The End of Power (44 page)

The pattern—and the emergency—is clear: Since the early 1990s, as the effects of globalization and the More, Mobility, and Mentality revolutions spread around the world, the need for effective multicountry collaboration has soared. But the capacity of the world to respond to these new needs has not kept pace. Critical multilateral talks have failed, deadlines have been missed, financial commitments and promises have not been honored, execution has stalled. International collective action has fallen far short of what was offered and, more importantly, needed.
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These failures represent not only the now almost chronic lack of international consensus but, indeed, another important manifestation of the decay of power.

And what has all this to do with the need to restore trust?

The failure of political leaders to effectively collaborate with other nations is related to their weakness at home. Governments with weak or nonexistent mandates are unable to strike international deals as these often require commitments, compromises, concessions, and even sacrifices that their publics won't allow them to make. The implication is not that we need to give blank checks and unrestrained power to those who govern us: we know that power without controls, accountability, and countervailing forces is dangerous and unacceptable. But we also need to recognize that when our society operates on the declining side of the inverted U-curve, additional constraints to the power of those in government end up hurting us. Restoring trust is essential to relax these controls and bring them to the side of the inverted U-curve in which society benefits. The exploding number and complexity of the checks and balances that restrain the power of those who run democratic governments are direct results of the decline of trust. In some countries, this decline has become a permanent trend. Recall the observation of Carnegie's President Jessica Mathews, who was quoted in
Chapter 4
in the context of the Mentality revolution: “[In the United States] anyone under the age of forty has lived their entire life in a country the majority
of whose citizens do not trust their own national government to do what they think is right.”
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There are, of course, many good reasons not to trust politicians and, in general, those in power: not only their mendacity and corruption but also the frequent underperformance of governments when compared with our expectations as voters. Moreover, we are all better informed, and heightened media scrutiny is prone to highlight the misdeeds, mistakes, and inadequacies of governments. As a result, the low levels of trust in government that are now common have become chronic.

This needs to change. We need to restore trust in government and in our political leaders. For this to happen will require profound changes in the way political parties organize and operate and in how they screen, monitor, hold accountable, and promote—or demote—their leaders. Adapting political parties to the twenty-first century is a priority.

In most democracies, parties continue to be the principal political organizations and still retain substantial power. But beneath the surface, they are as fragmented, weakened, and polarized as the overall political system in which they are embedded. In fact, today, most old-line political parties are unable to muster the power they once had. An illustrative example is the hostile takeover of the Republican Party by the Tea Party and the internal divisions the latter has unleashed in what was once one of the world's most powerful political machines. Similarly crippling factional conflicts are visible in political parties around the world.

By any reckoning, since the 1990s political parties have had a bad stretch. In most countries, opinion surveys show that their prestige and value in the eyes of the very people they serve are declining and, in some cases, have plummeted to an all-time low.
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The end of the Cold War and, more specifically, the collapse of communism as an inspirational idea blurred the ideological lines that gave many parties their unique identity. As electoral platforms became indistinguishable, the personalities of candidates became the main, and often the only, differentiating factor. To win elections, political parties relied less on the popular appeal of their ideals and ideas and more on marketing techniques, the media prowess of candidates, and, of course, the money they
could raise. Naturally, the same scandals that tarnish individual politicians also affect the political organizations to which they belong. Again, freer media and more independent parliaments and judiciaries ensured that corrupt practices once carefully hidden or silently tolerated became painfully visible and obviously criminal, thus degrading the “brand” of the political party. The public tarnishing was also fueled by political parties that could no longer distinguish themselves ideologically from their opponents and relied on corruption accusations and scandals to define political rivals in the minds of voters. It is impossible to ascertain whether political corruption actually increased in the past decades, but it certainly has been more publicized than ever.

Meanwhile, whereas political parties struggled, social movements and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) thrived. Even murderous terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda (which in many important ways are also NGOs) went global and had a good run in the 1990s. As the ties between political parties and their electorates weakened, those between NGOs and their supporters became tighter. As the public standing of politicians and political parties continued its secular decline, the prestige and influence of NGOs grew. Trust in NGOs grew as fast as trust in political parties dwindled. Their ability to recruit young and highly motivated activists willing to sacrifice for the organization and its cause is an organizational skill that has become more common among NGOs than among political parties.

As NGOs pursued their single issues with monomaniacal zeal, political parties chased a multitude of different, even contradictory, goals and seemed monomaniacal only in their pursuit of campaign contributions. In countries where political parties remained banned or stifled, NGOs became the only channel of political and social activism. In most other nations, NGOs grew rapidly because they were less tainted by corruption, often belonged to a larger international network, and generally had clearer ideals, a less hierarchical structure, and a closer relationship with their members. NGOs also had the advantage of having a clear mission. Whether dedicated to protecting human rights, saving the environment, lessening poverty, or controlling population growth, members rarely lost sight of what their organizations stood for. All of these factors led new cohorts of political activists, who in the past would have gravitated toward political parties, to tend instead toward NGOs.

The growth of NGOs is, on balance, a welcome trend. What is far less welcome, and indeed ought to be reversed, is the erosion in the public standing of political parties, which in many countries—Italy, Russia, Venezuela,
and so on—has led to their virtual disappearance and replacement with ad hoc electoral machines.

The key to parties' resurgence and increased effectiveness is to regain the ability to inspire, energize, and mobilize people—especially the young—who would otherwise disdain politics altogether, or channel whatever political energy they have through single-issue organizations or even fringe groups.

Political parties must therefore be willing to adapt their structures and methods to a more networked world. Just as relatively flat, less hierarchical structures have enabled NGOs to be more nimble, adaptable, and more attuned to the needs and expectations of their members, so they might also help political parties reach new members, become more agile, advance their agendas, and hopefully become better at fighting the terrible simplifiers that seek power inside and outside the party.

NGOs gain the trust of their supporters by making their members feel they are having a direct impact, that their efforts are indispensable, that their leaders are accountable, transparent, and not beholden to dark or unknown interests. Political parties need to elicit these same feelings from larger segments of society and to be capable of enlisting members beyond their narrow, traditional base of stalwart activists.

Only then will they be able to recover the kind of power they need to govern us well.

Easier said than done. Who has the time? And the patience to attend all the meetings and group activities that come with the involvement in any collective undertaking—especially a political party? These and other good reasons explain why only rarely do most people get actively involved in political parties or social causes in ways that go beyond the giving of an occasional donation or attending a meeting or a rally once in a very long while. Under normal circumstances, political involvement and social activism are for minorities.

But in recent years we have been surprised by sudden surges of interest in public affairs, the mobilization of vast numbers of usually uninterested, even apathetic citizens, and the engagement of tens of thousands in political activities that are more demanding (and in some countries more dangerous) than attending a political party's meeting.

In the United States, for example, Barack Obama and his presidential campaign in 2008 were able to motivate large numbers of political neophytes
and young people who would not normally be interested or engaged in one of the two parties' electoral activities. Beyond the background and race of the candidate, a lot more happened in the 2008 campaign that was also unprecedented: from the innovations in social media used to target political advertising to specific voters, to the use and recruitment of volunteers, to the novel approaches to fundraising. The surprises inherent in the sudden surge of political activism by hitherto-inert groups did not stop with the political newcomers to the Obama campaign. Energized or, rather, infuriated by the financial crises and the perception of unfairness in the distribution of the burdens of the crisis, the Occupy Wall Street movement and its thousands of equivalents in cities around the world also stunned governments and political parties that scrambled to understand its nature and functioning while searching for ways to tap the political energy of these largely spontaneous movements.

The most surprising and consequential manifestation of this broader activist trend started with an upheaval in a small town in Tunisia in December 2010. It led to the toppling of the government there and ultimately to the contagious wave of protests and demonstrations throughout the Middle East that became the Arab Spring. Millions of once passive—and repressed—citizens became political actors willing to make extreme sacrifices that included not just risking their own lives but even putting their families in danger. In contrast to the “Occupy” movements, which so far have been unable to convert political energy into political power, in the Arab Spring the political awakening did lead to important power shifts.

Thus, whereas under normal circumstances political participation is for small groups of engaged activists, in other instances, such as revolutions, political activism becomes the obsessive focus of entire societies. But revolutions are too costly, their outcome is too uncertain, and progress is not their guaranteed result. Therefore, the challenge is to avoid costly and risky revolutions while creating and channeling the political energy latent in all societies to effect desirable changes. The best way to do that is through more competitive political parties.

Rethinking political parties, modernizing their recruiting methods, and retooling their organization and operations can boost their allure and make them more worthy of the trust of the societies they wish to govern. Ideally, they could also become more effective laboratories of political innovation.

Only when we restore trust in the political system at home—and thus endow our leaders with the capacity to contain the decay of power and enable
them to make hard decisions and avoid gridlock—will we be able to tackle the most pressing global challenges. And for this we need stronger, more modern, and more democratic political parties that stimulate and facilitate participation.

Restoring trust, reinventing political parties, finding new ways in which average citizens can meaningfully participate in the political process, creating new mechanisms of effective governance, limiting the worst impacts of checks and balances while averting excessive concentrations of unaccountable power, and enhancing the capacity of nation-states to work together should be the central political goals of our time.

Without these changes, sustained progress in fighting the threats at home and abroad that conspire against our security and prosperity will be impossible.

In this era of revolutionary change, where almost nothing we do or experience in our daily lives has been left unaffected, one critical area remains surprisingly untouched: the way we govern ourselves, our communities, nations, and the international system. Or the ways in which we as individuals engage in the political process. Ideologies have come and gone, political parties have risen and fallen, and some government practices have been improved by reforms and information technology. Electoral campaigns now rely on more sophisticated methods of persuasion—and, of course, more people than ever are governed by a leader they have elected and not by a dictator. While welcome, these changes pale in comparison with the extraordinary transformations in communications, medicine, business, and war.