Charlie Stross has a fascinating and insightful post about the growth of the political class and the "beige revolution" that has caused all parties to converge on a status-quo-preserving non-platform:
So the future isn't a boot stamping on a human face, forever. It's a person in a beige business outfit advocating beige policies that nobody wants (but nobody can quite articulate a coherent alternative to) with a false mandate obtained by performing rituals of representative democracy that offer as much actual choice as a Stalinist one-party state. And resistance is futile, because if you succeed in overthrowing the beige dictatorship, you will become that which you opposed.
Political failure modes and the beige dictatorship