Zen-ish Thoughts About Dueling, the Mafia, and Trump

The less people trust civil institutions to protect them, the more they turn to personal violence, or to someone who will commit violence on their behalf.

This is not a moral observation. It is a structural one, and once you see it as such, a surprising range of phenomena that are usually treated as "unrelated" problems snap into focus as instances of a single dynamic.

When Violence Is Rational

Before the widespread availability of civil courts and government-provided law enforcement, personal violence was justifiable in many circumstances. Of course violence could be performed unprovoked, disproportionately, or barbarically, but the mere fact of meeting force with force was sensible in a world lacking access to a formal institution for fair adjudication and enforcement. It was the appropriate technology for that world.

If someone wronged you and stole your livestock, dishonored your family, or failed to pay a debt, you had two options: Absorb the loss and define yourself to the community as someone who can be abused without consequence, or provide consequences yourself. The state was not an option because the state, in any meaningful modern sense, barely existed. In a competitive world populated in large part by unscrupulous people, pacifism was an option that invited further abuse. Personal retribution, however problematic, made sense.

Millennia of evolutionary pressure and cultural preservation and glorification of personal retribution find all of us sometimes in that mode even when we have much better options. Some of us live in or very close to that mode all the time.

Honor culture in general, and dueling in particular provide an instructive example. To modern eyes dueling looks like an absurd ritual, two men standing twenty paces apart and firing at each other over an insult – even cooperatively taking turns while they do it. But dueling made sense under pre-institutional conditions. It simultaneously deterred others from going against you, and made personal reputation something much more tangible than "honor" conveys to the modern mind.

Even if you never used a firearm before in your life, it would be hard to miss someone at twenty paces with a modern gun, but in those days of misfiring, projectile inaccuracy, and intentional misses to satisfy form without actually killing resulted in far fewer dueling injuries and deaths than one might imagine. The duel was not primarily about killing as punishment. It was what behavioral scientists call display behavior. Very real, even if largely symbolic. Many animals "fight" this way, avoiding a real fight with real harm unless pressed beyond a fairly high threshold. Dueling was about maintaining a reputation for enforcement (including commitment up to the risk of being killed) in a world where reputation was the only enforcement mechanism available. Personal honor was largely a precursor to civil law – the rules that must be enforced for us to consider ourselves civilized.

Scholars who have studied the decline of dueling find that legal prohibition had remarkably little effect. For example, Louis XIV outlawed it in France in 1679, making it a capital offense with death for the offender and forfeiture of noble titles and confiscation of estates for his survivors. Even in the face of those penalties, his officers fought an estimated 10,000 duels during the several following decades before dueling actually came to an end. What precipitated the actual end was the credible extension of civil authority into disputes that had previously been private, along with an increase in dueling deaths as firearm technology became more reliably lethal. As the state became an accepted adjudicator of civil disputes and enforcer of civil law, personal enforcement became first unnecessary and later not just archaic but "barbaric and stupid". Barbaric and stupid is in the eye of the beholder, in the context of the culture.

Note well that the concept of the duel – a violent contest to "prove" who is right, to defend "honor", to create and maintain a "don't mess with me" reputation – persists in many forms, from bar fights to criminal enterprises to international wars. Even our legal system is just a sublimation of the same dynamic. It's not about finding the truth or about what is morally best. It's about which champion prevails within the confines of a highly ritualized contest. We weakly express a preference for truth and justice, but we sacrifice them as a matter of routine, sometimes even as a matter of policy.

Look how not-archaic and not-stupid even brutal personal enforcement is in contexts where no civil authority is credibly present. If you are in a criminal enterprise, you cannot rely on the courts to enforce your contracts, protect your territory, or protect your right to retain property you illegally hold. If you live in a place where the police in particular or the government in general repeatedly aids anyone other than you, and takes unwarranted actions against you and others deemed to be like you, you are not going to call on these agencies to assist you. If you appear to have access to appropriate institutions but they repeatedly let you down, at some point you learn contempt for those institutions, or at least not take them seriously, instead of continuing to defer to them. If you are in the MAGA sphere of influence, in which all civil institutions are seen as malignancies, everything is permitted in the name of self-defense.

The Dynamic

Personal enforcement, whether individual violence, organized crime, or political violence, fills the vacuum when civil institutions don't exist or when they are not deemed credible.

This is why the American South maintained a dueling culture long after the North had abandoned it. Southern civil authority was less developed and less trusted. Disputes were more likely to fall outside the reach of courts. Dueling persisted because the social conditions that made dueling rational persisted longer.

The South also illustrates that distrust of institutions can be deployed selectively. When federal Reconstruction enforcement withdrew from the South after 1877, White Southerners who regarded the occupying institutions as illegitimate immediately reverted to personal enforcement via lynchings, night riding, excessive conviction of Blacks on little or no evidence, convict leasing (of largely Black labor) backed by terror, and systematic disenfranchisement maintained by violence. The institutions were not accepted as legitimate in that domain. A person who can't imagine violating a court order about a business deal might participate in a lynching and not feel any conflict.

In each case one imagines he is just doing what any sensible person would do. People do this all the time in many areas of life. This is especially visible in the selective adoption of religious teachings one likes as being sacrosanct at the same time the same person ignores teachings from the same religion if they happen not to like them. Sometimes naked and usually heavily rationalized, this is done by everyone in every religion.

The Mafia arose in the late 19th century under conditions of near-total institutional failure: absentee landlords, predatory government, courts that were either inaccessible or corrupt, and no reliable property rights for ordinary people. The Mafia provided, at a price, what the state did not: enforcement of contracts, protection of property, and resolution of disputes. Its brutality was not incidental to this function. You trust the Mafia to enforce your contract because you have seen what happens to people who break contracts with the Mafia. You don't violate your contract with the Mafia, or resist their insinuation into your life, because you know what they do in response to such acts.

The same structural logic explains the Yakuza in postwar Japan, filling enforcement vacuums in a shattered economy and discredited state. It is present in the IRA's community policing role in Republican areas of Northern Ireland, where British civil authority was experienced not as protection but as occupation. In each case the same pattern holds: Institutional absence or institutional hostility produces demand for alternative adjudication and enforcement, and someone supplies it. The list of instances is sadly endless.

Manufactured Illegitimacy

Threats operate whether they are genuine or fabricated. Politicians have leveraged this since the dawn of politicians. That is, they find lying about the threat posed by their opponents, and their own unique ability to counter those threats, to be a very valuable tool. Until recently, that came with a caveat of needing not to get caught in one's lies, to preserve the appearance of playing fairly, honestly, openly, and with principle.

Trump has systematically dismantled that constraint, and the GOP has assisted him, partly because his base either has lying-blindness when looking at Trump, or as we will emphasize below, one's Liberator is allowed to walk a broad path. That very allowance even reinforces the idea of how special he is, how much leeway and reward he deserves for all the "good" he is doing.

Trump has spent years, from before his first campaign and throughout both of his presidencies, engaged in systematic delegitimization of American civil institutions. The courts are corrupt and politically motivated. The FBI and Justice Department were a weaponized deep state until he turned them into … oh wait, a weaponized deep state … don't look. Elections were rigged. A free press is the enemy of the people. The military brass were incompetent until he replaced them. The civil service was a swamp of saboteurs. The Clintons were pizza parlor pedophiles. Obama was a foreigner and therefore an illegitimate president, as well as a deceitful, closet Muslim.

Each such claim is wildly disproportionate to the facts or in most cases entirely false. Why doesn't that go against him? Because the net effect has been that a large group of Americans who already experienced civil authority as secretly illegitimate and hostile to them got their view validated, and the "evil" was exposed on one of the world's largest stages thanks to him. It is a Liberation.

You don't fret much over the scruples of your Liberator. And when your group is exactly the group the GOP has cynically courted and empowered ever since it became too politically expensive to be openly racist, you get, "What insurrection?" You get, "I wish I had been there." You get anything but honesty and accountability.

After the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Republican Party made a conscious strategic decision to absorb the racially resentful White Southern vote that the Democrats had lost. What began as sometime explicit and sometimes thinly veiled racist appeals gradually expanded into a coalition built around cultural displacement and grievance. Simply put, alienated White Protestants in the South were a group large enough to win elections, in search of a party that would "set things right" in their view. The GOP was a party so interested in its own preservation that it didn't care whose votes created their electoral wins, and in any case they largely agreed with the racist position, and with the paranoia that the only good government is a tiny government.

Their actual track record amply displays that they are not actually fiscally conservative, and that they don't care about families, or people in general. When they say "small government" they specifically mean small governmental impact on people who are already privileged and powerful, and policies that have a large impact on coercively constraining everyone else. But their lies are so compelling for their base that facts literally don't matter. From Spiro Agnew's railing against "effete intellectual snobs" to Trump's insistence that immigrants are eating people's pets, the modern GOP has become more and more brazen and effective in its manufacturing of fake threats with real payoffs. Agnew's career was ended when he was caught taking bribes and evading taxes. Trump's career is largely composed of taking bribes and evading taxes.

By the time Trump arrived, decades of deliberate cultivation had produced a base primed to believe that the institutions of American life were arrayed against them on purpose and with prejudicial malice. Trump did not invent the persecution narrative. He inherited a machine built to stoke it, and became its most provocative, unfettered, unhinged stoker.

While being the most institutionally connected and protected Americans, White Protestants were given a bold cover story of their alleged persecution and displacement, attuned to their existing resistance to civil rights, women's rights, science, and anything not ethnocentrically Male White Protestant and recognizably part of their cultural traditions. They were told the country is being taken from them, that the institutions that once protected their dominance now work against them, that they are the most put-upon group in America. Since the country is "theirs" (being taken from them), it must have always been meant to be theirs, hence the fact-denying hallucination that this country was intentionally founded as a Christian nation. Given the low quality of American education, and especially of their education, trampling over historical facts is as simple as making an unfounded and indefensible assertion. Trump is great at that, and his crew members revel in following his liberating lead.

The numerical and cultural preeminence of White Protestant men has truly waned, but their actual circumstances continue to primarily reflect their own choices in education, physical and mental health practices, de facto social policies, and who they vote for – in short, the culture they proudly perpetuate. Their so-called persecution is a fabrication, but that does not diminish the extent to which that fable helps them embrace violence and oppression, and support Trump's violence, and his destruction of democratic principles and governmental institutions that they continue to depend upon, or refuse to utilize, or actively sabotage, in apparent ignorance. These are people who think ObamaCare is horrible socialism but ACA (ObamaCare's other name) is great. These people reliably rail against gun control, and suffer the most from gun-related crime and death. They are people who don't fund their education institutions, and complain that people find them to be uneducated. These people keep inventing new disguises for Jim Crow laws, and take offense when they are called out for being racist. When people describe them as both mean and stupid, it's not baseless slander.

It is worth noting that Trump's coalition is not exclusively White Christian men, and the framework here actually explains why. The champion / liberator dynamic does not require you to share the primary tribe's demographic profile. Indeed, they may rally behind you precisely because you will do for them what they will not or cannot do for themselves – because of the champion not being just like them, even as they pretend that their commonality goes beyond a temporal alignment of who to cast as the enemy. Some supporters, including many women and people of color, are drawn to his relentless ferocity and appearance of strength, despite his whining, self-contradiction, lying, brutality, and the fact that he so clearly is not one of them, and has no interest in them that is not self-serving. You don't question your Liberator. If he is against anything you feel aggrieved about, and he is strong, then he is your man.

This is why facts don't enter into the discussion in a meaningful way. This is why looking for dialog with them instead of just condemning them is like expecting the Jehovah's Witness who knocks on your door to be genuinely interested in converting to your religion. There are reasons for being a Trump supporter (traceable paths that lead to that), but there are no excuses (no moral justifications that render the economy or even tribal preservation above gross inhumanity and the rule of law, no way to side-step the fact that he has been disastrous for the economy so that's just bs on its face.)

Enter the Champion

Before states monopolized violence, before civil courts and civil law enforcement, personal retribution or a champion as proxy were often the only protection available to ordinary people. The perceived illegitimacy of an institution is worse than its non-existence, in that it compounds any original issue with anger about an unfairly imposed "fake" institution – an active suppression of what is "right". A retribution's legitimacy is not derived from institutional or moral authority, although it is commonly framed as the latter. It comes from the demonstrated willingness and capacity to fight and win for "our side". That alone makes Trump their Golden Warrior, even though he is transparently not actually on their side any more than any hired mercenary would be.

Trump fits this template with remarkable precision – not a statesman, not a policy expert, not a competent administrator, not one of their own (certainly not a good Christian or a person with any connection to their financial circumstances), but as their champion. His appeal is not that he will govern well. It is that he will hurt the people they want to hurt, to first "even the score" and then to finally prevail over their "oppressors". He is visibly aggressive, visibly contemptuous of institutional constraints, and visibly willing to do things that polite civil society forbids. He demonstrates constantly that he is not bound by the rules of a system his supporters regard as their enemy. He is a "hero".

This is why his obvious personal corruption and incompetence are not disqualifying. In a world of legitimate institutions, corruption is a betrayal of the public trust, and incompetence is fatal. In a world where public trust in institutions is lacking, and "the whole system is rigged against you", a champion who enriches himself at the expense of your enemies, or even at your expense, while blathering like an idiot, while violating principles you claim to hold dear, is still your champion as long as you remain convinced that he is causing your enemies more pain than he is causing you. He is simply getting paid and adored for winning, which is what champions do. He is the proxy hired to fight the duel on your behalf.

The Protection Racket

A champion who benefits from institutional distrust has every incentive to sustain and deepen that distrust, and this is Trump's most powerful move. The lower institutional legitimacy falls, the more indispensable the champion becomes. The more indispensable the champion becomes, the more power he accumulates. The more power he accumulates, the more effectively he can drive institutional legitimacy further down. Begin with rhetoric explaining that all your problems are caused by (the Jews in Nazi Germany or) the government in America today. Then destroy governmental and other civic institutions as aggressively as you can. At the least, this reduces their ability to get in your way. At most, it simultaneously puts them under your thumb while anything they do "wrong" can be presented as further evidence of how deserving they are of even more punishment, and imposed changes in leadership and charter.

The defining feature of a protection racket is that the threat being protected against is substantially created or maintained by the "protector". The Mafia does not simply respond to a dangerous environment. It creates and manages the danger that makes protection necessary. It "protects" you against the very things it produces. Protection racket is not a metaphor for Trump. It is a plain-language description.

Trump spent years proclaiming the institutional illegitimacy that made him seem necessary. He continues to do so every time he speaks. Each attack on the courts, the press, the electoral system, the civil service, and anyone who displeases him is not merely an immature and fact-free expression of grievance or an exercise of power. It is maintenance work on the infrastructure of his power. It is the problem he produces from which only he can provide "protection".

Same Logic, Larger Scale

The United Nations was intended to be for nations precisely what civil courts are to individuals, a trusted third party capable of adjudicating disputes and enforcing those judgements, making violence unnecessary and illegitimate. That vision has failed. The Security Council veto ensures that great powers can never be held accountable by the body. Debate and enforcement have been biased enough to destroy the institution's credibility as a neutral arbiter. Self-serving politics, the antithesis of what the UN is supposed to be about, play a gigantic role in its actual operation. This is an institution that has done a great deal to ensure it is not seen as legitimate.

The result is exactly what the dynamic described here predicts. Nations revert to personal enforcement, which at the nation-state level means war, proxy war, and nuclear arms racing as a dueling-style device, partly display behavior meant to deter an actual fight, and partly real fighting with real deaths and devastation. The rhetoric of international conflict is saturated with honor culture language, respect, humiliation, strength, weakness, enemies who must be made to pay, because the underlying psychology is identical to the psychology of the pre-institutional duel.

What This Explains

The inverse relationship between institutional trust and use of violence, whether personal, political, or military, is not a new observation in political science or sociology. State capacity theorists have documented it. Honor culture researchers have traced it. Historians of organized crime have described it in detail. Students of international relations have their own vocabulary for it.

The point here is that these are all instances of a single dynamic. The man defending honor with a pistol, the Mafioso enforcing a contract, the political movement rallying behind a champion, and the nation launching a war it frames as self-defense are all responding to the same underlying condition with the same underlying logic: Institutions to handle this either don't exist or are not deemed legitimate, so I have to do it myself or get a champion, and since it's self-defense, lethal force is explicitly allowed and most horrific acts will be ignored.

Institutions earn legitimacy by delivering on their promises equitably, and lose it when they fail to do so – whether through neglect, corruption, or deliberate sabotage. America has had all three failure modes in abundance. The predictable result is exactly what the dynamic highlighted in this essay describes: A population that is primed for champions and contemptuous of the ordinary rules those champions will break on their behalf. The unpredicted result? We have arrived at a point where such a population is capable of and apparently quite interested in destroying the meta-institution of democracy itself.

What Legitimate Institutions Actually Look Like

The question is not whether we know what legitimate institutions look like. We do. The question is whether we are willing to build them. Courts that don't systematically produce outcomes aligned with wealth and Whiteness. A press that functions as a public trust rather than a profit center. Politicians who pay a career-ending price for dishonesty rather than harvesting it as a competitive advantage. Agencies that do their actual jobs – an EPA that restricts toxins, a Department of Health that follows science, a Homeland Security that secures rather than terrorizes. An economy in which the distance between the top and bottom does not itself constitute a form of institutional failure, signaling to hundreds of millions of people that the system was not built for them.

These are not wild, leftist fantasies. Ideas of this type have existence proofs that they work. Here are a few examples.

Portugal was not a promising candidate for institutional innovation. A traditional, Catholic country that had lived under dictatorship until 1974, in 2001 it was facing a public health crisis: Roughly 1 person out of 100 was addicted to heroin. As in most countries, they were either incarcerated, left in the misery that narcotics addiction brings, or died. With over 40% of sentenced inmates serving time for drug offenses, the crisis continued to worsen. The retribution model was there as elsewhere, a complete failure.

Under new law, personal possession of drugs became a health matter, handled by medical and social work people instead of prosecutors and prisons. Institutionally, Portugal had stopped punishing people for having a problem and started trying to solve it. The conflict between drug user and the government did not disappear, but its character changed: Where the state had been an adversary to be avoided, it became – imperfectly, unevenly, but measurably – a resource to be utilized. Treatment access within 30 days of needing it went from 25% to 66%. Overdose deaths fell 77% over two decades. Public support for the approach rose from 38% to 82% – because the institution was delivering on its promise. Portugal did not eliminate its drug problem, and it has poverty and immigration issues, like all countries, it is complex enough to have a frankly common array of challenges. But they made one particular institution legitimately responsive to people's needs, dramatically improving the lives of over a hundred thousand people, and tens of thousands more over time, while reducing government spend and having a net positive impact on the whole country.

The dynamic described here ran in the predicted direction. Instead of "defending honor" by punishing drug addicts who were already miserable and dying anyway, to no effect, instead of institutionalized retribution for a transgression, an institution that began to legitimately live up to its promise to actually help people materially reduced a real problem for individuals, families, and society. It was not impossible. It was not economically infeasible. It was a policy choice.

Explicitly guided by research rather than prevailing sentiment, beginning around 1960, Finland embarked on a program to radically reduce incarceration rates without having a corresponding rise in crime. The redesign was concrete. Most Finnish prisoners serve their sentences in open facilities – they live in unlocked rooms, hold outside jobs, and return each evening. The explicit design philosophy is that a prisoner is a citizen serving time, not an enemy being warehoused. The institution delivers the sentence without stripping the person of the dignity and habits that make reintegration possible.

What happened in the long-term? Between 1975 and 1998, the Finnish prison population rate did not rise at all. Today, Finland incarcerates 60 people per 100,000 residents. The United States incarcerates 698, 1,160% as many. The re-imprisonment rate within two years of release is roughly half the American rate.

A state that treats a problem based on empirical data instead of political pandering builds institutions around what actually works. It delivers on its promises and earns a relationship with its population that build trust and pride. Finland has domestic violence, racism, and a growing far right. It is not a perfect civilization. But where it made one institutional change carefully and supported it consistently over decades, and the predicted results followed. It was not impossible. It was not economically infeasible. It was a policy choice.

America has its own proofs of concept, the best of which are currently under deliberate attack.

Before Social Security, old age in America was a private problem solved privately or in most cases, going unsolved. Between a third and a half of elderly Americans lived in poverty. Pause. A third to a half of grandparents who worked their entire lives and still had families who cared about them nevertheless lived in poverty. Thirty states had pension programs by 1935, but only 3% of the elderly were actually receiving benefits, and the average was just 65 cents a day (just $15 today). The conflict between the needs of the elderly and the capacity of any institution to meet them was resolved by a huge subset of the elderly barely getting by, until they died.

Due to Social Security, elderly poverty fell from roughly 35% in 1960 to under 10% by the mid-1990s. The National Bureau of Economic Research found that increased Social Security benefits explain essentially all of the decline in poverty that occurred between 1967 and 2000. People who had been managing an unmanageable problem alone – or dying with it – now had an institution that showed up for them reliably, month after month. Social Security is the most politically defended program in American history, not because politicians protect it but because the population protects it against politicians. We are now faced with the threat of losing this actually successful institution because some politicians find it advantageous to cast it as both economically infeasible (despite its decades of self-funded existence), and as a form of – gasp – socialism for losers.

Here is a dirty little secret about Social Security. The original Act excluded agricultural and domestic workers – occupations that encompassed roughly 65% of Black workers at the time – at the insistence of Southern politicians determined to ensure that federal benefits would not disturb the racial and economic order of the South. Yeah, they did it again. The result was unambiguous: An institution that delivered equitably to some and denied delivery to others produced exactly the partial legitimacy one would expect. The exclusion was incompletely corrected in 1950. This best of all programs is deficient, but why does it succeed where it does? It succeeds where it proves its legitimacy by delivering on its promise so people don't have to solve everything on their own. This is the same dynamic we have been discussing throughout.

Medicare followed the same logic as Social Security fifteen years later, and its opponents understood the stakes clearly enough to fight it with everything they could.

By 1962, 48% of elderly Americans had no health insurance. Private insurers had largely declined to cover them – too old, too sick, too expensive. America is the land of capitalism being so over-emphasized that profit matters more than death itself, even in government policy. The market had rendered its verdict: this population was not worth serving. The government, it was argued, had no role to play in this. In 1964, only one in four elderly Americans had what was then considered adequate hospital coverage. People who needed medical care either paid until bankrupt, relied on family until family couldn't, or went without care, even if it would have been life-saving.

The opposition to fixing this was organized, lavishly funded, and explicit about its strategy. The American Medical Association launched Operation Coffee Cup in 1961, distributing to the wives of physicians across the country a vinyl record on which a middle-aged actor named Ronald Reagan warned that Medicare was "a short step to all the rest of socialism," that if it passed, doctors would be told by the government where to live and where to practice, and that "you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it once was like in America when men were free." The women were instructed to play the record at coffee gatherings and then have their guests write personalized letters to Congress. The AMA described Medicare as "the most deadly challenge ever faced by the medical profession."

The term "socialized medicine" was coined at the dawn of the Cold War specifically to suggest that anyone advocating healthcare access must be a communist. It worked for two decades. Medicare was defeated repeatedly before finally passing in 1965.

What followed made the prediction look ridiculous. Within three years of implementation, nearly 20 million beneficiaries had enrolled. The uninsured rate among the elderly fell from 48% to what is today 2%. Life expectancy at age 65 increased by 15% between 1965 and 1984, compared with 5% in the preceding fifteen years. Seventy-seven percent of Americans now describe Medicare as very important to the country.

Barely known today, Medicare eliminated hospital segregation. Participation in Medicare required provider compliance with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Hospitals that wanted Medicare reimbursement – which was essentially all of them – had to integrate. In less than four months, hospitals integrated their medical staffs, waiting rooms, and patient floors. Between 1961 and 1968, hospitalization rates for Black Americans over 65 jumped by 61%, compared to 38% for Whites. The gap in access that the market had maintained for decades closed rapidly once an institution arrived that delivered equitably as a condition of participation.

This is what "socialized medicine" actually produced: an institution that served people the market had abandoned, enforced civil rights the market had ignored, and earned legitimacy durable enough that sixty years later it remains politically untouchable – not because politicians protect it, but because the population protects it against politicians. Reagan's prediction was not just wrong. It was precisely inverted. Freedom was not curtailed. It was extended – to the 48% of elderly Americans who had been one serious illness away from destitution, and to the Black Americans who had been turned away from hospitals that their own taxes helped fund. The "horror of socialism" turned out to be: grandma and grandpa could see a doctor instead of suffering for the crime of being too old to work in a country where health insurance only goes to employees and rich people.

And yet, the fabricated fear of the "horrors of socialized medicine" threaten its destruction now, decades of life-saving and quality of life help to millions of people be damned.

Social Security and Medicare together currently keep roughly 22 million Americans out of poverty. They are imperfect, unevenly distributed, and still incomplete. They should be expanded, not curtailed. And they are currently under deliberate attack – not to improve them, but to degrade their delivery enough that people lose faith in the institution itself.

Administrative costs at the Social Security Administration are less than 1% of total spending. Cutting 7,000 Social Security employees – less than 0.1% (less than one tenth of one percent) of operational costs – does not produce meaningful savings. What it does do is increase delays, close offices, interrupt benefits distribution, and tell 70 million people that the institution they paid into across their working lifetime and depend upon to pay their bills during their retirement years cannot be depended upon. Why? Because politicians who work with a high salary, top tier healthcare, and innumerable perks and get a lifetime pension after working only a few years think they should work until age 70 and then just die without making a fuss. Lost institutional legitimacy increases demand for champions who promise to fix it, even if those champions are the very people who caused the broke the institution. This is not a coincidence. It is the plan for retaining office when you have nothing to offer people that is actually good for them because you forever pander to those who are already wealthy and powerful, because you don't actually object to the suffering of poor people, or people of color, or old people, or even children.

Social Security and Medicare were not impossible, not economically infeasible. They were a policy choice. Their destruction is also a policy choice.

Germany in 1945 presents the most complete institutional collapse in modern history. Every institution of civil society – courts, press, universities, churches, the civil service – had been conscripted into the service of genocide, and then the war destroyed what was left physically, morally, and financially. The question facing the people who designed the Basic Law of 1949 was not abstract. They knew, from direct and recent experience, what happens when institutions fail and champions are given power to "fix" things. They had just lived through a most catastrophic version of that story.

Their response was to build institutions specifically designed to resist that dynamic. Emergency powers were tightly constrained, because Hitler had used Weimar's emergency provisions to seize control legally. The Constitutional Court was granted real authority to overrule parliamentary majorities, because majorities can be captured by demagogues, and by their own self-interest in reelection. A "militant democracy" clause allowed the banning of parties that sought to destroy democratic institutions from within. These were not idealistic provisions. They were engineering decisions, made by people who understood precisely what they were guarding against.

Over the following decades, millions of West Germans transferred genuine civic loyalty to those institutions rather than to ethnic identity, historical mythology, or strongmen. The Constitutional Court became, by the end of the century, the most trusted institution in the German state. Verfassungspatriotismus – constitutional patriotism, loyalty to the values and structures of the constitution itself rather than to any ethnic or nationalist idea of belonging – was not a natural sentiment. It was deliberately cultivated, and when it was it took hold. This was not impossible, though it certainly seemed so. It was not economically infeasible, even though the economy had collapsed. It was a policy choice, and they took it.

Germany today has the AfD (Alternative for Germany), which has ties to extreme right wing groups that are themselves illegal or barely skirting the law. Despite its historically unprecedented accomplishment in banning its own worst actors, Germany is not immune. An asset it has that the United States lacks is a constitution explicitly designed to resist this, institutions that have accumulated genuine credibility over 75 years, and a living cultural memory of where the alternative leads. So far, the institutions have held – not because Germans are better people, but because someone deliberately built institutions worth holding. Will they fail? They may. But Germany has given us an amazing example of good policy doing good things no one had a right to expect. If it fails, it will only be because it did not go far enough, not because it was not the right direction to take.

Closer to the daily life most of us live, we know a lot about the conditions in which crime thrives. Reforming those conditions produces better results than attempting to reform people whose circumstances make crime a rational if regrettable response. The same logic applies at every scale. Moving toward a more level playing field – economically, in healthcare, in education, in basic food security and housing – is not charity. It is the mechanism by which institutional legitimacy is built and violence is made unnecessary. Those improvements also deprive bad faith politics of its most essential fuel.

Each of these ideas is a policy choice, always resisted as if they violate an inevitable law of nature, economic feasibility, or moral correctness. In fact, each of these is morally correct and realistically achievable, and in many cases proved out by already operating well in other countries. The interest in pursuing them currently gets described as unrealistic, un-American, radically leftist evil – which is itself evidence of how far the protection racket has advanced since Reagan, Friedman, et al. convinced the US that self-interest is the very engine of progress for all.

The tenuousness of even the best accomplishments of the type used here for illustration is an important message. Humans and their societies are so inescapably diverse and vulnerable to manipulation that a utopian steady state will never be achieved. Despite the understandable desire some people have to manufacture a non-diverse population with an unperturbable guidance system, the human condition precludes such an outcome, as history has shown at every opportunity. The conclusion? We don't get to opt out of paying attention and staying engaged unless we are willing to passively side with the next resurgence of needless suffering, whatever form it happens to take today.

Stop accepting that government-run means poorly run. The DMV and the Post Office are punchlines precisely because we fund and administer them to produce that result. That is a choice, not a law of nature or a requirement of economic feasibility. It's a product of our policy priorities, of what we actually value most and least. Politicians should once again pay a career-ending price for not at least maintaining the appearance of being honorable. Letting every transgression pass – we now elect convicted felons and sexual predators – is an expression of the gulf between government and the people it is meant to serve.

Privatizing essential services has not improved them. It has made them profitable for some and inaccessible to others. We have the privatized and most expensive healthcare system in the developed world, delivering great stock returns and super wealthy CEOs, along with third-tier public health outcomes to millions who cannot afford basic medications or insurance itself. This is what institutional abandonment looks like. This, sadly, is what actual American priorities look like.

Building institutions that deserve trust is not a giveaway to the undeserving. It is the only alternative to the cycle of optional suffering this essay has described. More simply, how could building institutions that deserve trust not be the right thing to do? It's really not complicated, just difficult.

Dueling ended not because people became more civilized, but because something better was offered and made credible. That is how a culture becoming more civilized actually happens. Portugal showed it in a particular domain. Finland too, and has kept it going over decades. Social Security and Medicare showed it here, in this country, against fierce opposition, and the results have outlasted every attempt so far to take them back. Germany showed what it looks like to build institutions specifically designed to prevent the worst from happening again – and shows, right now, that the worst is always trying to happen again. We need to build institutions worth holding onto. We need to actively hold onto them.