by Martin Gurri

Photo by Alex Proimos

The failure of government has been the theme of our age. Though I am concerned, here, with representative democracy, governments of every stripe have failed on center stage, under the eyes of the public. By failure I mean something more fundamental than the political disasters that befall administrations — George W. Bush’s missing WMDs, say, or Barack Obama’s crashing website. Failure has been bipartisan and post-ideological. From border control to regulation of the financial markets, it has implicated every function of that invertebrate monster, the modern government.

An unhappy public has reacted by voting out incumbents with abandon, then voting out their successors as well. In the US, every Federal election since 2008 has reversed the previous mandate. France, Britain, and Spain each have flipped from left to right or back the other way. Such bipolar mood swings are driven by frustration rather than hope: trust in government, in each of these countries, has fallen to red-alert lows. Not surprisingly, legitimacy has bled away from the democratic system as a whole. Mainstream political parties, to cite one example, stand in near-total disrepute.

Explanations invariably appeal to ideology. For those on the right, government fails the public because the intended beneficiaries are really the political elites. For those on the left, failure is proof that politicians are the paid stooges of corporate interests. Such conspiratorial fever dreams satisfy the cheerleading instinct, but they block the possibility of analysis.

In my book, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium, I have taken a different approach. The questions I asked were about the limits of human knowledge. Modern democratic governments have been around for more than a century, largely pounding away at the same projects: increasing national wealth while keeping down unemployment, for example. We know by now that they fall short of omnipotence. An empirical boundary must therefore exist, beyond which the application of power becomes self-defeating. Attempts to cross the boundary will proceed, with the inevitability of a Greek tragedy, to failure.

Governments can only be said to fail relative to their own claims of competence or the public’s expectations. On both scores, the twentieth century set the tone for democratic political rhetoric. It is heroic and utopian. Politicians speak of “solving” complex social and economic “problems.” They seem to believe that the sheer application of political power can impose prosperity, equality, happiness for the downtrodden. In this mood, the US government has declared “wars” on poverty, crime, drugs, and cancer. The economy in particular has inspired heroic ambitions. President Obama expected the Federal government to “save or create” 3.5 million jobs by spending $800 billion.

The history of these claims in action can best be described as a humbling collision with reality. Power has failed to deliver equality or happiness. The wars waged by the Federal government against social conditions have ended with the enemy standing more or less where he was when hostilities began. Government economic experts melted down like the wicked witch during the catastrophe of 2008. Alan Greenspan, once described as a maestro conducting a perfectly-tuned economy, said of the crisis: “I still do not fully understand why it happened.” The number of “saved or created” jobs specified by the White House for the stimulus erred by a wide margin.

It could scarcely have been otherwise. The best evidence suggests that government failure is less a function of incompetence or corruption than of attempting to achieve the impossible. Government projects fail because most human endeavors fail — as true in business, science, and the arts, as in bloated bureaucracies. And our endeavors fail because our intentions get lost in the Wonderland of complexity that is the world, and the consequences that follow are largely unintended and undesired.

In his aptly titled Why Most Things Fail, Paul Ormerod showed persuasively that, despite vastly increased spending rates, modern government has made little statistical difference in alleviating unemployment and income inequality. Economic experts, it turns out, are unable to predict the economic future. Powerful presidents can’t bend the whirlwind of economic activity to their will. The same appears to be true of government efforts to reduce the crime rate and integrate neighborhoods across ethnic and religious lines. “We may intend to achieve a particular outcome,” Ormerod writes, “…but the complexity of the world, even in apparently simple situations, appears to be so great that it is not within our power to ordain the future.”

If Ormerod is right, most democratic contests today are fought over phantom issues. Politicians are trapped in what I have called the democrat’s dilemma: to get elected, they must promise impossibilities that will lead to failure in office. The public, they know, has tended to accept government claims at face value. The ambitious rhetoric of the last century has evolved into the natural language of democracy, and the public now takes it for granted that government could solve any problem, change any undesirable condition, if only it tried. Failure then becomes proof of corruption and conspiracy.

To break out of the dilemma, the political elites must first embrace the reality of the limits of human knowledge. “I would like the people in charge to have a better sense of how the world actually works,” says Duncan Watts, another scholar of complexity. Such an awakening may seem unlikely, yet it is not enough. Even if politicians realize that government is the art of the possible, they will continue to promise the impossible for as long as the electorate demands it. The cycle of political failure, and the slow suicide of democracy, can only be reversed from below.