American eclipse
The institutions are not self-enforcing
Photo credit: Gary Hershorn
I have just returned from a trip to the United States straddling the dying days of the Biden administration and the first week of the Trump administration. Flags were at half-mast everywhere to mark Jimmy Carter’s passing (including the half-staff golden arches flag at the local McDonald’s). It was a reminder of a former era that, while it had its own problems, can now be viewed in a very different light.
The new administration’s first actions were predictably bad, not just on the specifics, but much more importantly, for the challenge they pose to the rule of law. The rule of law is the glue that holds all the other institutions together. While the rule of law is often disrespected, the Trump administration is taking it to levels that threaten the American project as we once knew it, along with the fundamental basis for US economic outperformance. The damage will not manifest straightaway, but that just makes the process all the more insidious.
I said previously that the failure to deal decisively with Trump in January 2021 was a first-order institutional failure from which the US might never recover. Everything that has happened since then is downstream of that failure. Robert Trancinski wrote a great essay last year sub-titled ‘no one is coming to save us.’ The various institutions that might have dealt with Trump all passed the buck. Robert’s point was that when institutions fail systematically, it places an enormous burden on individuals to pick up the pieces in ways that are very costly personally, often prohibitively so. People can be forgiven for not taking on that burden.
The institutions are not self-enforcing
As Mark Copelovich has observed, the US is politically, culturally and sociologically unprepared to deal with an authoritarian takeover. A Turkish writer made the same point before January 6 2021: Americans could not imagine the possibility of a coup mostly because they had never experienced one. The broader failure of imagination manifests in a variety of ways, most notably as sane-washing by the media, but also an assumption that the institutions that have stood the test of time will continue to operate as they have historically and can be relied upon to continue to function effectively.
But as Copelovich has repeatedly argued, the institutions are not self-enforcing. Once one institution drops the ball, it can quickly cascade into wholesale institutional collapse. That is exactly what we have seen post-election, best exemplified by some of the richest and most powerful people in the US capitulating to what they see as the new reality. The process began even before the votes were counted. It is a version of Pascal’s wager, in which people correctly assume that hedging is costless because they would only be punished by the side committed to smashing institutions and norms.