It has been a difficult time for American institutions, the cornerstone of society. The felony conviction of Donald Trump in a New York court last month was just the latest and most extreme example of the growing weaponization of the criminal justice system. The right-wing dominated Supreme Court has come under continued attack from the left for some conservative justices to have failed to recuse themselves from certain cases or for allegedly accepting gifts from wealthy political patrons.
Some government agencies have squandered decades of goodwill for questionable purposes, eroding hard-earned trust in the process. Public health services lost public trust during the COVID-19 pandemic by imposing draconian orders that were backed by neither science nor objective reality. Challenging such policies, now proven to be false, could lead to loss of livelihood, yet no apology (and no proper explanation) has been offered.
If institutions are necessary but severely deteriorated, what can be done?
The US military discharged unvaccinated soldiers while solemnly pledging to eradicate the existential threat of so-called “white supremacy” in the military, which the military’s own investigation later revealed did not exist. As the military squandered its traditionally highly respected status, veterans from various “alphabet soup” intelligence agencies banded together to support the Biden campaign just before the 2020 presidential election. Dubbed the “Dirty 51” by the New York Post, they declared Hunter Biden’s laptop “Russian disinformation,” the authenticity of which the FBI acknowledged in late 2019, and which Hunter Biden’s current criminal case reaffirms.
The pandemic has exposed corruption at the local level, public schools promoting DEI, critical race theory, and other “woke” principles through Zoom classes, and previously blind parents finally waking up. It has also revealed the hopeless misconduct of public sector unions, represented by the Chicago Teachers Union, which has consistently fought for significant wage increases while trying to keep schools closed for as long as possible.
Outside the public sector, other respected pillars of civil society are also degrading themselves. Fortune 500 companies have enthusiastically embraced one progressive cause after another, but they should not expect a refund or even recognition of the shareholder value they have ceded to Black Lives Matter and similar organizations whose sole purpose is to line their pockets. Elite and mid-tier universities have been promoting toxic ideologies on their campuses for years, so it is no wonder that anti-Semitism and other hateful beliefs are now rampant. Meanwhile, major media outlets publish op-eds and “news analysis” on the growing threat of disinformation while shamelessly evading responsibility for their key roles in Russia collusion and the Hunter Biden laptop fraud scandal.
There’s more to the story, but there’s no doubt that our institutions are rotten. Gallup’s 2023 Trust in Institutions survey reveals that trust in the U.S. military, Congress, public schools, the media and many other institutions has fallen to the lowest levels we’ve seen in decades, or even ever. As trust in the institutions that are supposed to embody our values and advance our societal goals wanes, we must ask ourselves: Does the decline in trust in institutions matter? If so, what can be done?
Many on the political right have watched as progressives have taken over nearly every American institution, welcoming the reckoning that has come to be so well-deserved for everyone from Ivy League deans to recently unemployed network hosts. take pleasure in the misfortune of others Given the elitism and (whisper it) undeserved privilege that hangs over these institutions and their followers, it would not be so easy, indeed perhaps foolhardy, to fire them, but it is understandable why.
Consider what our institutions are fundamentally: repositories of rules and norms that shape and constrain our behavior and promote broadly shared goals. They are the pillars of a functioning civil society, providing counterweights to each other and, importantly, to the public sector and its various instruments. Healthy communities benefit from a balance of power among respected institutions with different competing agendas. The resulting diversity and redundancy, for example in telecommunications or neural networks, avoid the “bottlenecks” associated with concentrations of power or influence. Positive values tend to thrive when they are widely distributed. As the federal government expands in both size and scope and moves ever deeper into our lives, it is essential to have other sites of legitimate social authority.
If institutions are necessary but severely deteriorated, what can be done?
Any solution requires an objective diagnosis of each institution’s specific problems. The nature of the organization also matters in devising improvement strategies. The myriad challenges facing our institutions include domination by ideologies or groups with distinct objectives, skewed incentives, lack of diversity of perspectives, groupthink, lack of moral courage, lack of competition, and more.
Once we properly identify the problems with a particular institution, we can chart a course of action. Recognizing that strong, functioning institutions serve the public interest, solutions can be packaged as a new “three Rs”: reject, replace, and reform. This approach transcends the right’s simplistic caricature that failed institutions are irredeemably corrupt and avoids the left’s ready-made impulse to bail out existing institutions that are in our control.
Rejection is most appropriate when an organization has become so corrupt, with a confused mission, or moral depravity that it is, in Hillary Clinton’s words, “beyond salvage.” Examples of organizations that have lost their way, or that have only succeeded in defrauding others through false advertising, include the Southern Poverty Law Center, Snopes, and Black Lives Matter. These organizations serve no useful purpose, and the world would be a better place without them.
The alternative approach can be applied when the stated (if not actual) mission is worthwhile and competition is appropriate, but it is too late for the target institution to bail out. Examples include media outlets such as CNN and MSNBC, and certain universities. The emergence of schools like UT Austin suggests that viable alternatives to “traditional” higher education may spur reform of existing institutions. Charter schools in elementary education play a similar role.
Reform is best suited to organizations that, while troubled, still retain some of their original mission and brilliance. These organizations may have simply lost their way for a while or were bogged down under severely misguided leadership. Reform can also be appropriate for organizations that are natural monopolies and therefore cannot be easily rejected or replaced. These include the US military, some universities (especially public universities; the University of Florida’s reform is leading the way), and many large corporations.
Given the stigma that corrupt institutions bring upon us, it is tempting to discard them. But in a healthy civil society, institutions can play an important role as shock absorbers. Without institutions, our choices are either an autocratic, unchecked central government or anarchy. Maintaining legitimate, functioning institutions is the only viable option for a free society.
