Rebuilding trust, consensus, accountability and creative ambition with a parallel politics of participatory goal setting.
A buddy of mine once told me, “You don’t start with what can be done. You start with what must be done.” You imagine the place you have to get to. Then you figure out how to get there. It’s a mindset that drives moral clarity. But it also fosters creativity. Necessity is the mother of invention and must drives the process, while can forgoes it entirely, caving to complexity and apparent constraint.
There are things we must do. Crises we must address.
The world is burning. The oceans are dying. Millions of children, caught in genocidal conflict from Gaza to Sudan, are starving. Inequality is spiralling out of control. The Venn diagram of private capital and political power is a converging circle. Hope for a positive future is evaporating. And that’s just some of the top-line stuff. All while the very tools and technologies that should inspire hope and empower change are being used instead to further entrench authoritarian economic and political power. Yet in the face of these crises, most of our governments are doing…nothing. Or at best, doing the bare minimum permitted by a twisted mess of vested interests, while hiding behind an apparent lack of consensus.
That inaction is bleeding democracy dry.
The MetaPolitics of Failure
Let’s be clear again. Addressing these problems is not optional. Yet the discussion always starts with what we can do.
Folks often refer to politics, and democratic governance in particular, as “the art of the possible.” Yet too often, it becomes a convenient pretext to dismiss “childish” aspirations in favour of what is deemed “realistic.” When that happens, the art of the possible collapses into a mere facsimile of the doable.
As a result, the drive behind history’s greatest political achievements similarly gives way to tepid pragmatism. Necessity and obligations, both material and moral, commensurate with the seriousness of the situation, don’t exist. There are no long-term visions, so there are no shared goals. And there is certainly very little in the way of consequences. Our political leaders have no marching orders, no accountability and therefore, in the end, no real impetus to get creative.
The chronic failure also has roots in a pervasive false premise. The idea that people don’t agree. Or that they don’t share values and goals. It’s a premise that has taken a kernel of truth and, with some help, warped democratic societies into conflict engines that exhaust and demoralise. Yet solidarity and consensus against something awful, like the annihilation of children or planetary ecosystems, is actually extremely easy. Even in deeply authoritarian environments, there’s often consensus that “the dictator is bad”, “food is too expensive” and “a fair justice system would be nice”. We saw as much in the Arab Spring. The fact is, on virtually all the major crises we face, there is broad agreement. From stronger action against climate change, to ending support for militant regimes, all the way to the need for affordable housing and healthcare. And the further we probe, the more we find, until we realise that, more often than not, it’s not what we want or where we want to go that lies at the centre of political conflict, but how we get there. Which is precisely why it takes centre stage.
Solidarity is functionally hidden behind a politics of competition over leadership, rather than cooperation towards shared goals.
So, far from doing what they must, the good do merely what they can while the rest do what they want. And the crises continue to mount.
Efforts to improve the efficacy of democratic governance, through citizen participation, accessibility and better inclusion of minority voices, have diversified representation. But this has run in parallel to expanding networks of corruption and authoritarianism, and the socio-cultural drama and chaos of the digital landscape.
Campaign finance, media cycles, outrage-driven news, Countless threads linking incentives outside those of the general public, either as individuals or in aggregate, form a cobweb that ensnares authentic creative interest, compelling it to spend all its time writhing and struggling, often against itself, instead of acting. And in the process, governing focus has become distracted and diffuse. We face urgent, highly solvable problems without a coherent drive to solve them. Just a rhetorical landscape of nebulous priorities, vague intentions, symbolic gestures and performative concern.
However, the apparent failure of democracies to meet the moment is not through lack of ability. It’s not a failure of democracy by nature, but democracy by nurture. It is what we have allowed democracies to become. Feckless. Insincere. Corrupt. Shortsighted. Inadequate. Unable to act even when broad public support exists. It’s not good enough.
The PseudoPolitics of ‘Success’
It also creates an opening for a familiar narrative. That of the successful authoritarian. The ‘strong’ leader who can ‘get things done’ when everything starts to feel a little much. Together with a government that can think and plan long-term to steer through uncertain times. It’s nonsense of course. Authoritarians aren’t better at problem-solving. They’re just unconstrained. Proverbial hammers before a row of apparent nails. Similarly uncreative because they don’t need to be. Occasionally, more ‘successful’ only because they are, at the very least, beholden to and operating on an imperative. Albeit one centred around the interests of the regime itself, with any long-term planning similarly motivated.
The problem on the democratic end, and the reason why apparent inaction stands in such stark contrast, is two-fold. Firstly, as above, we don’t have a collective process to define and obligate what we must actually achieve. Electoral politics has been largely reduced to cynical tactics and a rhetorical obsession with how we get places, while forgetting the need for a clear idea of where it is we’re actually going.
Secondly, our politics are inextricably tied up in the same short-term thinking and incentives as our economies, with precious little to separate them. And as inequality worsens, of course, so do the flow-on effects of that problem.
A few weeks ago, I witnessed someone in the venture capital business wondering aloud why democracy seemed so bound up in short-term thinking, lamenting that democratic economies couldn’t keep up with nations like China, who operated with long-term plans and invested accordingly.
“Why?” I remember thinking, or perhaps scoffing slightly. “You. It’s you, buddy. It’s all this.” An inability to think long-term is not a structural inevitability. It’s cultural. A symptom of a system trapped in the very logic of venture capital. Short-term returns. Low accountability. Endless cycles. It has always been a problem at this particular political and economic intersection. It’s just gotten a lot worse.
And there’s a class of folk that, while fancying themselves risk takers, won’t bet the big bucks on investments that take decades to deliver the goods. The kind that educates and keeps entire generations healthy. The kind that ends wars and builds peace. The kind that lays the theory and infrastructure for entirely new fields and industries. The kind that preserves a planet. Instead, they’ll take a scattershot of small risks, with the goal of multiplying returns in the space of an election cycle or two. Enough to rinse, repeat and retire on. Real risk is for the government, apparently. But the government is hamstrung, desperately appealing to those same interests. So everyone gets the same result. Nothing. Or at best, incrementalism.
And as the gap widens between the problems we face and the action we take, the democratic feedback loop collapses. And into that vacuum creeps authoritarianism, again, blaming the “the other” and offering the illusion of effective action.
In the end, it’s not democracy that has failed to deliver. It’s unaccountable democracy, or rather democracy that is accountable to money, rather than something else. So, you know what? Let’s give it something else.
A ParaPolitics of Participation
We don’t have to choose between representation and results. It is possible to preserve pluralism and anchor governance in citizen interests, while still ‘getting things done’. We just need to separate the how from the what or where. And that comes in three parts.
In part one, citizens dream and collaboratively set goals. Long-term goals. Domestic goals for the future of the country, as well as larger goals for the world they want to live in. They describe their vision. Not in consultation. Not in the margins. Not as an afterthought to electoral campaigns. But directly, meaningfully, regularly and at scale.
Citizens are asked open questions like “What do you want the future to look like?” It’s unfortunately a question no one ever really gets asked. Yet it forms the critical framing for the operative question of politics: “What do you think the government should be doing?” The technology already exists to pull it off, even incorporating scanned paper submissions. AI, for all its problems, massively expands our ability to conduct deliberative and participatory processes. People must obviously still be involved, structuring data, but it can scale without needing an army to sort through responses. Tens of thousands, even millions of responses can be synthesised and distilled, with receipts, into coherent demands, clear priorities and actual mandates. Generated not merely from a vat of stolen data, but using a coherent set of consciously and consensually provided inputs.
And citizens aren’t short on ideas. What they’re short on is mechanisms through which those ideas can be converted into political priorities. This is how we anchor governance in the public interest. Not through polling. Not through campaigning. But through shared authorship of direction.
In part two, governments are required to meet them. It’s not enough to gesture vaguely toward public sentiment. Governments must be held to the goals that have been collectively established. Transparently, measurably, and on a timeline. You were elected with a strategy? Fine. Good for you. You can debate the route. But the destination is already set. Figure it out.
There are already examples to build on. The UK Climate Change Committee for example, provides independent advice to the government on policy and goals. However, it is then the government itself that sets its own binding targets. That’s ok, but it’s not nearly good enough.
International agreements, like the Paris Accords, also attempt to set targets. Yet the detachment from domestic politics and any process of accountability, political or otherwise, has rendered them largely inert. And without consequence, a goal is just a gesture. Another piece of political whimsy that can easily be side-lined, ignored or fall prey to whatever discourse happens to be going on at the time.
There is even a growing list of examples where citizen consultation has directly led to targets, and not just in the expanding practice of participatory budgeting. Iceland’s attempt at a participatory constitutional draft is one such example. As is Finland's Education strategy, France’s Climate Convention and Ireland’s Citizen Assemblies. Whatever the case may be, the goals must become non-negotiable, outside of a recurring public process. These are not campaign promises. They do not shift with the electoral winds.
In part three, inaction has consequences. Right now, political failure is more often a failure of public relations and narrative control than policy. Poor governance can be subverted and good governance can be undermined. What you actually do carries only partial weight. We reward theatrics over delivery, with leaders promising, stalling, distracting and surviving. That has to change. If citizen-derived goals are not met and priorities are not addressed, something must happen. Government dismissal. Elections. Resignations. Audits. Public scrutiny. And there are existing institutions and roles in most democracies that could be granted the responsibility, such as an election commission, a Governor General or other figurehead of state. You might not be rewarded at the polls for doing something, but you damn sure will be punished for doing nothing.
A system with no accountability for failure is a system that rewards it. And we are seeing the bleak results of that every day. It’s not enough to say governments should act. They must know they will be held to account if they don’t.
There would have to be guardrails of course, as with any other political practice. To ensure accessibility and the protection of minority voices. To ensure legal and constitutional rights are unviolated. And to ensure technical security, among other things. Many of which are the same as those already required in current elections. Which is precisely why it makes so much sense to bake it into existing electoral processes.
You show up to vote. Vote. On screen or on paper. And while you’re at it, dream a little.
The ProtoPolitics of Progress
This is how we recover democratic function. Not by abandoning representation, but by giving citizens permission to dream and then demanding results. And in so doing, avoiding the downward spiral of authoritarianism that almost always has its roots in cumulative political failure and corruption.
The irony to all this, is that with all the squabbling over the how, we’ve been sucked into polarising narratives and dead-end policy and forgotten just how valuable and unifying the what and where can be.
Most of us want the same things. A liveable planet. A safe place to call home. A sense of purpose. A better future for our kids. But we lack a political system capable of anchoring governance in that shared vision, because we lack a mechanism for defining it in the first place.
And when there’s no vision, the details become disconnected. Disjointed policy deliberations feel random and frustrating. Money creeps in. Authoritarianism creeps in. Deceiving, inveigling and obfuscating. Bad ideas take root, not because they’re intuitive or effective, but because when democracy is gutted of its capacity to creatively solve problems, people are also robbed of the proof that it works. The only thing left becomes a negative feedback loop.
Having that vision however, puts the politics-as-usual in context. It tells a story. It allows complex solutions to complex problems to actually manifest and be nurtured. And it also serves as demonstrable evidence of our ability to agree, if not on everything, then at least on the big stuff. While it may sound superficial at first, it would be an invaluable reminder.
And having that reminder, regularly, just as organisations and social collections of all kinds have OKRs, KPIs, annual targets and mission statements, would surely help re-reign the ship of state and point it in the right direction, refocussing our efforts and driving creativity towards a better world.
A world where starvation is not written off as a tragedy, but treated as an unacceptable failure. Where poverty, homelessness, corruption and environmental catastrophe are not brushed off as unfortunate consequences, but as evidence of negligence. And a world where politicians are held accountable, just like the rest of us. But perhaps most importantly, it’s a world where the fundamental principles and inherent values of democracy are reclaimed and trust in its efficacy is restored. At its core, democracy is about having a say. Not just through occasional votes or symbolic representation, but through genuine engagement with the questions that shape our lives.
Yes, it may be unrealistic to expect everyone to be deeply involved in every decision, all the time, à la direct democracy. But we now, at the very least, have the capacity to actually ask people what they want. Not just for the next quarter, or the next election, but for the world they hope to see decades from now.
It wouldn’t require much in the grand scheme of things. And if we don’t ask, we won’t end up with the future we’ve chosen. We’ll just get what we’re given. So the question any government claiming to be a democracy should have been asking all along is the one we must insist on now.
“What do you want the world, and the future, to look like?”
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