The notion of self is a fictional device we use to maintain a sense of continuity across space and time, a way to pretend that we don't greatly change at different ages and in different circumstances. It would be overwhelming to just show up new to the world and our possibilities even once a year much less each morning. So — like a plot device that strings together otherwise disparate events and feelings — we sustain a sense of me that might actually be a crowd of related but hardly identical people all crowded into the parade of years and moments that constitute a life.
Institutions do something similar for societies. They are the plot device a people use to maintain coherence across generations — smoothing over the discontinuities, giving strangers a shared script, making it possible to wake up each morning into a world that feels, if not familiar, at least navigable. The Constitution, the local school, the company you work for, the church you attend or don't — these are the narrative scaffolding that lets a society of 335 million people function as though it were one story rather than millions of unrelated ones.
When institutions decay, people are showing up to a world that feels unfamiliar — and it is overwhelming. The anger in the country right now is partly the anger of people whose plot device broke. The story they were using to make sense of their lives — the job, the church, the party, the neighborhood — stopped working, and they're left with the raw, unnarrated experience of change. That's what strongmen exploit. They offer a simpler story.
The promise is seductive. The record is dismal. Consider the Korean peninsula: divided since 1948, sharing race, culture, and language. One side crushed its institutions under dictatorship; the other nurtured them under democracy. Today, the average South Korean produces in a couple of weeks what a North Korean produces in a year. Twenty percent of Russians still lack indoor plumbing; the country has defaulted on every 30-year bond it has ever issued. Strongmen capture attention but destroy prosperity. Strong institutions may be boring, but they are the only way complex societies thrive. Trump is a symptom of this institutional recession — and a warning of what happens when people lose faith in the institutions that have done so much to define this country and enable its progress.
The strongman's simpler story always has the same ending. Given a choice between a strongman atop weak institutions, or modest leaders within reliable, democratic institutions, bet on institutions every time.
Institutions do something similar for societies. They are the plot device a people use to maintain coherence across generations — smoothing over the discontinuities, giving strangers a shared script, making it possible to wake up each morning into a world that feels, if not familiar, at least navigable. The Constitution, the local school, the company you work for, the church you attend or don't — these are the narrative scaffolding that lets a society of 335 million people function as though it were one story rather than millions of unrelated ones.
When institutions decay, people are showing up to a world that feels unfamiliar — and it is overwhelming. The anger in the country right now is partly the anger of people whose plot device broke. The story they were using to make sense of their lives — the job, the church, the party, the neighborhood — stopped working, and they're left with the raw, unnarrated experience of change. That's what strongmen exploit. They offer a simpler story.
The promise is seductive. The record is dismal. Consider the Korean peninsula: divided since 1948, sharing race, culture, and language. One side crushed its institutions under dictatorship; the other nurtured them under democracy. Today, the average South Korean produces in a couple of weeks what a North Korean produces in a year. Twenty percent of Russians still lack indoor plumbing; the country has defaulted on every 30-year bond it has ever issued. Strongmen capture attention but destroy prosperity. Strong institutions may be boring, but they are the only way complex societies thrive. Trump is a symptom of this institutional recession — and a warning of what happens when people lose faith in the institutions that have done so much to define this country and enable its progress.
The strongman's simpler story always has the same ending. Given a choice between a strongman atop weak institutions, or modest leaders within reliable, democratic institutions, bet on institutions every time.
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