Sometimes - once he clears his throat - Timothy sings clear and true.

Everywhere the liberal idea of the state is at least in malaise, if not active crisis. Its problems are old, and so is the conversation about those problems. Is the tendency of modern political classes to become more and more self-aggrandizing a cyclical one that is interrupted and corrected by strong legal and constitutional safeguards, checked and balanced? Or have political elites since 1975, even in relatively liberal and democratic states, become more and more protected from social and political restraints? I tend to think that it’s more the latter than the former despite some notable exceptions and complications. It’s hard to believe that anybody now could have the kind of credulous faith in the nation-state as an administrative or managerial institution that was sometimes expressed earlier in the 20th Century. (Even in dystopian terms: one of the brilliant touches of Gilliam’s film Brazil was that dystopia, too, should be imagined as corrupt and inefficient rather than the perfect machine of Orwell’s envisioning.) . . .

Even the devil has personnel problems. The design of a system of governance should assume and anticipate corruption, incompetence and venality, and have mechanisms to expose, blunt and evade such predations.

Look at the fatuous tone of the Economist in the past week, for example. Much tut-tutting about the horrible misjudgement of British parliamentarians, and wishing for the stables to be swept clean of all the muck. But also fretting about how it would be a bad thing to hold an election where the expense accounts were the main issue, much concern that a freakshow side-tent might become the center ring. That’s not the Economist alone: you can find echoes of that double-gesture in punditry left and right.

In fact, that’s a realistic response in some sense, because there are no untainted parties to vote for that are not otherwise tainted by their ideology–and besides, given how systematic the abuses of the current political class are, why should anyone suppose that fringe parties would not quickly find ways to spend public funds on their own follies?

The taint runs deeper too than elected officials and bureaucratic elites, whether we’re talking the UK, the US, Gabon or anywhere else you care to name. If the fury that people feel is curiously unlikely to be more than fuel for conversational righteousness over a pint or two, it’s because most folk know that few of us are more than a few degrees separated from practices and behavior that some pitiless observer might name as corrupt, and few of us are more than a few degrees distant from some kind of largesse distributed by the state or by equally powerful civic institutions.

That's the real crime of bad governance - it co-opts and implicates everyone. Standards decline as each realizes personal culpability.

I remember a conversation in a decaying post-industrial small city in New England a few years back. One woman I was talking with had just retired from nursing. She bitterly complained about African-American “welfare cheats” but then ten minutes later talked about how she got a doctor to falsely attest that she was looking for work so that she could claim unemployment benefits, which she felt was her right. It’s always the other guy, but it’s hard to think of a way to stop the other guy that doesn’t create a new bridge for bureaucrat-trolls to hide under and demand some price from those who want to clip-clop across it.

And so you may understand my disdain for government and perhaps agree that it needs to be limited. It will be corrupt and incompetent, but it's the dose that makes the poison. The smaller the dose, the less pain and suffering.