How certain efforts to make government representative and accountable have engendered a more diffuse, opaque and pointless tyranny

A fable on the occasion of the European parliamentary elections

Once upon a time, in a lush meadow at the bottom of a quiet valley, there was a village. Being much like all the other villages, there was nothing all that special about it. It stood near a small stream over which somebody in centuries past had built a Helpful Bridge. Like other bridges, this one was not always in the best repair. There was a Market Square where you could buy baskets and fresh trout every Thursday, a church with a great brass bell where the friars preached every Sunday, a Manor on a hill, and an assortment of small houses on cobblestone streets where the villagers lived.

This village was ruled by a Lord. He traced his descent from a long line of previous Lords who had ruled before him, and he lived atop the hill in the Manor, from which he decreed when the trash was to be collected and which witches were to be burned in the Market Square. He also collected tolls from those who wished to cross the Helpful Bridge and taxes from the fish mongers and basket weavers at the Thursday market. The villagers probably never liked the Lord very much, but for centuries they didn’t dislike him either. They accepted him as a fact of life, like the seasons and the stream that turned their waterwheels.

As the villagers grew more prosperous, however, they began to ask why the Lord should get to decide about such important things as taxes and tolls and trash collection and witch burnings, and why they had no say in these matters. After all, their taxes and tolls paid for everything, while the Lord did little more than sit in his Manor and decide. It was infuriating even to think about. One year, on Walpurgis Night, a bunch of villagers got flaming drunk at the village pub and marched straight up to the Manor to put things right. They drove the Lord and his bailiffs out of town on the points of their pitchforks, and in the morning they returned to declare their Liberation. Instead of a Lord, they would hold something sacred called an Election to choose a Mayor and a Town Council. These would then govern on behalf of the villagers and not for themselves. Everything would be very different now, and much better, because that is what it means to have an Election.

The villagers rejoiced in their Liberation. They declared 1 May to be a village-wide holiday, on which nobody should have to work. The festivities would culminate in a ritual re-enactment of the Great Pitchfork Uprising. Alas, as the years passed, wicked tongues began to cast aspersions on these holy developments. It did not help that the Mayors had moved into the Manor on the hill to make their decisions about tax collection and witch burning much like the Lords before them. The Helpful Bridge was still not in the best repair, although the tolls had increased. Market taxes had also doubled. This, the Mayor proclaimed, was the price of Liberation and there was nothing to do about it. The Councillors had to be paid, the poorest villagers on whose votes he depended required stipends, and anyway nobody promised that Liberation would be easy.

Wicked tongues said other things as well. For example, they observed that suddenly nothing was anybody’s responsibility. At least when the Lord was in charge, there was a clear figure to blame should the wrong witches be burned or the trash be neglected. Now these missteps still occurred, but the Councillors said it was the Mayor’s fault and the Mayor said it was the Councillors’ fault and in the end nobody could figure out whose fault anything was. Still worse, these wicked tongues noted that the annual Elections did not fix anything. You could vote out a bad Mayor and vote in a new Mayor, and he would change the curtains in the Manor and plant different flowers in the garden, but otherwise everything remained the same. At least with the Lord you could complain, but since Liberation everybody personally identified with village government and took offence at every last wicked rumour. “At least you’re not ruled by Lords any longer,” the village busybodies would say to any cynics unfortunate enough to cross their paths at the Thursday market. “Imagine how bad that would be.”

A final point raised by the wicked tongues – those of them who were not accused of witchcraft and burned, anyway – was that all of the Mayors and the Councillors seemed to hail from the same confined class of well-to-do villagers. In theory anybody could run for Mayor, but in practice all the Mayors and the Councillors came from the same five or six families. These were the families that owned the largest houses near the Village Fountain, which unlike the Helpful Bridge was always kept in the best repair. The wicked tongues said it was as if they had traded one Lord for a whole plague of Lords who merely pretended to commoners. They started to call this plague the village elite, which was a very uncharitable way to refer to them. For this the wicked tongues were called not only witches but also conspiracy theorists and worse.

Unlike the other villagers, this elite travelled widely. They developed connections to the elite of other Liberated villages, in whose company they propounded an ever more elaborate political theology of Liberation. All of this inter-village socialisation broadened their perspective and with it their discourse about local affairs. In the beginning, Mayors and Councillors promised more frequent trash collection, hotter witch burnings and better bridges, but the more they travelled to other villages and allied with neighbouring families, the more they could only ever be bothered to talk about a new world of bigger valley-wide concerns.

The real problems with village politics, they explained, was that their Liberation had been incomplete. It was entirely too parochial and backwards to think only of the village and its specific problems with witches, trash and bridge repair. There was the broader inter-village community to think about. What was needed, was a League of Villages, one comprising every last ordinary village in the entire valley – all 27 of them. This League could pool resources and act in concert to burn not just local witches, but to eradicate witchcraft from the valley entirely. The Helpful Bridge might be missing a few planks, but other villages had no bridges at all. The League would see to it that everyone had Helpful Bridges, with Helpful Tolls to keep them always in a state of minimal repair. And the League would organise a more efficient system of inter-village trash collection. Really everything would be better and vastly more Liberated than it had ever been before.

The League would be governed like a kind of meta-village. Each of the 27 mayors would also serve on a central League Commission, and they would choose a Pan-Village Lord Mayor to represent all of their concerns. When the wicked tongues began to scoff that they had merely replaced many small Lords with a vastly greater and more powerful Lord Mayor, who lived in god only knows what castle beyond the reach of all conceivable sharpened farm instruments, the League decided that the villagers would also be allowed a second Election to choose a League Council. Nothing smells of Liberation so much as more Elections, and so it did not matter very much that the Council had almost no power, while the Commission and the Pan-Village Lord Mayor had almost all of it.

While Liberation had many unexpected consequences, nobody was quite prepared for the bizarre things that followed this even more intensely just, equitable and high-minded experiment with pan-Villagism. At first it was not all bad. The fish mongers and the basket weavers had more markets at which to sell their fish and their baskets, and the poorer villages got those Helpful Bridges they had always wanted but could never afford. Even the wicked tongues could not deny that there was some good in this. The wickedest among them, however, began to notice a curious phenomenon: While under Liberation problems were never anybody’s fault and seemed increasingly impossible to fix, the League encouraged a dizzying array of positive initiatives, with equally mysterious origins, most of them pretending to respond to problems that nobody had ever noticed before.

That the League had a peculiar relationship to problems first became apparent in the arena of witch burnings. Now, our villagers had been burning witches with enormous enthusiasm for centuries, somehow always without eradicating witchcraft. The wicked tongues thought that the League were very unlikely to see any more success here than prior governments, and indeed the League soon abandoned their Pan-Village Witchcraft Eradication Programme. They began singing a very different tune, one of respect and tolerance for ancient peasant traditions. The local friars, who just a few generations prior had enjoyed pulling out the fingernails of accused witches to extract confessions and the names of their accomplices, now preached that even the most apparently subversive practices harbour important eternal truths. Some even began carrying around broomsticks to signal their solidarity with the witches. Because all societies require enemies, our erstwhile Witchcraft Eradicators soon alighted upon a more productive replacement. Those wicked tongues and their conspiratorial anti-Liberation observations posed the true threat to pan-Villagism, and it was they who had to be burned at the stake. Liberation was all well and good, but Defensive Liberation was even better. At a stroke, most of the wicked tongues were silenced.

The next peculiar episode involved that perennial problem of trash collection. Here our villagers only ever had one demand, namely that it occur regularly every Friday. Liberation had failed to establish reliable trash collection, and as with the witches the League had few prospects of improving the situation. Unlike witches, however, trash cannot be defined out of existence, and so the League took a different approach. They busied themselves with the problem of trash in general, as a substitute for actually doing anything about trash collection. To improve hygiene, the League announced that villagers would have to sort their trash into separate receptacles for fish bones, chicken bones and cow bones. Because villagers love to tidy up in meaningless self-defeating ways, they adopted the programme with unusual dedication. They even reported their neighbours for neglecting the sacred duty of placing the bones of the zero, two- and four-legged creatures into distinct bins. Amazingly, the villagers continued to sort their bones even after the village children noticed the Friday trash collectors throwing the refuse from all these separate receptacles into one and the selfsame wagon.

While the League indeed constructed several more Helpful Bridges, they proved no better at the problem of bridge maintenance than the Lords or the Mayors before them. All they did was issue new complex Helpful Bridge Construction Standards, which were intended to improve bridge reliability, but which mainly just made upkeep (and therefore tolls) even more expensive. Having failed to manage the water in the only way people cared about, the League then devised a wholly new initiative to solve a water problem that nobody had noticed before. It was the trash story all over again. All those waterwheels turning in the stream were bad for the fish and bad for the water, the League announced. To save the stream there would have to be a great new transition to windmills. It was a good thing that the League existed to see to these matters, the League said; no individual village could solve a valley-wide problem like this on its own. For years and even decades, windmills were all the League would talk about. They imposed heavy taxes on watermill owners, which they used to subsidise windmill construction, and when villagers complained that there was no wind in the valley and that this programme made no sense, the League responded that they had simply not constructed enough windmills. The great windmill transition was the only way forward, even if they had to build six windmills for every stream-destroying waterwheel.

While the villagers didn’t like this very much, they had no idea what to do about it. There was no longer any Lord to drive out of town on the point of a pitchfork, and voting the Mayor out of office in one of their sacred Elections proved even more useless than before. His was but one voice of 27 on the League Council – all the others being elected by other villages and reflecting the sum of their opaque local concerns. Some of the villagers began demanding that they abandon the League and return to the simpler world before pan-Villagism, but the fish mongers and the basket weavers objected that this would destroy their trade, the village elite warned of the dire consequences for those poorer villages that never had bridges before, and the friars began suggesting that far too few people had been set alight in the Market Square of late.

Those wicked tongues who remained as yet unburned speculated that in their efforts to achieve a higher-minded, more representative politics, the villagers had merely constructed a more resistant and convoluted tyranny – one that was infinitely harder to oppose than the transparent, self-interested exactions of the ancient Lords in their Manor on the hill.