Life today feels fast. Events, processes and activities seem to unfold at an ever-increasing pace. Technology has allowed us to squeeze chores, work, travel, even entertainment into smaller pockets of time. This phenomenon has been observed by social theorists such as James Gleick, who, in remarking on the ‘acceleration of just about everything’, have suggested that our obsession with fast food, fast cars, fast fashion as well as speed-reading, speed-walking and speed-dating form a modern economy of impatience. Instant gratification has become the default: we no longer wait, attend or deliberate; instead, we expect the fulfilment of our desires immediately. Yet, our political systems, almost uniquely, still run on slow time. Is it possible for democracies to keep up with this culture of impatience?

The German social theorist and political scientist Hartmut Rosa is one of the foremost thinkers of acceleration, having published several books on the theme over the past 20 years. Part of the obsession with speed, according to him, stems from the modern tendency to measure a life well-lived by the number of its experiences enjoyed. Structural forces compound this further, as institutions, infrastructures and social expectations lock acceleration in place independently of individual choice. The result is the experience of acceleration, in which our entire lives feel as though they have been sped up without any value added.

Acceleration, as Rosa has demonstrated, has been a major theme of the last two centuries. Alongside rapid social change, we have seen the pace of medical, scientific and technological advancements speed up, with shorter and shorter intervals of time between huge developments.

Most recently, we have seen AI emerging as the ultimate technology of speed, collapsing temporal intervals, automating cognitive labour and producing in seconds what once took hours or years. With computing capacity allegedly doubling every seven months and artificial general intelligence still on the horizon, AI represents a promise to multiply productivity, compress experience and extract more from the inescapable constraints of finite time.

With all this time-saving technology, one might expect to have more time on our hands, and more time to experience life. Yet, confronted with this compression of time, we turn to acceleration as a compensatory logic: by attempting to do more, we also believe that we can outpace and regain lost time. Acceleration, in this case, becomes a goal in and of itself. And yet the faster we move, the quicker we need things done.

These shifts have had a strange impact on our sense of political life. Rosa observed that politics once had a clear temporal grammar: the ‘conservative’ right sought to preserve institutions and values, proceeding with caution, while the aptly named ‘progressive’ left sought to accelerate transformation. Only a few years ago, when Rosa was writing, this alignment had already witnessed an unusual reversal.

Across the globe today, both the traditional left and right have been described as slow; as defenders of a bureaucracy, multilateral institutions, and deliberation, values that have failed to keep up with the pace of modern life. It is the new insurgent forces, on both extremes of the political spectrum, that have positioned themselves as the champions of modernity, promising to ‘cut red tape’ and insisting that regulation is making everything ‘too slow’. Donald Trump’s declaration of multiple national emergencies is just one sign of the general trend toward the speeding up of political processes. The promises of the Green Party in the United Kingdom to levy a wealth tax as a quick fix for complex economic problems is, similarly, a sign of this economy of impatience on the left.

The consequences of this temporal compression in politics are threefold. First, it increases the pressure to act on minimal information. When the news cycle moves faster than the policy cycle, and when the public has been conditioned to expect immediate responses, governments face mounting pressure to act before the full picture has emerged. Deliberation comes to look like hesitation, and consultation looks like delay.

Second, acceleration shortens the window of public trust. Democratic institutions were designed with a particular temporal logic in mind: mandates are long, reforms take time and the benefits of good policy are often deferred. But in an accelerated culture, that deferral feels increasingly intolerable. Governments that ask for patience find that time is precisely what the public is no longer willing to give. Trust, once extended across a parliamentary term, now expires within a news cycle.

Third, and perhaps most consequentially, the culture of acceleration makes the promise of cutting through deliberation and bureaucracy feel almost rational. If speed is the dominant cultural value, then the institutions designed to slow politics down – checks and balances, parliamentary scrutiny, judicial reviews – begin to look less like safeguards and more like obstacles.

This demand for speed comes at a considerable cost: governments are not kept fully accountable and, subject to public opinion, end up in reaction mode instead of developing long-term visions or goals. As Rosa writes: ‘Just as it has become virtually impossible to individually plan one’s life in the sense of a life project, it has become politically impossible to plan and shape society over time; the time of political projects, it seems, is also over.’

While it would be convenient to blame our politicians for this, one also needs to remember that our politicians are led by us. After all, politics is a market like any other. And the public wants change now. And yet, policies enacted today may take years, even decades, to produce measurable effects. The most significant changes in human history have rarely come into effect with any immediacy. The Industrial Revolution in Britain transformed the lives of the population for the better. In the long run, life-expectancy grew, child mortality rates went down, and living standards improved – but not quickly, and not without cost. For about 50 years, conditions for ordinary people got worse before they got better. People moved from rural settlements into cities that quickly became overcrowded and diseased, and child labour was routine. Nevertheless, I expect most people would agree that the Industrial Revolution in Britain was overall a good thing.

Across the democratic world, governments are increasingly organised around the demand for instant results and are not structured for long-term thinking. They are trying to fix decades’ worth of economic problems using a three to five-year election cycle, when the public is operating on a 24-hour news and social media cycle. In New Zealand and Australia the election cycles span only three years – barely enough time for a government to find its feet. The first year is spent ‘fixing’ or ‘undoing’ the work of the previous administration. Policy begins to be developed or changed in the second year, but by the third year the government is campaigning for the next election. The window for substantive, long-term reform is, in practice, vanishingly small. The United States, Sweden and Norway fare only marginally better on four-year cycles, and even the five-year terms common across much of Europe offer limited space for long-term change.

This is perhaps why China’s infrastructure transformation, its long-run industrial strategy and its decades-long poverty reduction programme have been so successful: because the government could plan across 50-year timescales without being compelled, periodically, to seek a renewal of its mandate. Democratic governments, by contrast, are structurally incentivised toward the short-term policies whose benefits will materialise before the next election. Acceleration has sharpened this disadvantage: as public patience shrinks, the gap between what democracy can deliver and what it is expected to deliver grows wider.

Yet the comparison cuts both ways. It would be a mistake to read China’s long-term achievements as a living advert for authoritarianism. The same absence of accountability that enables 50-year planning also enables half a century of unchecked error, repression and the subordination of individual lives to the ambitions of the state.

Clearly our economy of impatience is at odds with our belief in the virtues of democracy. Where the shortest electoral cycles tend to correlate with the healthiest and most accountable democracies, they also impose the most severe constraints on long-term thinking.

This begs the question: can any government operating through normal democratic channels satisfy this culturally-embedded expectation of speed? The honest answer is, probably not. After all, politics is a marketplace. If the public wants change, then governments will campaign for change. If the public wants stability, then governments will campaign for stability. If the public can be persuaded to value durability over speed, the incentive structure shifts. The problem is, accordingly, cultural.

This returns us, finally, to the question we began with: what does it mean to govern well in an age of impatience? Better communication of long-term timelines might help at the margins. Institutional redesign might buy some room. But what is most needed is something more radical and less comfortable: a political culture willing to make the case for patience. How such a culture might be built against the grain of all our contemporary economic incentives, technological progress and cultural reflexes is a question I cannot answer. But it is one of the defining political challenges of the coming decades.