‘Politics’ is just Premier League football. Team sports. You need to look at institutional capacity to…

‘Politics’ is just Premier League football. Team sports. You need to look at institutional capacity to understand what’s happening to us. Starting with the UK. Look at the density of public service provision. Cut in half since the 1970s. 1/7 https://t.co/LxX5yG9mDs

Australia. Even greater gutting of institutional density in public service provision. Public institutions are what run societies, and create a public. Not the idiocies of voting and party politics. But the story goes even deeper. 2/7 https://t.co/O0iDIN4UEa

Because even where headcount in public institutions appears relatively stable, it’s often a ‘hollow State’ at work. Much of that headcount is now private contractors. This guts coherence, accountability and institutional memory. 3/7 https://t.co/b06amMOIp4

We’re doing stupid things in the West not because of ‘Left’ or ‘Right’ decisions. Trying to frame what’s happening to us as Left or Right is one of the MOST stupid things we’re doing. But because beginning in the 1970s, we’ve gutted our own collective memory. 4/7

Our nations lost coherence, accountability and memory, leaving us with nothing but imitative social trends to try to shape our collective lives. We’re bobbing in a sea of viral trends that have no material connection to actual problems and shift every 10 minutes. 5/7

I’ve written often about how the 1970s was the decisive tipping point. Where post-war rebuilding, guided by new institutions focused on a ‘we’ (the ‘public’), was replaced by a resurgence of status-driven life. Combined with the anti-establishment countercultural surge. 6/7

Here’s the true story, in a nutshell. The State is everywhere and nowhere. It spends more, employs many, but commands less and knows less. We’ve lost our capacity to coordinate societies, using any sort of historical memory. /end https://t.co/89iKn8WEBJ