Britain went to the polls last week, which led to the following conversation with my mother. Me: "What did you think of the elections yesterday?" Mum: "There were elections?" Me: "Yeah." Mum: "O. I was out all day so I missed them." Whenever I want to know what the people of Britain aren’t thinking, I ask my mother. 

The old girl certainly spoke for the majority. In all the parts of the country that hosted elections on Thursday, only 32 percent of people bothered to vote. The dismal turnout was eclipsed by Labour’s landslide victory, but, as Brendan O’Neill argued in the Telegraph, it was surely the more significant story. That the British are so uninterested in politics in the middle of such a terrible recession speaks volumes about the decline of democracy. 

A few years ago, I might have been outraged. Like a lot of young people on the Left, I defined civic engagement by voting. In fact, turning out once every two years to cast a ballot for a complete stranger - who will go on to do (at best) nothing or (at worst) a lot of damage – hardly screams Citizen of the Year Award. There are countless other, better ways to improve the lives of your fellow man, of which the surest is to care for your family. You really want to create good citizens, rebuild the jobs base, and advance educational opportunity, all at no cost to other people? Try homeschooling.

But what of the argument that by not voting you lose a right to complain? It’s a magician’s misdirection. Across the West the relationship between the citizen and the state isn’t defined by voting but by paying taxes. That’s what gives you the right to complain. The citizen is rather like a consumer purchasing a car. He’s at liberty to involve himself in the process of making that car – become an engineer, buy shares in the company, vote at shareholder meetings, demonstrate outside the factory against pollutants etc. But even if he didn’t do all those things, he still has the right to complain when he lifts the bonnet of his brand new car to discover that it has no engine underneath. Why? Because he paid good money for it. As with cars, so with schools, hospitals, and even nuclear weapons.

Likewise, nothing is more irksome that the righteous MP or congressman who tells us that we have lost all right to complain about potholes or wars because we didn’t vote for or against them. Maybe the apathetic citizen didn’t vote for them, but he sure as heck paid for them – and that’s his mandate to moan. If we could come to some arrangement by which nonvoters could abstract themselves altogether from the farce that is modern government, then perhaps voting would reassert itself as a true act of civic-minded volunteerism. Democracy for the engaged; anarchy for the self-contained. Let’s call it “pay to play.”

I’m not anti-politics. On the contrary, I spend 90 percent of my life with a laptop on my lap writing about it. I’ve probably lost my fertility in the great cause of exposing Barack Obama’s insatiable appetite for dog meat. But my interest has shifted from partisan politics to the realm of ideas.

Show me a good thought and I’ll give it column inches. If it seems sometimes like I’m a schill for the American Right, it’s because they have the most interesting ideas at the moment. Be it their critique of the media, their emphasis upon constitutionality, or their concern for marrying the temporal and the spiritual, they never fail to fascinate. Among them, the most coherent (and therefore, from an academic point of view, most useful) is Ron Paul. That’s why I’ve written so much about him: he’s intellectually lively, consistent, engaging, and pure.

Conversely, my taste for big ideas is why I find it tougher to write either about the American Left or the diminishing spectrum of British politics. I was unmoved by the London mayoral contest – a battle between two personalities rather than contrasting philosophies. What differences there were had to be teased out, and they all typically came down to a few pence here, a couple of policemen there, and a refurbished sewer. All very important to people who consume whatever services the mayor controls but not the stuff that feeds the soul. Not enough to climb a barricade for. And not, in the opinion of 62 percent of Londoners, even worthy of a ten minute detour to the polling station. The silence of two thirds of the electorate was far louder than the applause for Boris Johnson when he won the final count.

Perhaps it’s time for a retreat from national democracy, for a return to the politics of the private sphere. This could translate into a greater emphasis upon individual or community activism. But most of all it should mean a revival of coffee house, salon culture. Away from the ceaseless mudslinging and name calling, we need a quieter, sophisticated debate about ideas. We’ve allowed politicians to set the tone of political debate for too long.

I’m finally leaving America. My visa has expired and they’re kicking me out. I’ve spent my last few days in Washington DC, drunk as a skunk. I was collected from the airport by The Contractor (my mysterious friend who supplies various military regimes with “things they need”), driven to the Capital Grill and pumped full of T-bone and red wine. We had a furious but friendly debate about whether or not slavery is immoral (I think it is). All of this was a welcome switch from Los Angeles, where I lived on a diet of liberalism, lentils, and a once-in-a-blue-moon Mojito. I’ve always found Washington to be a fun place. The average worker ant is boring and aggressive (all those Republican boys in their blazers and cargo pants pushing they way through the Metro), but the old lags who hang around the National Press Club and the bar at the Bombay are fantastic.

In late July, however, Washington is physically unbearable. In past times, the city emptied at June and everyone went home for fourth months to cool their hands against buckets of ice. Nowadays they have to stay and endure this horrible wet heat. Los Angeles was scorching but dry, so the skin had room to breathe. Washington is humid and sticky, like eating a curry in the bath. People are dying of this weather. It accords with the apocalyptic mood that has descended over the capital. I’ve been away three months and it feels like three decades of revolution. The Murdoch Empire is on its knees, Amy Winehouse is dead, some lunatic killed scores of people in Norway, Michele Bachmann declared for the presidency, and San Francisco tried to ban goldfish. America’s budget default creeps closer. All we need now is a whore on a ten-headed dragon to ride into town and we know we’re finished (and that’s probably already happened on this season’s True Blood).

Yet I leave America feeling strangely optimistic. If they count their blessings carefully enough, America and the world should feel happier than they do. Consider the following.

1. The American economy is still fundamentally strong. Growth and profits are back up, although they haven’t been shared in jobs increases. This shouldn’t really surprise us. Like the production shock of the early 1980s, a lot of the recent recovery has been about resizing and stripping bad assets. No one actually wants the banks to return to their profligate ways, so it’s inevitable that capital is a little tighter than it once was. But that’s not a problem so long as we continue to innovate. I know that all TED seems to showcase right now is “Al Gore’s Electronic Flower Pots”, but the beauty of the free enterprise system is its ability to not only dig itself out of a hole but also invent a cybernetic shovel with which to do it. Something’s around the corner and I suspect it’s the energy market.

2. China’s getting fatter. Almost mystical powers of economic productivity are projected onto China. But as she gets richer, she also develops many of the same social problems that the West has – smoothing down the competitive edge between our two markets. It’s estimated that somewhere in the region of 25 percent of the Middle Kingdom’s subjects are now porkers. Not only does that have a deleterious effect on the quality of their labor force, but it demonstrates that those hard-working devils are turning into lazy-ass consumers too. Ergo, MacDonalds now has now committed itself to opening a new store everyday within the next four years. That’s to compete with the Colonel’s tally of 3,200 stores across the country. The cost will be measured in increased demands for health and social services, forcing China to replicate the welfare states that are now bankrupting the West. In 50 years time, the Chinese will owe us money.

3. In a revolution, no one’s safe. In the past, disorder tended to create new orders that would last a little while longer than the last. Nowadays, chaos follows chaos in quick succession. No sooner had the expenses scandal crippled Gordon Brown and helped elect David Cameron, the Murdoch scandal had knee-capped Cameron and possibly opened the door to Ed Miliband. Likewise, the Tea Party revolution is being eaten alive by its own radicalism at the moment – destroying the credibility of the congressional Republican leadership and catapulting the country towards bankruptcy. That might not seem like a reason to be happy, but it is nice to know that Western democracy is proving more sensitive to public tastes than it once did. In the past few months, the people are destroyed two venerable parties – the Canadian Liberals and Fianna Fail of Ireland. It’s likely that they will strike the deathblow of Gaullism in the next French presidential elections. All have been eclipsed by radical parties on the left and right (Irish Labor, Canadian New Democrats, French National Front). The center will not hold. For those of us driven by ideas, it’s an exciting time to be alive. We have finally emerged from the centrist abyss of the 1990s; ideology is back.

I return to a UK in turmoil. What is unusual is that there is no obvious winner from all the political disaster. Labour theoretically leads the Conservatives, but Ed Miliband is widely seen as a bad leader. The Liberal Democrats have extinguished themselves as a party. There is some hope in the bizarre collection of libertarians, disgruntled socialists, Sedevanticists, and golfing fanatics who make up the United Kingdom Independence Party, but they are hamstrung by the First Past the Post voting system that makes it tough for minority parties to break through.

In contrast, the American party system seems fairly stable and alive. What Britain did in the last ten years – consciously and systematically – was kill off all internal party opposition. That’s strangled new ideas and left large swathes of the country without representation. There are no young voices in Britain that are definitively liberal or conservative, whereas the Americans have charismatic lobbies working on both sides. It may seem odd to see the deficit crisis as anything but a crisis, but it does highlight the fact that the US still trades in ideas and philosophies of government. I regret having to leave that debate for the rather more tepid one in Britain, which, despite all its anxieties, still obsesses about emptying the bins and cleaning up dogs’ mess.