System failure and despair

All systems are prone to fail at some point. In politics, it's the response to failure that matters. A lack of response generates a sense of exclusion, cynicism, and, for some, the search for more radical alternatives. These are outcomes that can carry a heavy cost for democracy. After a crisis, political leaders are likely to say that action must be taken to ensure that a particular failure will never happen again. But tomorrow there will be new, probably different, failures and we look afresh at our systems.

Surely some systems fare better than others. Many Greeks lament domestic failings and claim that such a failure would never happen abroad: in Britain, for example. Variously, they might cite the tragedy of the rail crash at Tempe, following the failure to invest and manage the system upgrade. Or the failure to hold anyone to account for the awful loss of life when the...