America's Institutional Crisis, Redux

I've been writing about the topic for a long time. I thought it was timely in 2022. Nope. Too early. I brought it back in July. Still to early. Now? Maybe.

I’ve been thinking about DOGE—The “Department of Government Efficiency” that Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are heading up to restore a bit of sanity and restraint to our government.

I love the steady stream of outrages they talk about targeting. Yet I’m getting a bit concerned—mirroring some of my concerns with education reform. Identifiable outrages are symptoms. Yes, we absolutely need to get rid of these symptoms. But unless we fix the underlying problem, the symptoms will recur. After all, the reason our system produced these outrages is that the system was designed and structured to produce them. They emerged because our bureaucrats are motivated and incented to produce them.

So I’m back to where I was in July, wondering if my 2002 series on institutional reform had been lost because it was premature.

So I’m reprinting July’s piece pointing to the 2022 series. Perhaps now the timing is right. Because if any of you know how to get this material to the DOGE team, I’d appreciate the assistance.

And more importantly, the country will thank you for the service!

That said…

In the Summer of 2022, I wrote a four-part series about America’s institutional crisis. I can sum up the basic argument in a single sentence: The modern world is far too complex to navigate without trusted institutions, yet none of our institutions are trustworthy.

As with many of my thoughts, it’s a problem I’d identified years earlier but waited to synthesize until I thought a critical mass of potential readers might resonate. After all, ideas brought forward too soon often appear “too out there” to be worthy of consideration.

I may have jumped the gun. Two years later, I’m beginning to see murmurs of a broad public recognition of the scope of the problem. So I’ve decided to bring the series forward.

Though my thinking about some of these issues has evolved over the past two years, I defer such updates to a later date. In the meantime, here are pointers back to the original series:

Part 1: Does Widespread Institutional Corruption Spell the End of America?

Part 2: How to Drain the Swamp: Gutting & Rebuilding America’s Public Sector Institutions

Part 3: Saving America’s Private Sector Institutions

Part 4: The Politics of Gutting and Rebuilding America’s Institutions

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For more information about Bruce D. Abramson & American Restorationism, visit: www.BruceDAbramson.com

To learn more about America’s Spiritual Crisis and the new religion of Wokeism, see: American Spirit or Great Awokening? The Battle to Restore or Destroy Our Nation (Academica Press, 2024).

To learn more about how America’s elites destroyed the republic, see: The New Civil War: Exposing Elites, Fighting Utopian Leftism, and Restoring America (RealClear Publishing, 2021).

To learn more about the ideology driving today’s anti-American leftism, see: American Restoration: Winning America’s Second Civil War (Kindle, 2019).

To learn more about our work at the American Coalition for Education and Knowledge, visit us at The Coalition for America.

To learn more about how I turn the ideas I discuss here into concrete projects that serve the interests of my clients, donors, and society at large, please e-mail me at bdabramson@pm.me.