Essentially, the book can be divided into two halves, two perspectives on an interrelated problem: institutional decay. Ostensibly, Hayes is writing about the failure of America meritocracy and how this seemingly egalitarian system has been transformed into something supporting oligarchy and plutocracy. Hayes has a wonderful piece in The Nation detailing this very phenomenon and showing how an obsession with "smartness" has betrayed fundamental American values and led to the institutional crisis that has persisted past the financial crisis and great recession. Although problem is multifaceted, Hayes prefers to simplifying things by calling the general decay a Crisis of Authority. I'll follow his lead; it makes things easier.
At the same time, Hayes proves to be a very persuasive chronicler of life amid institutional decay. In particular, he shows that two very distinct political movements emerge once institutions begin failing. In one corner, you have the defenders of the institutions, who hope for reforms but are unwilling to eliminate these institutions outright. Conservative in nature, Hayes names this group the institutionalists Opposite of them are the insurrectionists, who seek more dramatic transformation. I'm posting a somewhat long excerpt from the book detailing this distinction.
I know that this puts me in direct opposition of people of a more liberal bent, whether they're libertarians or socialists. I can understand their anti-institutional view, things are terrible, but I cannot ultimately agree with their proposed solutions. Throwing out the Federal Reserve, or the institutional framework in general, as of way of solving America's current problems is like trying to treat a disease by bleeding a patient. If you remove the Fed's ability to conduct monetary policy, you're going to cause serious damage. The era of the Gold Standard was one of disastrous instability. Poor people were crushed by debilitating deflation and financial panics were common. Why would you wish that on anyone?
The concept of a revolution is nice, the practice of revolutions isn't; they're hoping for a revolution in Syria after all. I am certain that you can reform processes without being so extremist in your positions. Decry politics all you want, but it's the only way most things get decided in a democracy. We can talk about the unfairness of our political system too, but it doesn't change the fundamental role of politics. And heck, if you wanted a direct tax for wars, or a draft or some other way of raising the stakes, you'd have to go through a political system to get there.
Regardless of how you look at it, the fundamental nature of America's institutional framework cannot be ignored. All of these institutions can be improved upon, and in the case of the Senate dramatically, but most of that improvement can happen without radical change. I still believe very much in the New Deal America that emerged after WWII, which I guess makes me more conservative than most people around here would recognize.
The path to getting back there will be long and frustrating. But I'm a patient man. I don't need something dramatic to see improvement. It can happen step by step, increment by increment, one "marginal revolution" at a time.
To recover from the damage inflicted by the Crisis of Authority, we will be forced to reconstruct and reinvent our politics, a process that has, in a sense, already begun. Andrew Smith, an organizer with Occupy Wall Street, told me one fall evening in 2011 that the movement is not “Left or right, but up or down.” Amid drums and whoops and chants of “We! Are! The 99 percent!” he leaned in and said, “I realize that’s scary for some people.”Regular readers of this blog would recognize my generally institutionalist disposition. I don't often find myself taking sides with David Brooks against Paul Krugman, but there you have it. While I might not necessarily support the idea of "gentle" change, reform can and should happen within the institutions that we already have. You don't have to end the Fed to change its policies for industry representation on its boards, for example. Nor do you need a political revolution or a third party to reduce outside contributions. Tax policy and minimum wage increases can reduce inequality. The list is pretty long, and pretty boring. But that's government, I guess.
Beyond left and right isn’t just a motto. Those most devoted to the deepest kinds of structural reform of the system are insistent that they do not fall along the traditional left-right axis. Just as elite failure claims a seemingly unrelated number of victims—the Palm Beach retiree bankrupted by Bernie Madoff and the child left homeless after his mother’s home was foreclosed—so, too, will you find that among those clued in to elite failure, left/right distinctions are less salient than those between what I call insurrectionists and institutionalists.
Paul Krugman is one prominent example of an insurrectionist. A man who was once a defender of elite competence and neoliberal technocracy against its populist foes, he has come to believe there is something very wrong with the people running the country: “At the beginning of the new millennium,” he writes in his 2004 book, The Great Unraveling, “it seemed that the United States was blessed with mature, skillful economic leaders, who in a pinch would do what had to be done. They would insist on responsible fiscal policies; they would act quickly and effectively.… Even those of us who considered ourselves pessimists were basically optimists: we thought that bullish investors might face a rude awakening, but that it would all have a happy ending.” But the experience of the fail decade has made Krugman profoundly skeptical of elite opinion and what he derisively calls Very Serious People. He now approvingly cites such insurrectionist heroes as the radical author Naomi Klein, something that would have been unthinkable a decade before.
The insurrectionists not only think there is something fundamentally broken about our current institutions and the social order they hold up, but they believe the only way to hold our present elites accountable is to force them to forfeit their authority. Insurrectionists see the plummeting of trust in public institutions as a good thing if it can act as a spur for needed upheaval and change. The insurrectionists want a rethinking of some of our major institutions—our government, our corporations, our civil society.
On the other side are the institutionalists, who see the erosion of authority and declining public trust as a terrifying trend. Like Edmund Burke, the institutionalists look on aghast as pillar institutions are attacked as decadent and dissolute by the uninformed rabble. Part of what horrified Burke about the French Revolution, as he told the British parliament in 1790, was that the revolution had laid waste to the entire institutional landscape of the ancien régime. The revolutionaries, Burke explained, had “pulled down to the ground their monarchy; their church; their nobility; their law; their revenue; their army; their navy; their commerce; their arts; and their manufactures” leaving the door open to “an irrational, unprincipled, proscribing, confiscating, plundering, ferocious, bloody and tyrannical democracy.”
Institutionalists live in fear of a society without central repositories of authority, one that could collapse into mob rule at any time. The New York Times columnist David Brooks is institutionalism’s most accessible advocate (the Times op-ed page contains multitudes) and in 2009 he laid out its vision. Citing the political scientist Hugh Heclo, who wrote the book On Thinking Institutionally, Brooks writes that “the institutionalist has a deep reverence for those who came before and built up the rules that he has temporarilyt aken delivery of … Lack of institutional awareness has bred cynicism and undermined habits of behavior.”
Most people who, like Brooks, occupy coveted positions at the heart of our pillar institutions—from university presidents to CEOs—are institutionalists by disposition. Nearly every member of the United States Senate from both parties is an institutionalist (there’s no institution quite so dysfunctional and quite so loved by its members as the United States Senate). In his farewell speech to that body, retiring senator Chris Dodd (D-CT) decried the fact that “Americans’ distrust of politicians provides compelling incentives for Senators to distrust each other, to disparage this very institution, and disengage from the policy making process.” He hoped, he said, that they would resist that temptation and rather embrace their institution’s unique features, the same ones that critics contended were making self-governance near impossible.
A big part of the institutionalist catechism, discernible in Dodd’s defensiveness about his own institution, is that the people at the center of power are doing a better job than they’re given credit for. At Davos in 2011, while Clinton alluded to elite failure, JPMorgan Chase chief executive Jamie Dimon defended bankers from the mob mentality of a resentful public. “I just think this constant refrain ‘bankers, bankers, bankers’—it’s just a really unproductive and unfair way of treating people,” he said during one session. “And I just think people should just stop doing that.”
What divides the institutionalist from the insurrectionist is a disagreement over whether the greatest threat we face is distrust—a dark and nihilistic tendency that will produce a society bankrupted of norms and order—or whether the greater threat is the actual malfeasance and corruption of the pillar institutions themselves.
But even the most ardent institutionalists have to admit that things aren’t working. “My own trust in our political leaders is at a personal low,” David Brooks wrote on the Times’ website in 2010. “And I actually know and like these people. I just think they are trapped in a system that buries their good qualities and brings out the bad.”
Ultimately, whether you align yourself with the institutionalist or the insurrectionist side of the debate comes down to just how rotten you think our current pillar institutions and ruling class are. Can they be gently reformed at the margins or must they be radically overhauled, perhaps even destroyed and rebuilt?
I know that this puts me in direct opposition of people of a more liberal bent, whether they're libertarians or socialists. I can understand their anti-institutional view, things are terrible, but I cannot ultimately agree with their proposed solutions. Throwing out the Federal Reserve, or the institutional framework in general, as of way of solving America's current problems is like trying to treat a disease by bleeding a patient. If you remove the Fed's ability to conduct monetary policy, you're going to cause serious damage. The era of the Gold Standard was one of disastrous instability. Poor people were crushed by debilitating deflation and financial panics were common. Why would you wish that on anyone?
The concept of a revolution is nice, the practice of revolutions isn't; they're hoping for a revolution in Syria after all. I am certain that you can reform processes without being so extremist in your positions. Decry politics all you want, but it's the only way most things get decided in a democracy. We can talk about the unfairness of our political system too, but it doesn't change the fundamental role of politics. And heck, if you wanted a direct tax for wars, or a draft or some other way of raising the stakes, you'd have to go through a political system to get there.
Regardless of how you look at it, the fundamental nature of America's institutional framework cannot be ignored. All of these institutions can be improved upon, and in the case of the Senate dramatically, but most of that improvement can happen without radical change. I still believe very much in the New Deal America that emerged after WWII, which I guess makes me more conservative than most people around here would recognize.
The path to getting back there will be long and frustrating. But I'm a patient man. I don't need something dramatic to see improvement. It can happen step by step, increment by increment, one "marginal revolution" at a time.
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