the golden muddle...

An interesting article on the complacency of electorates. This reminds me of those psychology studies that show that people have a base level of happiness to which they inevitably, and surprisingly, return to, no matter what life changing events befall them. Thus, no matter how terrible they miht imagine some event being, even something like losing a limb, if it actually happens it is not only never as bad as expected, but eventually their rating of their happiness eventually settles back around their 'norm'. There is something of this in politics too, in that no matter how much people may on one hand be concerned and even angry about a situation, on the other there is a very strong tendency to trust the system despite this and assume can 'muddle along'. On the one hand such resilience is a good thing, on the other hand it makes politicians less held to account, and under less pressure to reform things, than they should be.

The mood in Britain is to muddle along | Martin Kettle | Comment is free | The Guardian

"People are fatalistic. Once they get used to the initial shock and fear of hard times, it seems, they hunker down and find that life, generally, carries on tolerably well.
Put these things together and you get much closer to a truer explanation of a great paradox. People may resent economic distress and have little confidence in governments or politicians, yet they still expect to get through, and so they are generally unattracted by radical change. As the Cambridge political scientist David Runciman put it recently, the overriding temptation is to muddle along. That's the mood in Britain; but it is also the mood, so far at least, in places such as Spain and Greece, where conditions are much more stark. Kicking the can down the road isn't as glamorous as revolution, but it isn't as destructive either.
If this is right, then the implications matter for all politicians and for those who write about politics. The truth is that most people seem to want the system we have got, not some other system. That may not go down well in the grandstand, but it works on the field. Sure, we would like the system to work better in various ways, and we are open to sensible and fair suggestions that don't put what we have at risk. But we also know that things are rarely as bad as they look."