Happy March, everyone!  Well, as happy as March can ever get, anyway.

The Bernie surge--the Burge?--makes me think about a lot of things.  One of the things is the way that a lot of his most fervent supporters explain their support for him in contrastative terms, by disparaging the way things have been, the way "the establishment" wants it to be.  It seems the closer you are to their view, without actually holding their view, the more contempt they heap on you, perhaps in order better to differentiate themselves from you.  Or maybe because they think you are simply too cowardly to accept their view fully. I don't know. I suspect the first is more true than his opponents want it to be, and the second is at least a little true of their psychology as well.  But the first is more more true.  But of course I could be totally crazy.

What I do feel pretty confident about is the way this reminds me of a larger "crisis of instititutions" we're facing now.  I'm not the first person to notice the crisis of institutions, but it seems to me a pretty durable feature of our current situation, popping up again and again, and I'd like all of us to notice it, and name it more often.  (I'd also like us all to be more institutionally-minded than we typically are, but one step at a time.)

The Sanders supporters' hostility to the party, and to people they call "moderates," strikes those moderates (aka me) as bordering on contempt and dismissal.  Then again, maybe we seem to them, with our accusations of naivete and vehemence, to be dismissing them as well.  So maybe it's a wash. 

But it does seem to me to be revelatory of something important--namely, that leftist thinking since at least Marx has often articulated a pretty thin notion of "politics,"and institutional change.  Now that may sound a bit odd--what is Marxism but politics?  But consider--it's actually mostly sociology, and sociology in the form of meterology, of forecasting.  Marx doesn't really have much of a theory of politics, he off-loads it to the category of "revolution" and also to evolutionary change; vide his apocalyptic longing for “the withering away of the state.”  And consider the general avoidance of thinking about institutions by later Marxists: those who came after him (with the interesting though partial exception of Gramsci) also kind of left the actual nitty-gritty of politics in a black box.  (The appeal by the Frankfurt school folks to theological accounts of change, somewhat in Adorno but definitely in Benjamin--divine Gewalt, anyone?--gets at something of what I'm pointing to here.)  The appeal of Hardt and Negri to "multitude" in recent years is only the latest iteration of this.

(BTW: This isn't too surprising, since most leftist thought really emerges from fairly uncompromising, one might even say uncritical, affirmations of modern notions of freedom and agency, and most of those have a pretty uncritical understanding of agency, and of freedom, and that those categories would be put under some pretty serious analysis and critique by my any durable moral psychology, such as my idea of Christianity.  There’s a lot more there, but hey, I’m an Augustinian.  We are finite, and secondary, and mortal, and while the final feature is contingent (sin), the former two are not, and Christianity is a way of us inhabiting that condition.  A big discussion, which I'll not go into here.)

In fact I think the recovery of the language of institutions over the past few years--at least the "recovery" that I want to imagine has been there, among those who bemoan the absence of actual institutions--is intentionally meant (not just by me) to be a counterpoint to the romantic voluntarism at the heart of a lot of leftist politics since 1789.  It's easy to be enthralled by the romance (!!) of movement politics and “assemblies” and the like.  But in fact the boring work of institutions is really important. 

The right (with its suspicion of certain kinds of agency claims, its insistence on hierarchy and power and romance of tradition) sees this better than the left—thus their attention to institutions, and to institution building.  The right's captivity of US politics is not simply a matter of electoral victory; they've engaged in a forty-year planned campaign to change public discourse, with think tanks and media and ideological pressure, and they've moved the Overton window far to the right.  And yet here too, the institutions seem to have unleashed forces that have now turned on them and are consuming them.

In December I heard an interview with the editor of Christianity Today, on NPR, about the editorial they had published, the famous one saying that Donald Trump should be impeached and removed from office. It was what I would’ve expected – – I kind of milquetoast critique of how Donald Trump has, somehow inexplicably, gone bad.  What was interesting, however, was that it turns out the editor who wrote the peace, was retiring in eight days. Thus, he dropped that bomb, and then fled the scene as quickly as he could. Strikes me as exactly the kind of thing that we seen a lot of in recent years from conservatives.  What we’ve seen a lot of from conservatives recently, that is, is an inability to confront the unpleasantness at the head of their movement until they have safely found themselves some old hole in which to flee to after they have announced their mild disapprobation of this monstrosity. (Ben Sasse is a good example of this.)  

However, the behavior that they are exemplifying is not actually all that different from other people on the left. What is happened, it seems to me, is that social media has allowed for a flattening of hierarchies, and a vulnerability of elites to critique and assault from all sorts of perspectives. Anybody can yell at an elite now, and there is no need for anyone to judge them as having legitimate or illegitimate credentials. Everyone looks the same online. On the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog.

The problem with this, is that the elite have a certain logic. You may not like the logic, you may think that the structures as they used to potential themselves are completely unjust, and that is completely within your power to believe that. However, there is such a thing as expertise, and trained disciplined attention and focus and legitimacy. You may not like the methods or the criteria or the systems which produce recognized authorities, but it seems to me that some sort of authority structure is inevitable.

I have already mentioned in previous posts the way that authority structures seem to me to be increasingly important, even while we increasingly distrust authority structures. It seems to me that the way they delete representing themselves in public is part of this. Buy a large, we are mostly cowards, afraid first and foremost of being shamed. Maybe there is something in Augustine to help us think about shame and guilt and how to be a good authority an expert, even while not embodying the fear the reflexive fear of shame.  Maybe we can learn.  Or maybe we know all we need to know, and only need to enact it.

Cheerful, I know.