Democracy, prosperity, citizens and the state

Abstract

Political discontent has grown in the prosperous post‐war era, a phenomenon that is described, compared, and explained in the United States and Canada. Various theories, which purport to explain political content, are reviewed and a structural explanation is offered: governments began the last half of the 20th Century as agents for the market and ended up by the 1990's as agents of the market. As such, governments have developed commercial relationships with citizens while neglecting to sustain earlier social relationships. Thus, political discontent is an outcome of a clash between commercial and social relationships, or between the institutions of democracy and the market. A new balance between social and contractual relationships presently sustained between governments and the people in the West as well as by governments and the people in Islamic civilization might help defuse the apparent clash between two. In other words, a new balance might moderate the apparent prevalent Islamic view that the West is characterized by crass commercialism in most of its relations; it might also vitiate the Western perception that the Islamic world is rife with blind religious intolerance in most of its internal and external relations. In the meantime, Western governments must re‐establish themselves as entities separate from and ennobled by social purpose as well as by social covenant in order to prevent further deterioration in political contentment. After all, stable, vigorous, and well‐supported democratic institutions have a prodigious capacity to absorb challenges from within and from without and to assimilate those challenges into new directions in policy, to the benefit of citizens of Western nations as well as to the benefit of people from nations based on other civilizations, including Islamic civilization.