New Localism and Old Institutions
1st May 2018
It’s been widely noted that trust in institutions has been declining across the board in America. Government, religion, media, and business have all seen declining trust. To be quite honest, that decline in trust is deserved. These institutions by and large are not meeting the challenges of our present day and are often dysfunctional.
The root of this at some level is the maturity curve. Our institutions are old and either in maturity or decline. (As I’ve observed many times, one reason sprawly suburbs seem so great in the now is simply that they are new, and so in the youth phases of their lifecycle).
At some level it’s hard to appreciate how old many of our institutions are. Some of them date to the American founding or before. Others are legacies of the 19th century or the New Deal. The high water mark of institutions was in the immediate postwar era – the Marshall Plan, NATO, the UN, the institutional infrastructure between things like the interstate highway system, structures like the GI bill, a then decently functioning corporatist combination of big business and big unions, and many other things.
But World War II ended almost 75 years ago. This is roughly the same distance as from the Civil War to World War I, and from the Revolution to the Civil War. These roughly 70 to 80 year epochs (the span of a human life, interestingly), produced major institutional resets in America, often after a process of upheaval. If history is any guide, we’re due for another one. (I gather that this might be the premise behind the book The Fourth Turning, which I have not read. My observations are my own, but I think rather obvious).