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Respecting the Institutions
I went to a high school basketball game this evening to watch my cousin Grace play. As we always do before the first varsity game each night, we stood for the national anthem. I’ve written in years past about the impression this makes on me, the thought of crowds of parents and players in thousands of high school gyms across the country doing exactly the same thing. It’s one of the things that makes me stubbornly optimistic about America, the knowledge that this is a solemn moment for so many, many of whom are largely unconcerned about politics but nonetheless feel pride and reverence toward our flag and the nation it represents.
On the drive home I thought about those who burn flags, or kneel in disrespect to the flag, or otherwise feel and express contempt for our country. I understand criticism, and I respect the right to express criticism. But I think I also understand the desire to tear down, burn down, gut, and destroy whole institutions out of anger and frustration, often in hopes that something better might rise in its place.
Our institutions are under attack. Folks on the left, frustrated that they can’t consistently achieve the electoral victories they seem to think are their due, would abolish the Electoral College. They would dilute the Supreme Court until its partisan bloat reliably delivers the verdicts they deem appropriate. Defund the police, redefine marriage, assert primacy over parents in the raising and educating of children, fundamentally transform transform transform until all the Bad Old ideas, all the outdated Constitutional provisions, all the stodgy old institutions have been subverted, coopted, or simply obliterated. The nuclear family, the idea of objective truth, the concept of merit, and virtually every other cultural convention and traditional value has come into the left’s crosshairs in recent years.
The left is no respecter of institutions.
We should respect our institutions.
Being conservative doesn’t mean opposing every change. It does mean seeking to conserve, seeking to change modestly and cautiously when possible, and working to improve our institutions rather than tearing them down and starting over. Occasionally that’s necessary: some institutions are so deeply wrong-minded, or so corrupted, or so ineffectual as to warrant being razed to the ground. But that shouldn’t be something conservatives pursue lightly, in the heat of the moment, and without careful consideration.
I’ve listened to woefully misinformed attacks on the Republican Party, sweeping and bizarre indictments of law enforcement, scathing rejections of 90% political allies, and imperfect yet overwhelmingly reliable conservative voices. I expect those from radicals; I understand why they might occasionally come from frustrated conservatives. But cautious evolution is almost always better than radicalism, better than nihilism, better than revolution.
We won 38-24. It was a terrific game.
Published in Culture
Yes!
Our institutions have been corrupted. They are indeed under attack. The corrupting forces and the reaction to the effects of the corruption itself.
This makes conservatism sound like a religion. I’m not expecting conservatism to mean anything.
Good.
Also, not so good.
Good, in the sense that the institutions have been inhabited by meretricious intellectual narcissists who either have contempt for the foundational ideas of the institutions, or believe they are an enlightened class that can trade off the residual respect the institutions command and bend them to more progressive purposes, while basking in the rote respect the institutions confer.
Good, in the sense that the rot and incompetence of several institutions has been revealed.
Not so good, in the sense that the rot and incompetence of several institutions has been revealed.
Not so good, in the sense that many will mistake mistrust for the inhabitants of the institutions with the institutions themselves, and want to scour to zero the one that annoys them the most. When the majority of people lose faith in one or two institutions, it can cohere into a national desire to trash the lot. What else can you do but start over, with fresh hope, clear eyes, pure hearts?
But the American institutions are worth defending, and that’s what makes the job of the Right so difficult. Everyone wants to do something about the squatters in the old house who’ve been breaking into other people’s homes and cars, robbing them on the street – so raze the house! No, no – save the house. It is a beautiful, noble, many-roomed treasure, and if think we are the equals of the architects who built it, we are as foolish as those who regard it as a common construction, no better than any others, merely a place for arguing who steals what from whom.
Perhaps people somewhat ‘less’ conservative than you have carefully considered, and might have decided on a more practical approach to advancing conservatism – as they perceive it – than the strategy of serial caution.
What’s misinformed? Anyone who throws this word around in this environment is screaming authoritarianism and epistemological arrogance.
Scathing rejections…. oh like how their agenda is continually dismissed and rejected?
So I’m a radical. That’s a label. Try to transcend labels. It will set you free.
Sure. Like most words. They’re just sounds, unmoored from ideas
Well, if “conservatism” is a meaningless sound to you, at least “misinformed” gets a rise.
Franco, are you saying:
“Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”
I think we’ve been slow and cautious and “evolutionary”, and we’ve had Republican Presidents and the Dems screwed us. We’ve had Republican House, Senate and the White House, and the Republicans screwed us. I think slow and sure hasn’t worked.
It used to be that respect was something that had to be earned; not something an institution was entitled to regardless of how corrupt or ineffective it had become. This “we must respect our institutions” sounds a lot like a call to ignore the rot. It’s hard to respect the FBI when they’re hunting down people who may have been in the Capitol area on January 6th, perjuring themselves to go after politicians they don’t like, sending 15 agents to a NASCAR track to check out a garage door, and busting Aunt Becky for bribing a college official with cash instead of the institutionally respectable generous donation to the endowment fund. Meanwhile, the same FBI gives a pass to terrorists like the brothers Tsaernev and sex pests like Larry Nasser and Jeff Epsteain’s client list. Their local-level law enforcement counterparts have rebranded as lemonade-stand-and-Covid-enforcers-wh0-will-raid-your-house-and-shoot-you-in-the-middle-of-the-night while they ignore street crime at the demand of local political commissars. It’s difficult to respect institutions that behave in real life like the caricatures of corrupt institutions in bad movies.
The notion of, “the institutions are good, but they are inhabited by bad people, and we need to fix the bad people while preserving the institutions” sounds good and all; but as a practical matter, how can it be accomplished? And has it ever been accomplished in history? Has a corrupt bureaucratic institution ever been turned around and returned to order? (The Roman Catholic Church has entered the chat.)
Some ask what “conservatism” even means any more. Well, as practiced by the Republican Party, conservatism means “preserving the policy advances of left-wing progressives.” “Obamacare has made health care more bureaucratic and expensive, but repealing Obamacare… well, it just wouldn’t be prudent at this juncture. Too embedded in the system. Time to move on, don’t you think? So, we hear you guys want the immigration laws enforced. Well, gosh darn it, you see, the problem is we’ve had an open border for so long it’s just part of the system now. Enforcing immigration law just wouldn’t be prudent at this juncture, so let’s just accept the new normal and move on. Are you guys upset about CRT and the contempt public schools have for parents? Good, well, we’ll do something about that. Something prudent, of course, when the juncture is right.”
When it comes to institutions, I like the approach of the Catalan Oath of Allegiance:
We, who are as good as you, swear to you, who are no better than us, to accept you as our king and sovereign lord, provided you observe all our liberties and laws–but if not, not.
This is the only one I agree with the left on. And I half agree with it. I would divert the funds to new and better police forces that have to compete with one another. Charter police should be a thing.
Furthermore, the conservative cause has been more about conserving its own dogma than about conserving anything else. The culture is warped. Social values are warped. The institutions don’t function. The bureaucratic state endlessly abuses the people. What has conservatisms answer been? Why isn’t there a defund the IRS movement? People hate them more than the cops. Who has love for the IRS? Who thinks they are an amazing part of our civic life? Who thinks the cretins that work there aren’t cretins but valued public servants above reproach? No one. Why can’t conservatism cut the budget for once starting with them? This has been three decades of abject failure. Conservatives need to build their own institutions that better peoples lives and their own regulatory state that makes sense. They also need to build their own culture. That has always been the answer. Waiting for the courts to save us or tax cuts to work magic has never been and will never be a solution. And that means challenging, reforming, defunding, and/or ripping down the hollowed out husk of everything from Hollywood to the FBI. It means waging war on corporate America. It means splitting up and decentralizing business and the bureaucracy. Not trying to copy and paste Ronald Reagan quotes ad infinitum, William F Buckley’s fusionist nonsense, and propping up back stabbing fossils like George Will. That is the future.
I think is is the fundamentally conservative argument. Some things are worth preserving. I am all for that with the military, for instance.
I don’t think the CIA is an institution worth saving per-say, in its current form. Do we really need and FBI and an ATF? Every government agency has its own SWAT teams with paramilitary’s power. That can’t be right.
As far as Congress is concerned, the only thing that can restore it is to force it to take up its actual power.
The Wisdom of the ages.
The problem with people who get elected or appointed into power, they start to think of it as their birthright.
And this is a fundamentally human thing. Look at superhero movies. They are the fantasy that “If I had the power, I could make things better.” One of the things I liked about the Iron Man arc in the MCU was that he kept using his power and making things worse. Yes they were reactive to defeat bad guys. However, when he was too proactive, things went sideways.
I have a son whose mental health is not good. One day I received an alarming text from him that suggested the possibility of self-harm. He lives in another state, so I called the local police non-emergency number and asked if they could send someone to drop by and see if he was okay.
They dispatched three squad cars, broke down his door, dragged him to a hospital, and left him there with no means to get home.
I think the situation could have been handled better. So, yeah, I’m all in favor of police reform that would involve separating the health-and-safety check function from the law enforcement function.
And the text? He said he was just drunk and depressed and meant nothing by it.
Um, yeah. I think that situation could have been handled better too.
What on earth…
[Casablanca clip]
James, great catch.
As for me “screaming authoritarianism and epistemological arrogance…”
A few years ago a young lady I knew asked me if I could give her a ride to work the next morning while her Prius was in the shop for repairs. I was happy to oblige, and picked her up as I drove my kids into town for school. As it happened, I’d cracked a molar a couple of days before, and was managing that with over-the-counter pain medication while I waited to see my dentist, so I wasn’t feeling my characteristic loquacity when she got in the car. Her somewhat too-colorful babble (for my admittedly conservative tastes) in the presence of my children didn’t add to my enthusiasm. If she could ascertain from my expression that I wasn’t enjoying the drive I couldn’t tell, as she talked all the way to town.
But she obviously picked up some negative vibe from me, because later that day I got a terse text from her informing me that I was “rude and off-putting.” I’ve used that as my tagline ever since, stopping just short of printing it on my business cards.
But I may switch to “screams authoritarianism and epistemological arrogance.”
Not really. Bogart’s character claims he was misinformed. Henry is saying others are “misinformed” Big difference.
How do you know we, or I, was/were misinformed? About what? What facts were we misinformed about?
But you know, right? You know the facts.
Ok, what does conservatism mean? Tell me. Is conservatism something that is inherently good? Don’t we need to ask what is being conserved?
I’ve read all the books (or a lot of them) Sowell, Hayek, Coulter (jk) Subscribed to National Review and The American Spectator and listened to Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin nearly every day for about 15 years.
Teach me, oh, expert on what I know and don’t know. What about this post is anything more than idiotic platitudes and worship of empty words?
This is wishful thinking on the part of left, because they don’t know how to build! It’s easy to tear down, but difficult to build.
Whenever someone wants to do away with existing structures and institutions we need to make sure they have a plan and skills to build something better. Otherwise it’s just destruction for other people to clean up.
I don’t disagree with this, but I think you are about a decade late. They have now taken over the institutions. They attacked and won. Now they are relying on dupes on the right 0and there are so many – to guard these institutions like nothing happened.
The police are enforcing leftist laws and ignoring many laws we conservatives prefer to be enforced. They succeeded fully in redefining marriage and are making chaos out of male/female relationships. They took over the public school system decades ago and now they are 100% in charge.
Hasn’t “come in the left’s crosshairs” nope. More like they beheaded these things and are displaying the heads on pikes.
I think we are long past “working to improve our institutions”. The institutions are completely in control of left-wingers and they are trying to pretend these institutions are sanctified (precisely opposite of what they were saying when they were ‘attacking’ them)
However your post is sufficiently vague, that perhaps we should name some institutions.
It might be easier to name the institutions that haven’t been corrupted and are capable of being “improved” on a practical level.
While I enjoy these discussions, I find them frustrating. Our government has many institutions and traditions. Some of them are essential and worthy of conservation while others are not. This is not radical, but conservative. Where the federal government has overstepped its constitutional purpose, where institutions evolve well beyond their intended design to become purveyors of dictat for the entrenched ruling class, when bureaucrats and politicians ally to force the citizens to heal or the opposition to relent, then those institutions have become corrupt and need to be purged or dissolved.
We can start by amending the Administrative Law Act and reigning in the power of the administrative state. No institution should act as regulator, adjudicator and enforcer of law. People should be able to easily seek relief from the courts in any administrative action. Fines imposed by regulators should be minimal and never subject to prefunded multiple damages unless assessed in a civil court action. Major offenses should be referred for criminal prosecution. We start by pulling the teeth from the Administrative State.
Franco, sometimes we do know facts. For example, a claim I’ve often encountered is that “there’s no difference between Republicans and Democrats.” One need only look at the voting records of the two parties to recognize that this isn’t correct. It is a factually, demonstrably, provably false claim.
I called that “misinformed” because I’m trying to be charitable. In fact, it’s an ignorant and blatantly untrue claim, on a par with “Police are Criminals” or “The GOP is Utterly Useless.”
Incidentally, this is a pretty anodyne post. Conservatives should generally be wary of tearing down established structures. That’s a basic idea of conservatism. Obviously there are worthy and unworthy institutions, and sometimes conservatives have to yield to more important principles than caution and moderation. I expect the reader to be thoughtful enough to understand that obvious point and take it into consideration.
The left is busy undermining and destroying bedrock institutions. We conservatives should resist the urge to participate in radicalism. That seems pretty obvious.
And yes, this was a response to “Police are Criminals.” That’s the left’s mantra, and the basis for their call to defund the police. That’s a bad idea, for pretty obvious reasons. I think we should take a somewhat more nuanced perspective.
These blanket statements should be taken in the spirit they are intended, and with a grain of salt.
“(T)here’s no difference between Republicans and Democrats.” means, on issues I think are most important there’s no difference. I can accept that because I see that too. On immigration, globalism, interventionism (they are for different foreign wars, albeit)
And votes aren’t a very good yardstick. A better standard is what is actually enacted and how hard our representatives champion various causes.
The police are criminals is obvious hyperbole, but there is a real problem and it’s interesting to see so many conservatives coming to the defense of police who will happily follow orders, arrest you or me for some trumped up crime, go home thinking he’s a hero.
Every post or essay doesn’t have to have special nuance and disclaimers. I find it tedious.
The disclaimers we are all supposed to use becomes a burden to communication and in fact often buries the point. This tactic has been used by the left, and I damn sure don’t buy it from the right
If you have to say, Well, I’m not saying that Donald Trump is a saint and that he hasn’t made mistakes or acted blah blah blah, but I agree with him on X, Y and Z, you’ve already lost. You have to write a freaking position paper of 2000 words full of disclaimers and nuance your target audience will never read – or if they do will take you out of context anyway, is not effective communication.
Lately we’ve seen a lot of defense of the FBI sound something like this. It’s really just the top figures of the FBI who are questionable. The rank and file are good guys trying to do the right thing. What is the right thing? Following orders. From their superiors.
These people need to be told directly. We don’t like what you are doing. Consider that it is you who might be more the criminal.
Oh, I understand that. I understand that it’s hyperbole. I understand that, if the speaker were to pause for a moment and consider what he’s saying, he might rephrase it. He might say something less destructive, less inclined to drive people away from the only party standing between a functioning civil society and Democratic Party hegemony.
I’m trying to encourage people to pause and consider before saying things like that.
It’s a bit like the “Trump is unfit to be President” line. I understand that conservatives who said it were looking at a particular aspect of Trump, not at the entirety of his administration. It was still harmful, and it would have been better (for those of us who wanted Trump to be re-elected) if those people had said “I think his temperament is inappropriate for the office” while acknowledging other ways in which he was actually quite good at his job.
I suspect that the wag who wrote “Police are Criminals” was similarly engaged in hyperbole. However, he’s endorsing the left’s view about law enforcement, which is similarly inaccurate and hyperbolic. I don’t think that’s smart or productive behavior from conservatives, and I think we should be more careful.
Is the Fed an institution to be preserved as well?
I think it’s a bit more nuanced than that. The left (or elements thereof) saw law enforcement as ‘criminal’. Now that they own law enforcement -am I wrong? – the left will say they are representing everything that’s right in the world.
Now that the left* owns the police on several levels, watch them defend them. They will be re-funded to enforce mask mandates and the like in the future.
It’s looking to me that the summer riots were allowed to happen more to spread chaos while Trump was in office and to further co-opt police. Notice there are no riots now.
The main problem with “respecting the institutions” is that they’re largely corrupt and we have little or no power to reform them. The “conservative” leadership doesn’t really care. It’s all just empty rhetoric designed to acquire and maintain power and wealth. This has been shown to be the case over and over. Sure, there are likely some folks in D.C. that truly want to change things, but they’re overwhelmed by those who have bellied up to the trough, who are “conservative” only in the sense that they have theirs and now don’t want things to change. Eventually, even those with good intentions are corrupted or leave in disgust.
It was less than six years from the Contract With America until the GOP House was setting new spending records. W. came into office and oversaw a huge growth in the federal government, dismissing anyone who complained as uncompassionate, unpatriotic, sexist and racist.
So along came Trump, disrespecting the institutions and breaking the furniture. Oh my stars and garters! How gauche! The “conservative” leadership was vastly more concerned about Trump’s lack of decorum than they’ve ever been about the corruption of the hallowed institutions or the rottenness of the furniture.
Until we have leadership that truly wants to fix things and are willing to risk their own political fortunes and to forgo a place at the trough, all talk about respecting institutions is meaningless.
P.S., Trump was willing to risk his political fortunes and forgo a place at the trough. The hallowed institutions attacked him at every turn. They’ll do the same to ANY leader who tries for substantive change. Trump was the object lesson — outsiders will be assimilated or destroyed.