites to accommodate lonely hearts distinguished by their political views.

In Britain, recent elections saw the first ever accession to a parliamentary seat—in the European Parliament—of a far-right party with the victory of the British National Party. In the U.S., Republicans and Democrats are increasingly choosing to live apart from one another, and locate themselves with others of similar political views.[62] Red and blue are now more starkly drawn than ever.[164]

The polarization of political views, the intercession of business, lobbyists and interest groups between voters and their representatives, the growing number and power of political actors who are neither politicians nor conventional political parties, nor accountable to anyone but themselves yet nonetheless wield considerable influence—together, these factors suggest a deepening divide between the public and their nominal representatives. They suggest nothing less than a crisis in democracy.

The pact between citizen and government is never explicit. You can spend an entire life paying taxes, obeying laws, without once being asked whether you wish to contract into or out of it. Government insists upon your registration at birth, and to be notified upon your death. At no point does it seek your consent. You never get the chance to contract into the pact: Your parents are legally obliged to do so on your behalf whether they like it or not. And there is only one way to contract out.

The pact rests on one central pillar (and, oddly, it is the same whether a country is democratic or not)—that government more or less represents the collective interests of the populace. The democratic process provides—in theory at least—for continual feedback, as Karl Popper once theorized, from governed to governors, the only way, Popper believed, to optimize policy so that it reflects the needs and preferences of the people. But if that feedback is interrupted, government policy, at best approximate to the collective wishes of the people, starts to diverge. People and government become estranged. When this happens, the pact breaks down. The evidence is accumulating in the twenty-first century that this is indeed happening.

If government cannot provide for the stability, safety and just arbitration of our common affairs, who can? The answer is both radical and discomforting. For there is only one alternative if government cannot successfully provide: We must do so ourselves. Self-organized government is one term; another, rather more loaded term, is anarchism.

But this is not the anarchism of early twentieth-century bomb-wielding Russians, or nihilists charging police lines at G8 summits. It is a different vision, of individuals and groups peacefully organizing their affairs, arbitrating necessary business directly with one another, guided by their conviction and direct experience—not by party political dogma. It is more evolution than revolution, for it is dawning on people across the world that in order to fix our problems, there is no one to look to but ourselves. The minimalist act of voting is looking less and less adequate as a solution.

This vision may animate people, but it does not prescribe. Instead, this new way of doing things is just that—a way of doing things, a method, and emphatically not an end in itself, nor a design to be imposed upon others. Only a fool would wish the abrupt or violent overthrow of the current system, for the certain result would be violent chaos—anarchy of the worst kind.

But if it’s true that government is less and less able to manage our collective affairs, it seems we have little choice but to take that burden upon our own shoulders. We must learn anew to look to ourselves to produce the effects we desire, to take responsibility for ourselves and for others, and to cooperate and negotiate with each other, instead of leaving that arbitration to an evidently imperfect mechanism. As these habits spread, a new and more durable order may emerge, not—as now—legislated from above but built from the ground up, by people acting upon their beliefs and engaging with each other.

For curiously, it is perpetuation of the existing way of doing things, not anarchism, that may pose the greater risk to our peace and security. It is the alienation of government from people, and us from each other, that more endangers our fragile stability. It is no coincidence that this is the commonest criticism of anarchism, that it engenders disorder, that Anarchy = Chaos. Let us examine this, most serious, objection to this different way of doing things.