As long as you have highly centralized national states with major powers over issues like education, social justice, public spending and pensions in a religiously, morally and economically diverse and fragmented society, you are going to have a legitimacy problem and you're going to have public money spent in ways that citizens do not agree with; and you're going to have public policies passed that are completely alienating to a large body of the citizenry.
Finding a brave populist leader to do your bidding will not solve this problem, because the problem is not with the policies of the State, but with the structures of the State. As long as those structures remain excessively centralised, policies will be designed at a national level and thus often be a poor fit for local and regional needs.
The only way to overcome this problem is to devolve powers to the regional and local levels, so that complex and controversial issues can be thrashed out at the local level, where you have some potential for a broader consensus than you would have at the national level.
As long as we think we can solve these problems within the existing nationalized structures, we are deluding ourselves. These problems will not be solved until we acknowledge the fact that modern, centralized states are structurally incapable of governing complex and diverse societies in the long run.
Decentralisation is inevitable if we wish to rescue our political systems from the dysfunctions of centralised, top-down rule, which is poorly tailored to idiosyncratic local problems and needs. And if it’s not done very soon, then we are probably heading down a path towards more centralized, bureaucratic, technocratic and authoritarian styles of governance, as centralised States become increasingly desperate to control and manipulate the populations under their sway.
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Unless We Decentralise our Political Institutions, States Will Become Increasingly Authoritarian Over Time