The Rift Between the People and the Government Widens on Its Own

Every representative government has spent its history being pushed, from below, to serve the people it governs. That is what the reform movements, the franchise extensions, the labour laws and the constitutional amendments all were: efforts to bend the machine toward the majority. Some of them worked. None of them finished the job, and the incompleteness has a consequence that is easy to overlook because it is everywhere.

There is a rift between the people and their government, and the rift does work. It is not merely a feeling. It changes behaviour, and it changes it in a direction that makes the rift wider.

What the Rift Does to Cooperation

A government runs on cooperation that it cannot compel. It can compel some tax, but not the honest declaration. It can compel a court appearance, but not a truthful witness. It can post a speed limit, but not the judgement that the limit is reasonable. The enormous majority of what makes a state function is people going along with it because they regard it as, roughly, theirs.

Withdraw that regard and the going-along thins out. It thins first in the small and invisible ways: the cash job, the inflated deduction, the rule that is understood as something to be got around rather than kept. It thins further into avoidance of everything the state offers, from the census to the vaccine. At the far end it thins into crime that the criminal does not experience as crime, because the law that forbids it belongs to them and not to us.

None of this needs to be organised. It is what a population does when it concludes that the government is a party to be dealt with rather than an instrument it holds. And each thinning confirms the government's own view that the population must be watched and compelled, which produces more compulsion, which widens the rift.

The Second Rift

The first rift runs between the public and the state. The second runs through the public, and it is the more corrosive.

People who believe the government is not theirs look for whose it is. And they find candidates, because there are always groups with more influence than their numbers warrant: an industry, a region, a religious community, a profession, a class. Sometimes the belief is paranoid. Often it is simply correct, because a government that cannot free itself from strong minorities is in fact influenced by them, and that fact is visible.

So the citizen who feels shut out does not only distrust the state. He distrusts his neighbours who seem to be inside it. The farmers think the cities have the government's ear; the cities think the farmers do. Everyone can point to a subsidy, an exemption, an appointment that proves the other side has the special line. A government that serves everyone a little and a few a lot manufactures suspicion between all the many about which of them is the few.

Why It Does Not Heal

One might expect the rift to close over time as reforms accumulate. The record says otherwise, and the reason is structural.

The government's influence by strong minorities is not a scandal that gets fixed; it is a condition that gets reproduced, because the minorities have the concentrated stake and the sustained attention, and the public has neither. So the evidence that feeds the rift keeps arriving. Every year brings a new case of an interest that got its way against the plain preference of the majority, and every case is one more reason to conclude that the machine is not ours.

Meanwhile the behaviour the rift produces, the withdrawal of cooperation, looks from inside the government like ingratitude and disorder, and calls forth exactly the responses that confirm the public's view: more enforcement, more surveillance, more contempt in both directions. The loop is closed and it runs in one direction.

Where It Ends

Civil unrest is the usual name for where it ends, and unrest is the least of it. Before the streets fill there are decades of a society that does not quite work: taxes that need an army to collect, laws that are jokes, elections that half the country treats as somebody else's ritual, and a governing class that regards the governed as a problem to be managed.

I have argued in many places that the distance between a governing minority and the public is a property of representative systems rather than a fault of particular ones. This is what that distance costs, over time, in the tissue of a society. It is not only that the government does the wrong things. It is that the people, correctly perceiving that the government is not theirs, stop behaving like people whose government it is, and a country in which nobody behaves like an owner is a country nobody owns.

The remedy that actually addresses this is the boring one: close the distance, so that the government is the public's in fact and the perception has nothing to feed on. Every other remedy treats the symptom.