Note 69: Make no little plans

So, it’s almost been two weeks since the election and – unsurprisingly – there have been a good number of hot takes on what happened and how America elected a proud and unrepentant autocrat back into the highest office of the land. Most of this commentary has been extremely uninsightful.

The informal test I’m using for each column and interview I read is whether I could print it out, stuff it in a manila envelope, jump into a DeLorean, go back two years ago, and share it with the candidates (or others) who could make a difference, so that we could watch the election unfold differently. Sadly, just about everything I’ve read over the past two weeks fails that test.

Rather than rip on others’ comments, let me introduce the theory I’ve come to accept since the election: Americans no longer value institutions because they forget why institutions exist in the first place, or the institutions were no longer serving them well enough to be worth defending.

Since being declared the victor, Trump’s roared back into the scene, not promoting policies or nominees that will actually govern, but those that tear down our governing structures. I’ve heard many lament that It All Needs To Be Torn Down, even if they cannot answer the next question, “With what?” We are about to witness the wholesale destruction of the institutional order put into place following World War II. Yet something new will spring up in its place. The chapter for the past eight decades is finished. We are now staring at the opening page for the next.

I’m weirdly optimistic about the next decade. It’s true that the institutional order I defended and praised will be collapsing like a Gazan apartment building rumored to have Hamas fighters in the basement. It will be chaotic, and a lot of people will get hurt and killed. There will be attempts to stand up nepotistic and corrupt replacements in the craters where each institution previously stood. (Watch how the race to anoint Lara Trump as the Florida Senator replacing Marco Rubio unfolds for a preview.) It’s going to be a goddamn mess, but my outlook is positive (should I make it through). Why is that?

The seeds of the new order won’t be taken from the rubble of the institutions that will be brutally strangled in the new year, but from the rubble of the collapsed attempts that the grifters – who only know how to destroy – erect in their stead. As I mentioned above, American have forgotten why we have institutions like the Security and Exchange Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, and even the Federal Bureau of Investigation. As H.L. Menken alluded, Americans are about to get what they voted for, good and hard.

Look for pyramid schemes and crypto scams to proliferate once the SEC and FTC have their gaze wrenched from digital currencies by the political hacks appointed to ruin them. Expect the financial equivalents of patent medicines and snake oil to saturate advertising channels, as peddlers try to one-up each other with increasingly elaborate schemes. Know what’s cool? Beating the average annual returns of the S&P 500 by buying and holding Bitcoin. Know what’s cooler than that? Beating Bitcoin’s returns with this complex financial derivative that you’ll never be able to explain that uses math you never studied. Long Term Capital Management, who was that?

Look for Americans to relearn the painful lessons of the Cold War when it turns its back on NATO. Ukraine and Moldova will fall without Americans batting an eye. (If they can’t find them on maps, are they actually real countries?) Maybe they will wake up and notice that they can’t make their favorite drinks anymore, because Stolichnaya disappeared from the liquor shelves after Russia correctly decides that America won’t defend its NATO allies Estonia, Latvia (the home of Stoli), and Lithuania, populated with the unfortunate souls living on land between St. Petersburg and Russia’s disconnected territory in Kaliningrad. How far will Russia have to push its sphere of influence before America is (once again) sending its young men and women to defend Europe?

“Do not remove a fence until you know why it was put up in the first place.” – an admonition by G.K. Chesterton to think hard about destroying what we do not know or understand. Advice that that modern day America will be disregarding over the next several years as we bulldoze the structures our grandparents (and their parents) erected for our benefit. What did we expect? We became a nation that doesn’t understand its history and largely treats our government as an inscrutable black box, as opposed to something that we’re all supposed to be working on. There’s not enough School House Rock to turn this tide on its own.

Here's the thing – after sitting with the results of this election for the past two weeks, I’d be happy to hand them the sledgehammers to take out those metaphorical white picket fences. Not because I’ve become a nihilist and no longer value what will be shortly turned to rubble. No, it’s because that this election revealed that there are not enough people like me who still value our institutions to matter electorally anymore. So, let’s crank up the heat on the hot stove that has a line of folks ready to rest their hands on it. Lessons are going to be learned one way or another – if we’re going through the trouble, let’s teach them in a manner that’s not easily forgotten. Not just to the current generation(s), but an education that echoes through those that come afterward as well.

We’re sorry that you’re not getting that inheritance you were expecting, because a con-man convinced Gramps to invest it in a “can’t lose” scheme. We regret that you no longer have cousins to play with over the holidays because your aunt and uncle “did their own research” and came to the conclusion (with the implicit approval of Health and Human Services) that vaccines were part of some vast 5G conspiracy. We’re sorry that your brother has to get around in a wheelchair now, after having both limbs blown off defending American interests in Germany. We’re sorry that all of this was avoidable, and that Americans saw Leeroy Jenkins as a hero to emulate, and not a cautionary tale.

I have to remind myself that the institutions I respect and value didn’t spring up on their fully formed in a vacuum. Just as hard times (supposedly) produces strong men, hard times also produce strong institutions. I can’t tell you how many grandparents will have to start eating dog food before Americans say “Enough!” and begin (re)building structures and laws that keep the thieves away from our elderly. I don’t know how many pandemics we have to weather before remembering that it’s within our power to avoid them. I don’t know how many young Americans have to die or get maimed before we decide that isolationism is a losing strategy long-term. I am confident that the meager ranks of us institutionalists will begin to swell once more, as people get tired of being left not only to their own devices, but to the devices of every predator that sees them as prey.

And let’s be honest – there is a lot in current American institutions that aren’t working all that well at all. Here in Chicago, as Texas shipped their asylum seekers here, we had buses full of able-bodied men and women just wanting to make a living, but our federal laws prohibited them from receiving work permits. Our disability administration is so out of kilter, in that it forces recipients to effectively become wards of the State. (Earn one penny above some threshold, and those payments for medicine and health services vanish.)

While my preference is to repair the parts of the fence that are broken or rotten without ripping the whole thing down, it is coming down, and while the folks tearing it down don’t have a good answer for what should be there instead, that’s no excuse for the institutionalists among us to not be honest about where our institutions failed, what we can do to avoid that failure next time, and how those institutions can concretely demonstrate their value to their constituents, so when the next two-bit authoritarian comes along claiming that the system is broken and only he can fix it, those who would have backed him think twice about what they have to lose supporting him and whether the leopards will end up eating their faces.

I’m posting this Note from the ninth floor of building near downtown Chicago, near the point where the Great Chicago Fire jumped across the river from its cradle in the city’s southwest into the northern neighborhoods. Many strong buildings and families’ homes were destroyed in the conflagration. It was a great tragedy, certainly. But from those ashes, the city of Chicago rose like a phoenix to become the world-class city is today. It became the birthplace of the American skyscraper, and the canvas upon which Daniel Burnham sketched his plans for the city to become “a Paris on the Prairie”.

As our current political conflagration gains strength and we dodge the flames and the smoke, let’s remember that (outside of Centralia, Pennsylvania) no fire burns forever. It either consumes all the fuel that gave life, or does enough damage to bring in the fire fighters. Like the glorious wooden buildings erected in the middle of the 19^th century, our institutions will soon be heaps of burning rubble. However, let us “make no little plans” and begin to envision and design institutions that we’ll be called upon to erect, just as our grandparents did after defeating the authoritarian tyrants in their day.