Institutionalist or Insurrectionist?

Chris Hayes' Twilight of the Elites is the current book on the reading list. I'm enjoying it quite a bit, and I'll probably have a lot more to say about it once I make it through. In the meantime, I'll be talking about it as a nice piece of swath of institutional and institutional decay literature that I've been digging through. This includes Winner-Take-All Politics and Unequal Democracy (both of which I've talked about in earlier posts), along with more economic takes on institutions, like Why Nations Fail (my review).

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.