🧵Watching the West stumble from one crisis to the next, I think democratic governance has been hollowed by our inept elites, possibly beyond repair. I see this both as a byproduct of globalization and what has been happening deep inside our nations and our communities. 1/10
This hollowing out of Western democracy is not about electoral processes or counting votes. It’s about the elites believing less and less they actually owe something to their fellow citizens by virtue of being part of a larger community. This core national bond is cracking. 2/10
This hollowing out of Western democracies is caused by the decomposition of the nation—driven by the deconstruction of national identity without which the bond of citizenship no longer rests on the mutuality of obligation among citizens regardless of their wealth or class. 3/10
As I see it, in the West we live in a world where elites no longer govern on behalf of the citizens but over them. This mutation feels like a modern take on empire with—where citizen’s’ task is to affirm through elections merely what political parties put in front of them. 4/10
In the US and Europe you can spend your entire life now walled off from people outside your wealth-class and status. Nations are being replaced by “gated communities” that have less and less contact, with the digital space masquerading as a public agora that it simply is not.5/10
As educational systems across the West transmit less and less of the cultural DNA, there is less and less of the national/societal glue that is the sine qua non of democratic governance. As nations become deconstructed, so is democracy, for it looses its national foundation.6/10
Since the end of the Cold War we’ve lived in an era I call the “triumph of institutionalists,” with neo-liberal elites confidently predicting that institution would prevail over culture, and national identity was an obstacle on the road to to the brave new globalized world. 7/10
The attendant de-industrialization of the US and Europe has wrecked the social contract of mutual obligations between citizens and elites. It has shown that in economic policy, the welfare and security of the national community matters not; that “gated communities” rule. 8/10
In the United States we’re living through a revolution driven by the fury of the abandoned citizen—and Europe is not far behind. It’s a rebellion of those whose welfare the elites ignored for decades. It’s a rebellion that will change America but we not yet see the end-state.9/10
Our elites we must relearn that in a democracy institutions are only as strong as the national cultures they nest in. Only then will those to whom much has been given remember that much is expected of them, and that leadership is not an entitlement of wealth and class. 10/End