THE MANAGERIAL GOVERNING CLASS’S WORST NIGHTMARE IS FOR THE VOTERS TO GET WHAT THEY WANT: Why the European Right Keeps Rising.

What is rising across Europe, in Germany, in Austria, in France, in the Netherlands, in Italy, is not a single party but a recognition by an every growing number of citizens: That elections, in the form they have taken since the 1990s, have stopped producing the changes voters keep asking for. The British political scientist Colin Crouch described this condition twenty years ago in a book called Post-Democracy. Although the formal rituals continue – people going to the polls, watching the debates, not studying the party manifestos – all the substantive decisions most people see as existential priorities like migration and energy, are made elsewhere: At the European level, in supranational bodies, in NGO networks supported by public money, and in administrative organs accountable to nobody the voter can remove. The state, whose representatives often speak about “saving democracy” these days, actually likes this pattern.

Something similar obtains here, and our managerial class is brutally resisting the loss of its unaccountable power, and has been for a decade.