brendan halpin

I try to stay away from the NYT editorial page, but today someone linked approvingly to a piece by David Brooks (I’m not linking to it because the hell with David Brooks and the New York Times. If you’re interested, it’s not hard to find) in which he tiptoes right up to the point and then misses it entirely.

Brooks offers the insight that the MAGA cult has a distrust of institutions and people who have been venerated by them. And then says, well, they’re wrong, and instead of people who want to tear institutions down, we need people who will lovingly reform them from the inside, like some guy did at some military training school.

In short, Brooks, a classic establishment conservative, asserts, like classic establishment liberals, that institutions are inherently worth saving because they are institutions.

This, of course, is ridiculous on its face. Institutions have no inherent value. Their only value comes from their usefulness to people. Once they stop being useful, they should be abolished. This, by the way, is essentially the point of The Declaration of Independence.

But I suppose Brooks would have read that document and said, “people who understand the value of being colonized should work to reform colonization from the inside rather than rashly throwing the entire colonial system away!”

It is terrifying to establishment centrists to imagine a world without the institutions that have rewarded them for their loyalty, but we do away with institutions all the time. There are big examples, like entire systems of government, or chattel slavery, and small examples, like how Massachusetts banned dog racing a few years back. Some institutions are so fundamentally corrupt they do not deserve to be reformed. They just need to be abolished.

To be clear, I think MAGA fascism is a deeply evil grift, but the idea that Brooks finds so dangerous—that our institutions are rotten—is correct. It’s just that the MAGA diagnosis of why the institutions don’t work is wrong. And the remedy they propose, which seems to be sucking as much public money into private pockets as possible while running the entire country into the ground and cruelly persecuting anyone who’s not a rich white guy, is awful.

But look at the US Supreme Court, which is corrupt both ideologically and financially. Tell me that’s an institution worth saving. Hell, look at the US Senate, which was designed to force unpopular positions on a majority of the people in this country and is working exactly as designed. Why, exactly, should we preserve this relic of chattel slavery and not chuck in the dumpster of history? Why do we still have a patchwork of cruel and inept health insurers instead of national healthcare? Why save a system that causes misery?

I could go on and on (and on!), but I think you get my point. One reason fascism has been able to thrive in the US is that it has correctly identified what most Americans know from painful personal experience, which is that our systems and institutions are broken. Until non-fascists can acknowledge this truth, they’ll always be at a disadvantage.