"Another cause for the increase in alienation and cynicism is a feeling that too many policy decisions that affect individuals have been taken out of any system that has accountability or that they can influence"
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Teeter’s line is less a diagnosis than a warning label for modern governance: people don’t turn cynical just because they dislike outcomes, but because they can’t see a lever they could plausibly pull. The engine of alienation isn’t disagreement; it’s procedural fog. When decisions feel like they’ve migrated into “systems” rather than elected bodies, the public doesn’t experience policy as collective choice. They experience it as weather.
The phrasing is calibrated for a political operator who understood mood as much as ideology. “Too many policy decisions” signals accumulation, the slow drip that becomes a flood. “A feeling” is doing strategic work: it softens the claim into something empirically slippery while still treating it as politically real. And “taken out” implies theft, a removal from a rightful place - not merely technocratic efficiency but a loss of democratic custody.
The subtext is a critique of the late-20th-century shift toward insulated expertise: independent agencies, central banks, courts, trade regimes, and bureaucratic rulemaking that can be hard to trace back to a ballot box. Teeter’s point isn’t that these institutions are illegitimate; it’s that legitimacy has become indirect, and indirect legitimacy doesn’t read as legitimacy in daily life. Accountability that exists in theory but can’t be experienced in practice breeds the sort of cynicism that voters resolve with disengagement, conspiratorial thinking, or anti-system candidates who promise to “bring it back” - whether or not they can.
It’s a politician’s version of a civic truth: democracy fails quietly when people stop believing they can meaningfully interrupt the machine.
The phrasing is calibrated for a political operator who understood mood as much as ideology. “Too many policy decisions” signals accumulation, the slow drip that becomes a flood. “A feeling” is doing strategic work: it softens the claim into something empirically slippery while still treating it as politically real. And “taken out” implies theft, a removal from a rightful place - not merely technocratic efficiency but a loss of democratic custody.
The subtext is a critique of the late-20th-century shift toward insulated expertise: independent agencies, central banks, courts, trade regimes, and bureaucratic rulemaking that can be hard to trace back to a ballot box. Teeter’s point isn’t that these institutions are illegitimate; it’s that legitimacy has become indirect, and indirect legitimacy doesn’t read as legitimacy in daily life. Accountability that exists in theory but can’t be experienced in practice breeds the sort of cynicism that voters resolve with disengagement, conspiratorial thinking, or anti-system candidates who promise to “bring it back” - whether or not they can.
It’s a politician’s version of a civic truth: democracy fails quietly when people stop believing they can meaningfully interrupt the machine.
Quote Details
| Topic | Decision-Making |
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