The Ideas Letter

Peter Mair, the Irish political scientist who died in 2011, published a landmark essay and book on what he called “ruling the void.” He argued that Western democracy has been hollowed out in part because parties have withdrawn from their representative function and become more like governing elites rather than channels between citizens and the state. Mark Leonard, one of the keenest observers of European foreign policy, is a Mair devotee. I asked him to take the measure of Mair’s thesis for today’s political conjuncture, and he does so brilliantly. Leonard worries that Mair’s void will be filled by far-right ideology and mobilization. That may indeed be what the future portends.

Europe remains the focus, via Italy, of our next essay, written by the versatile writer and Italophile Ursula Lindsey (she spent much of her youth in Italy). Lindsey, who has written for The Ideas Letter on American decline as seen from the Middle East, now turns her attention to Melonismo, the political current around Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. Meloni is a complicated and contradictory figure, who in some ways fulfills Mair’s description of managing the politics of a depoliticized society. Lindsey argues that Meloni’s durability rests on her personal narrative and her tactical flexibility: She is a moving target, which makes her hard to pin down ideologically, but for that very reason, she is all the more effective. Her critics warn of longer-term risks to democratic institutions and checks on power.

Finally, Owen Hatherley, who has lately turned his attention to the political culture and aesthetics of the built environment in Asia, tries to make sense of a puzzle: Why does Japanese modernism constantly reinvent itself? What are the implications of its culture of forced obsolescence,