Analysts usually explain these upheavals by referring to inflation, migration, polarization, or disinformation. But they often overlook a quieter force that millions of citizens know firsthand: the cumulative humiliation of dealing with states that make ordinary life harder than it needs to be.
Citizens do not encounter the state mainly through constitutions, speeches, or summit meetings. They encounter<\/a> it through visa offices, licensing counters, tax portals, welfare agencies, police stops, customs desks, hospital billing departments, and websites that crash at the worst possible moment. They experience government in the small places where power either respects their dignity or strips<\/a> it away.
That distinction carries political consequences.
A difficult process does not automatically produce rage. People tolerate inconvenience when rules seem fair and burdens seem shared. What they struggle to tolerate is contempt<\/a>: the missing form no one mentioned, the unexplained denial, the line that never moves while connected people pass through side doors, the fee that appears late, the official who treats confusion as a character flaw.
When those encounters repeat often enough, they stop feeling administrative. They become visceral.
Contempt and corruption often travel together, but they operate differently. Corruption usually involves<\/a> a transaction: a payment, a favor, a connection that bends the rules. Contempt does not require any exchange at all. It shows up in the shrug, the unexplained denial, the process that wastes your time because it can. One is an abuse of power for gain. The other is an abuse of power for display. But to the citizen on the receiving end, the distinction matters less than the message they both send: the rules are not designed<\/a> for you. Over time, that message lands just as hard whether it comes with a price tag or a smirk.
This dynamic has appeared in very different political systems. In the United Kingdom, the Horizon scandal exposed<\/a> how hundreds of sub-postmasters were wrongly prosecuted after faulty software generated false accounting shortfalls. Many lost businesses, savings, and reputations before the scandal received full national attention. What outraged the public was not only technical failure but an institution that insisted ordinary people were lying while evidence mounted that the system itself was broken.
In the United States, pandemic-era unemployment systems in several states trapped<\/a> applicants in frozen portals, identity-verification loops, and impossible call-center queues just as households faced acute economic stress. Many citizens did not experience that as neutral overload. They experienced it as abandonment.
Across parts of Latin America, citizens still navigate document systems, municipal offices, and policing<\/a> environments where delay, arbitrariness, petty corruption, or personal connections can matter more than published rules. In such settings, corruption<\/a> does not remain an abstract governance metric. It becomes a daily lesson in who counts and who does not.
This helps explain why anti-system rhetoric travels so well. Across democracies, outsider candidates have turned distrust of institutions into electoral success, from Javier Milei<\/a> in Argentina to Geert Wilders<\/a> in the Netherlands. Many voters may not follow central bank policy or constitutional design. They do remember delayed claims, broken systems, unexplained denials, and months spent waiting for decisions no one would justify.
Political scientists often describe<\/a> legitimacy in broad institutional terms. But legitimacy also lives or dies in ordinary<\/a> encounters. A citizen who feels consistently treated as suspect, nuisance, or prey will not easily defend \u201cthe system\u201d when demagogues attack it.
That creates a dangerous feedback loop. When formal procedure comes to symbolize humiliation, rule-breaking<\/a> can start to look like justice. Citizens may support leaders who disdain courts, mock civil servants, or bulldoze process because that process has become synonymous with disrespect. Democratic erosion can grow<\/a> from that sentiment long before it appears as a constitutional crisis.
Governments often misread this problem<\/a> because they measure throughput instead of dignity. They count cases processed, forms completed, websites launched, and budgets spent. But they rarely ask a simpler question: how does it feel to be governed here?
That question deserves more attention from policymakers worldwide. Administrative dignity is not cosmetic. It is democratic infrastructure.
The remedies are practical rather than grandiose: simplify procedures, publish real timelines, reduce discretionary choke points, create credible appeals systems, expand language access, punish petty extortion, and reward public servants for solving problems rather than guarding turf. Digitalization<\/a> can help, but only if it reduces friction instead of automating confusion.
Governments around the world worry<\/a> about extremism, polarization, and disinformation. They should. But they should also worry about the quieter force that feeds<\/a> all three: millions of citizens repeatedly taught, in the everyday machinery of the state, that power holds them in contempt.
Jeffery A. Tobin is a senior advisor and partner with Pan-American Strategic Advisors.<\/em>
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