Our society codes its experience into its institutions; in a grand edifice we call limited government and rule of law.
His theme is that there is more knowledge embedded in institutions than in individual technocrats. Remember to take note of Joseph Henrich’s anthropological support for that in The Secret of our Success, one of my five favorite books of the year.
The entire talk is moving and masterful, but if there is one sentence with which I would argue it is the first one in the quote below.
People who distrust the government are less likely to vote for the next big personality promising big new programs. Instead, they might be more attracted to candidates who promise restraint and rule of law; to administer competently and to repair broken institutions.
I think that as distrust in government rises, you get more demagoguery, not less.
“You get more demagoguery”
Yes. If a corrupt government cannot be defunded and limited, then people will elect a “reform” tyrant. Irony.
Law vs legislation comes to mind. Building of good institutions is so,slow and incremental that bad and extractive layers can build up before we notice. As since Trump can’t fix something that took decades to go wrong the only option is hard reboot.
One catch with this argument is that it could easily be spun the other way by progressives, since practically every trace of the pre-FDR, more classically liberal American system has been swept away.
So, they could say something like we’ve had New Deal institutions for going on 80 years now. Those institutions have been evolving with thousands of marginal refinements over generations now that, yes, no one person can ‘know’ and yet which embed a lot of lessons learned about how to run a statist (i.e. socially just) system as well as possible. And nearly every government in the entire world seems to be converging within a fairly narrow spectrum of mixed-economy, moderately-socialist political organization.
They would probably say that this is argument for less skepticism, not more, in the current structure.
Arguably, the great problem of our time is entropy decay. A thousand factions calcify their hold on some part of the public pie, in a process of demosclerosis. All positions of power and authority are gradually taken over either by ideological zealots or by amoral, politicking, opportunists (the pointy haired boss). Those obsessed with “the next civil rights movement” flock to the courts, to academia, to politics, where they tear down long-standing institutions, traditions, and mores.
So conservatism is a great attitude when faced with entropy decay. Conservatives can help arrest the decay, and preserve great institutions. But what happens when entropy decay is too far gone? What happens when the rot has infested the entire building? What happens when amoral factional infighting and arsonist ideological zealots have taken over everything? Conservatism is no longer a useful frame. Do you conserve a rotten deck? Or do you build a new one?