A recent survey by Ipsos found that across 28 countries, there is broad support among half the population for 'socialist' politics, in this case meaning support for policies such as taxing the rich, free education and healthcare, and a universal basic income.
In Australia, 88 per cent of people agree that education should be free and 89 per cent said that free health care is a human right. You don't need Cambridge Analytica to tell you that policies like substantial funding for Medicare, schools and welfare through raised taxes would be a vote winner.
And yet, the Turbull government plans to make tax cuts the centrepiece of its budget. The Labor party is doing a little better, but also has a disconcerting preoccupation with returning the budget to surplus.
The systems theorist Stafford Beer argued that 'the purpose of a system is what it does'. In this case, the purpose of representative democracy appears to be to facilitate the smooth running of the economy in the interests of big business, even though the majority want something radically different.
There is a growing sense that politicians have appointed themselves as the adults who tell us the awful truth that, like Father Christmas, sharing and welfare are childish fantasies; we need to be practical and realistic. But maybe — 50 years after the struggles of May 1968 — to be realistic, we must demand the impossible. Impossible that is, for politicians who are subject to regulatory capture.
This problem is often called a democracy deficit — the rift between politicians and the people they are supposed to represent. This leads to disengagement and surprise results at the polls, such as the election of Donald Trump and Brexit, fuelled at least in part by a desire to discipline the political class.
A common response to voters behaving badly is to call for qualifications on the franchise, such as education, or the outsourcing of public policy decisions to experts. Instead, I'd argue the opposite: the problem is not democracy, it is the deficit. It is not that too many people have a say in how society is run, but rather not enough.
"Citizens panels and juries will not be the appropriate decision-making process for every kind of issue, but then again neither will parliament, with its backroom deals and complex preference flows."
If we want to address the problem of disengagement, we need to experiment with different ways to give more people the capacity