January 2016
Introduction: the corruption of our political institutions
An overview of “The Corruption of Our Political Institutions,” a symposium organized jointly by The New Criterion and London’s Social Affairs Unit.
Burke was writing about corruption in the Hanoverian court of George III, but he could have been writing about the metabolism of vested interest in modern bureaucratic democracies. People across the political spectrum feel that the political order is out of joint. Their identification of the causes may differ according to political filiation, but there is widespread and uneasy agreement about the symptoms. The uneasiness speaks to the complexity, also to the seriousness, of the issue. A rising tide of corruption brings with it a faltering of legitimacy, which in turn yields a withdrawal of allegiance. Western democracies still maintain the forms of a free society. We hold free elections. We pay obeisance (a nice Latinate word for “lip service”) to free speech and free markets. But these forms increasingly resemble the abandoned buildings of a ghost town. The structures still stand, but no one lives there. We elect people to govern us but are, more and more, governed by an alphabet soup of unelected bureaucrats.
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