There is and always has been a certain amount of alienation between government and the governed. That is the very nature of government; the alienation of those who have direct access to the mechanisms of power to those who have indirect access or no access at all. The conservative, liberal, and even the socialist response would be that such a separation is inevitable. The conservative would say it is a good and right separation, the liberal would say we can live with the separation as it is now, and the socialist would say that such a disparity should be reduced and eliminated when possible but ultimately there will always be some distance.

The socialist position is by far the most sympathetic. The vision of the left is that of communities and individuals reclaiming their own sovereignty and reappropriating their own resources so those resources aren't used against their or other sovereign people's interests.

Modern liberal democracy is as close as we have gotten to a left vision of the world where this central disparity is reduced. The people are not nearly as distanced from the means of power as they have been in the past and it has meant huge material gains. However, people are still fundamentally alienated from governance, and lately that real and mental distance has grown in the United States in elsewhere. It's an open secret in the US there is hardly anything left of a representative republic; the people's voices are routinely sidelined through the influence of the economically powerful and those that are in government to represent the people are part of this powerful class or closely aligned with it.

More than ever in history the common ideal of the left to reclaim governance for the people is relevant and pressingly obvious as the solution to the ongoing crisis of political legitimacy. What is the road map for a left in the United States that wont be subsumed into the capitalist Democratic party?