Contradictory claims are made about democratic politics:
The first claim poses a problem for those who would recruit new people for political action. One solution is to change the way political parties operate. Over the past century or two, political leaders recruited followers. The new technique is for the leaders to recruit `professionals'. These people come to meetings to meet people and to engage in activities they enjoy. The newcomers volunteer for tasks that they want to do with people they like.
This is somewhat awkward for leaders, since the new recruits insist on setting some policies. However, in so far as the leaders either have similar values to the new recruits or do not care about policy, the new format succeeds. More significantly to the old hands, few of the new expect political appointments for themselves or their relatives if their side wins. Their rewards come in the means, not in the consequences.
The second claim is that politics provides vast returns to scale. This situation is similar to that of a firm with high initial but low incremental costs:
.... A century ago, it cost a great deal of money to build a steel works. But once built, it could produce steel at a low incremental cost (up to a maximum). The same with railroads. ....
But political action has always been like this:
Think of ancient China. .... The most powerful state beat the others and established a unified government. The initial cost of creating an army was high; but after that, the cost of conquering one more city was low (for the government with the powerful army). ....
Perhaps the only difference between the present and the pre-industrial past is that we now expect changes that are bigger than any that were possible before the rapid advance of technology. In the old days, dynasties came and went. New religions appeared, and some succeeded. But the new worlds always replicated the old, more or less.
After the industrial revolution, people sought or feared huge changes. Marxists hoped for a paradise on earth rather than heaven; fascists aimed to destroy intellectuals and a worn tradition. Liberal parliamentarians tried to balance various groups with a mixture of government regulation and independent economic activities.
Conservatives tried to prevent changes in which they would lose either by winning directly or though an alliance with fascists or by embracing United States-style capitalism.
(Philip Bobbitt 1 views the major wars of the 20th century as a conflict among different ways for governments to offer to better the material welfare of their citizens.)
Huge returns to scale continue to exist. Governments can make change more difficult, especially by dictatorship and stagnation. Otherwise, there is no way for politics, which is based on ideas, to avoid huge changes when people not only think differently, but governments come to act differently.
Wider political involvement, as actors rather than followers, is new. But it is not unlike the rise of the modern judiciary: over the past few centuries, the judicial branch of government became less arbitrary in its actions and less a place for ambitious men. The most successful political leaders are not themselves judges; they appoint judges. (I am not saying the judicial branch has become insignificant to politicians, only that many of its actions, like the settlement of disputes between small firms, are no longer as important politically as they were 300 years ago.)
I suspect that over the next few generations, political leaders will come decide fewer issues. This restriction will enable their political supporters to decide others, and therefore feel and be important.
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