Before I abandoned my efforts, though, a calculating thought presented itself to me: the next time we were set to meet up, I could just order food without asking anyone. I guiltily discarded this idea without ever seriously considering it,1 but it felt even then like a microcosm of an increasingly common phenomenon: where frustrations with process yield authoritarian impulses. Multiply that feeling by at least a million and you get one of the central political dynamics of our time: When government feels incompetent or incapable, people don’t usually distinguish between bad procedures and democracy itself—they just want someone to cut through the noise. That’s how you get technologists pining for a CEO-in-chief and voters gravitating towards anyone who promises to act quickly and decisively.