Writing in Foreign Policy, the political scientist Stephen Walt has a short, clear analysis of the factors bringing about this moment of global discontent. This is particularly true, I think:

The third reason is the increasingly-evident incompetence and/or corruption of governing elites in many countries, and the tendency of governments to do too much to protect wealthy and powerful interests and not enough to help ordinary people. In Egypt, it was the overt corruption of the Mubarak regime, whether in the form of privileged deals for military officers or for Mubarak’s son. In the United States, it was the taxpayer-funded rescue of “too big to fail” financial institutions as well as the “too-well connected to fail” recycling of some of the same people who helped create the whole mess in the first place. And then there’s the continued recycling of policy ideas that had been discredited by events but never discarded. People may be disappointed by Obama, but real disenchantment comes from the growing realization that replacing him wouldn’t make much difference and might make things much worse.

Which leads him to:

Ask yourself: how many contemporary political leaders do you genuinely admire? How many of them would rate a paragraph, let alone a whole chapter, in a revised edition of Profiles in Courage? How many of them seem capable of giving you a straight answer to a hard question, as opposed to offering you a lot of happy double-talk? How many of them are better at making a powerful speech than they are at taking a principled stand and sticking to it? How many of them have really got your back, as opposed to pandering to the endless parade of well-heeled lobbyists and special interest groups? Is there political leader in your country who is not for sale?

If you’ve been paying attention, and you can’t find such leaders in your country, and you having been watching the obscenely wealthy get richer and more powerful, so that they can rig the game to make themselves richer still, then you’d probably think about painting a sign and getting out in the streets. And if I didn’t already have this blog for my soap-box, maybe I would too.

Very well put. How would you answer the question? I honestly can’t think of a single political leader that I admire, or trust to do the right thing, or even the competent thing. It’s not that I think all of them are Snidely Whiplashes, not by a long stretch. But I think we have managed to get ourselves into a situation in which it’s not only hard for our leaders to do the right thing, but it’s hard for them even to imagine what the right thing is. We reward happy double-talk. I was talking this afternoon to a friend of mine, and we were lamenting how hard it is to have a rational political conversation with so many people, because everybody is so ready to believe that all our problems are the Other Side’s Fault — and that the only thing that needs to change is the party in power.

But what happens if people start to conclude that the problem is not with the Republicans or with the Democrats, but with the governing elite — with both parties? Someone once said that the definition of a corrupt system is one in which its leaders know that they have to change to save it, but can’t. What if a sizable number of people in our country conclude that our system is corrupt in this way? What happens then? I’m actually asking these questions in a straightforward way, not rhetorically. I don’t understand why our democracy hasn’t produced more authentic voices for reform from within the institutions.

Matt Bai’s cover story about the GOP in this past Sunday’s NYT Magazine offers some clues. Long excerpt below, but worth it, because it not only shows how the Establishment gets corrupted, but also why the puritanism of would-be reformers is problematic:

Vin Weber was 28 when he was elected to Congress in the Reagan wave of 1980, and he soon became one of Newt Gingrich’s chief allies — part of a group of rebellious young conservatives who rose up against their affable minority leader, Bob Michel. Weber left Congress before the 1994 Republican takeover, forced out by the House banking scandal, but soon reinvented himself as one of the more powerful lobbyists in town. When I sat with Weber on a late-summer day in his corner office across the street from the National Portrait Gallery, I suggested that he had been, in effect, the Bachmann of his day. He laughed out loud. “Yeah, probably so,” he said.

Like nearly every other establishment Republican I visited, Weber went out of his way to tell me how much he admired these Tea Party lawmakers and shared in their essential cause. “One thing I do notice about them,” he added, “is that when I ask them, ‘So how are you enjoying it?’ almost none of them will say, ‘Oh, jeez, I’m really loving this.’ They all say some version of, ‘This is not what I’d want to be doing, but I’ve got to do it for the country.’ ” Weber seemed genuinely surprised that this aversion to Washington didn’t melt away once they arrived in town.

“I can just tell you, when I came to Congress, we were rabble-rousers, but, boy, if you’d asked any of us six months into it how we were enjoying it, we’d have said this was the greatest opportunity of a lifetime,” Weber said. “It just struck me. And it’s part and parcel of this anti-government mind-set.”

I wondered if maybe the Tea Partiers’ contempt for Washington was just a kind of outsider’s shtick.

“I’d feel better about it if I thought it was,” Weber said glumly.

He had on his mind the infamous 1990 tax increase that the first President Bush negotiated with Democrats and signed into law, despite having made his “read my lips” pledge against doing exactly that. Weber was among those who adamantly opposed the deal, in much the same way that today’s Tea Partiers resist any compromise on spending.

“I’ve thought about that a lot since then and how it might have been handled differently,” Weber said, sounding a little pained at the memory. “I don’t regret what we did, although it’s hard to see how much good came out of it. We ended up with a tax deal that moved to the left, after we defeated it in the House the first time, and may have contributed to the defeat of the president.”

There was a lesson in all this for the Tea Partiers, Weber said — one he had been trying to impart to them whenever he got the chance. “I think I know what they want to accomplish, and I agree with most of it,” he said. “But if they want to accomplish it, they need to ‘rise to the level of politics.’ I mean, you can’t just stand there and take a stand and say, ‘I’m not going to compromise on my position.’ Because you won’t achieve anything.”

This issue of compromise versus absolutism came up in most of the conversations I had with longstanding Washington Republicans, because it gets to the essential quandary they face in trying to exploit a popular movement for their own policy ends. Most establishment Republicans, including those who would be derided by the Tea Partiers as big-government conservatives, were disheartened by the rate of spending during the Bush years. This is especially true for the economic conservatives who sit on the boards of policy and advocacy groups and who stood by, quietly seething, while Dick Cheney declared that deficits no longer mattered. Their No. 1 policy goal is to change the trajectory of spending on entitlement programs, namelyMedicare and Social Security, before public debt becomes an all-out crisis. And many of the Republicans I talked to confided that they would be willing to accept some higher taxes on corporations, or even on millionaires, in exchange for a deal to meaningfully roll back entitlement spending — something Obama and Boehner briefly explored during the debt-ceiling negotiations.

For these Republicans, the rise of the Tea Party has been a great turn of fortune, because the movement suddenly exerted more public pressure to cut spending than anyone would have thought possible just two years ago. But the same Tea Party members who created this more conducive climate are also opposed to even a hint of compromise on taxes. (The Boehner-Obama talks failed after lawmakers on both sides rebelled, but the biggest roadblock was the opposition of strident House Republicans who were threatening to take the American economy over a cliff if they didn’t get their way.) And while the Tea Partiers like to talk about trimming programs like Medicaid, they’ve not put much of their energy behind the kind of radical restructuring that Paul Ryan, the Republican congressman, has proposed.

Instead, the loudest members of the Tea Party caucus tend to dwell almost exclusively on cuts to discretionary domestic spending, which accounts for less than a fifth of the federal budget. Not only does this do little to change the long-term fiscal outlook, but it also puts the caucus in direct conflict with establishment Republicans like Vin Weber, who are inclined to protect some of those discretionary programs — either because they actually believe the programs have merit or because some company is paying them to preserve the status quo.

(Bai’s entire piece is worth reading, by the way).

I laugh at the OWS people because their demands are so diffuse as to be non-existent, and I get frustrated with the Tea Party because they know what they want, but what they want I find to be reckless in some respects. But then I ask: well, what do you want? I find it hard to object to Matt Taibbi’s suggested five demands OWS should make:

1. Break up the monopolies. The so-called “Too Big to Fail” financial companies – now sometimes called by the more accurate term “Systemically Dangerous Institutions” – are a direct threat to national security. They are above the law and above market consequence, making them more dangerous and unaccountable than a thousand mafias combined. There are about 20 such firms in America, and they need to be dismantled; a good start would be to repeal the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act and mandate the separation of insurance companies, investment banks and commercial banks.

2. Pay for your own bailouts. A tax of 0.1 percent on all trades of stocks and bonds and a 0.01 percent tax on all trades of derivatives would generate enough revenue to pay us back for the bailouts, and still have plenty left over to fight the deficits the banks claim to be so worried about. It would also deter the endless chase for instant profits through computerized insider-trading schemes like High Frequency Trading, and force Wall Street to go back to the job it’s supposed to be doing, i.e., making sober investments in job-creating businesses and watching them grow.

3. No public money for private lobbying. A company that receives a public bailout should not be allowed to use the taxpayer’s own money to lobby against him. You can either suck on the public teat or influence the next presidential race, but you can’t do both. Butt out for once and let the people choose the next president and Congress.

4. Tax hedge-fund gamblers. For starters, we need an immediate repeal of the preposterous and indefensible carried-interest tax break, which allows hedge-fund titans like Stevie Cohen and John Paulson to pay taxes of only 15 percent on their billions in gambling income, while ordinary Americans pay twice that for teaching kids and putting out fires. I defy any politician to stand up and defend that loophole during an election year.

5. Change the way bankers get paid. We need new laws preventing Wall Street executives from getting bonuses upfront for deals that might blow up in all of our faces later. It should be: You make a deal today, you get company stock you can redeem two or three years from now. That forces everyone to be invested in his own company’s long-term health – no more Joe Cassanos pocketing multimillion-dollar bonuses for destroying the AIGs of the world.

I don’t see why any conservative who wasn’t a free-market ideologue would have any serious objections to any of this. Beyond this reform, I would hope and expect to see spending cuts, tax increases, and serious entitlement reform. I would also like a pony, and a French dwarf to be my henchman. Seriously, though, it’s going to hurt most everybody. But what is the alternative?

Anyway, back to Walt’s question: Can you think of a contemporary political leader you admire? I can’t, and haven’t been able to since around 2007. Then again, at the state and national level, I can’t think of a single corporate leader (now that Steve Jobs is dead) or religious leader that I admire and trust. To be clear, I’m sure there are admirable business leaders and religious leaders out there, and I just don’t know about them, or don’t know enough about those I’m aware of to make a fair judgment about whether or not they are admirable or trustworthy. So my statement is more about the loss of trust I have in institutional authorities than it is a reflection of a studied assessment of the character and leadership of corporate and religious CEOs. I know plenty of people in business and government and in the church that I deeply admire and trust … but they are pretty much at the local level.

OK, enough. I’m rattling on. Time for more Sudafed. Like Walt, it’s a good thing I have this blog soapbox. Otherwise I might be compelled to get out on the street and protest, or something.

UPDATE: By the way, if you haven’t figured it out now, this blog is not a place where you will get nothing but strong, consistent opinions on every issues. Sometimes you will. Sometimes, as in this rambling post, you will see me trying to work through things in public. I identify with Joan Didion, who said she often doesn’t really know what she thinks until she writes it down. This is why I appreciate good comments in the threads — you help me think.