Elaine Kamarck, a long-time Democratic party intellectual, has a new little op-ed out from Brookings.  She's arguing for an increased role for what she calls "peer review" in the Democratic presidential primary process.  In fact what she means is "increaased selection power for recognized authorities," since if she wanted "peer review" it would mean, you know, that those who had already been President, or perhaps more generously (or accurately) those who had been Democratic nominees for President, would fit in that category.  But she means to count people like herself--Bigwig DNC people, and the like.  

It's not a silly argument.  I agree that elite voices should matter more.  Certainly peers of the Presidency should be taken with utmost seriousness.  Perhaps no job has a steeper learning curve than the President of the United States except, maybe, becoming Pope, or becoming a parent.  (I actually mean that.)  Those who have sat in the Oval Office have an unbelievably unique perspective.  The way we use ex-Presidents suggests that.  (Right now I think Donald Trump will have to be kept away from these roles, as some part of a larger damnatio memoriae of him, but I am so emotionally enraged by this president that I am not sure we should trust my own view, right now; but that's another topic.)

But what Kamarck's argument is unfortunately heavily larded with the kind of sophistry political thinking doesn't deserve.  Peer review is not the same thing as giving a greater voice to authorities.  As someone who has a few decades' experience of dealing with peer review, as an author, as a reviewer, and as the editor of a major journal, I am quite enthusiastic about it.  

But that's not what Kamarck is actually arguing for, despite her rhetoric.  "Peers" are authorities, but not all authorities are peers.  I wish she wouldn't flippantly employ the name of a practice that I suspect she only obliquely participates in and understands.  (The relationship between academia and think tanks is a complicated one, to say the least.)  She's worried about centrist governors being kept out of the contest while rich people (like Andrew Yang) and new age celebrities (like Maryanne Williamson) are allowed in.  (Don't get me started on how Bernie Sanders, who has never really been a Democrat, has become so powerful a presence in the party.)  I agree she has something to worry about there, and we should share her worries.  

But I don't know if it's primarily a matter of elites being edged out of control.  In fact I think that Kamarck's post points to a larger struggle happening now--the struggle about elites and other authorities as part of the crisis of institutions we are currently undergoing.  This is a larger problem, but you can only understand Kamarck's rather rhetorically desperate hail-mary pass at trying to re-establish the street cred of the older institutionally-anchored (Brookings! DNC!) figures.  It won't work, but it is symptomatic.

Many people writing on this, like Derek Thompson in the Atlantic piece just linked to above, seem content to describe this without hypothesizing about the deep structures of culture and society moving things around.  That's ok; they're journalists, it's not their job to go deep.  But they might notice that in fact opportunities for--longings for--a new institutionalism are palpable in the people they report on:

The older working-class men in the paper desperately want meaning in their lives, but they lack the social structures that have historically been the surest vehicles for meaning-making. They want to be fathers without nuclear families. They want spirituality without organized religion. They want psychic empowerment from work in an economy that has reduced their economic power. They want freedom from pain and misery at a time when the pharmaceutical solutions to those maladies are addictive and deadly. They want the same pride and esteem and belonging that people have always wanted.

The ends of Millennials and Gen Z are similarly traditional. The WSJ/NBC poll found that, for all their institutional skepticism, this group was more likely than Gen Xers to value “community involvement” and more likely than all older groups to prize “tolerance for others.” This is not the picture of a generation that has fallen into hopelessness, but rather a group that is focused on building solidarity with other victims of economic and social injustice. Younger generations have been the force behind equality movements such as Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, #AbolishICE, and Medicare for All, not only because they’re liberal, and not only because they have the technological savvy to organize online, but also because their experience in this economy makes them exquisitely sensitive to institutional abuses of power, and doubly eager to correct it. What Americans young and old are abandoning is not so much the promise of family, faith, and national pride as the trust that America’s existing institutions can be relied on to provide for them.

The authors of the paper on working-class men note that, even as their subjects have suffered a shock, and even as they’re nostalgic for the lives of their fathers and grandfathers—the stable wages, the dependable pensions—there is a thin silver lining in the freedom to move beyond failed traditions. Those old manufacturing jobs were routine drudgery, those old churches failed their congregants, and traditional marriages subjugated the female half of the arrangement. “These men are showing signs of moving beyond such strictures,” the authors write. “Many will likely falter. Yet they are laying claim to a measure of autonomy and generativity in these spheres that were less often available in prior generations. We must consider both the unmaking and remaking aspects of their stories.”

And there is the brutal truth: Many will likely falter. They already are. Rising anxiety, suicide, and deaths of despair speak to a profound national disorder. But eventually, this stage of history may be recalled as a purgatory, a holding station between two eras: one of ostensibly strong, and quietly vulnerable, traditions that ultimately failed us, and something else, between the unmaking and the remaking.

What's weird is that, just when we talk about this "crisis of institutions," certain other institutions are going gangbusters.  Whatever the turbulence of the modern economy, business flourishes--even to the degree that it doesn't need large generalized support for it (as most people distrust "business").  For all our complaining about social media, more than a third of humanity are on Facebook, isn't that right?  And ethno-nationalism is definitely speaking to more "informal" institutions like race and ethnic identity.  So the crisis is not dissolving us into a soup of anomic individuals; rather, we're definitely being formed by institutions. The question is, which ones?

I believe it was Robert Bellah, channelling Durkheim, who said that we live in a liminal age, where the old gods are dying, but the new ones are not yet born.  The crisis in institutions is a part of that.  The 2016 election was a part of that.  The 2020 primaries are a part of that.  We're all a part of that.  The condition may outlast our lives.  We may be in a permanent crisis.  Or it may be that the new gods are being born already, but they're not the kind we would like to admit are our gods.