Excellent piece. I agree with most of your takeaways, but one line struck me:
> Israel, where faith in institutions survives
You mention that corporations are the last functional institution most Americans encounter. I agree with this, but, outside the military and religion, I don't think Americans have really ever experienced functional n…
Excellent piece. I agree with most of your takeaways, but one line struck me:
> Israel, where faith in institutions survives
You mention that corporations are the last functional institution most Americans encounter. I agree with this, but, outside the military and religion, I don't think Americans have really ever experienced functional non-business institutions in the way we talk about them today (political machines like Tammany Hall were arguably extremely functional institutions, but I don't think they'd count in today's parlance). The history of America seems mostly defined by its lack of institutions, allowing (or forcing, depending on your point of view) for the ambitious to just do the job that needed to be done, for better or worse. The other defining feature seems to be that America has _always_ been bad at building large scale institutions. The crowning achievement of Hamilton (who was more interested in building state capacity than any still influential founder) was a central bank, which barely outlasted some of his peers (followed by a century of banking panics). There was arguably a brief respite during WWII and the Cold War, though much of those effective institutions were either military or primarily private (and people like my grandfather, whose ranch in central Washington was simply appropriated for Manhattan Project testing might disagree about the positive impact of this time of briefly "effective" institutions).
The striking thing to me, as I read more and more American history, is that the secularization of much of America (I'm one of those secularized Americans, by the way) removed the institution that actually tried to solve the problems that we now ask our governments to address (but expect them to fail at): religion, and the community fostered by it.
And yes, agreed on the last point. It's something both Charles Murray and George Packer have made: we expect governments to solve things we've traditionally solved otherwise (cf. Tocqueville and his observation about the American mania for associations).
You're going way back in time here, and maybe you're trying to make a larger historical statement about the US.
But, I think the comp in most Americans' minds (even if very subconsciously in the younger generation) is the WWII (and post-WWII) period of governance, which was pretty good (certainly compared to now).
I think that's fair. I still think that the WWII/Cold War era is actually the exception rather than the rule, historically, but for the purposes of what an average citizen experiences today, it's much more relevant than the Gilded Age and western expansion. While I will again raise that many Americans (such as my grandfather) did not experience what they'd call institutional excellence during the WWII era, it's pretty inarguably true that, at worst, we experienced effective partnership between public and private institutions as measured by output.
Excellent piece. I agree with most of your takeaways, but one line struck me:
> Israel, where faith in institutions survives
You mention that corporations are the last functional institution most Americans encounter. I agree with this, but, outside the military and religion, I don't think Americans have really ever experienced functional non-business institutions in the way we talk about them today (political machines like Tammany Hall were arguably extremely functional institutions, but I don't think they'd count in today's parlance). The history of America seems mostly defined by its lack of institutions, allowing (or forcing, depending on your point of view) for the ambitious to just do the job that needed to be done, for better or worse. The other defining feature seems to be that America has _always_ been bad at building large scale institutions. The crowning achievement of Hamilton (who was more interested in building state capacity than any still influential founder) was a central bank, which barely outlasted some of his peers (followed by a century of banking panics). There was arguably a brief respite during WWII and the Cold War, though much of those effective institutions were either military or primarily private (and people like my grandfather, whose ranch in central Washington was simply appropriated for Manhattan Project testing might disagree about the positive impact of this time of briefly "effective" institutions).
The striking thing to me, as I read more and more American history, is that the secularization of much of America (I'm one of those secularized Americans, by the way) removed the institution that actually tried to solve the problems that we now ask our governments to address (but expect them to fail at): religion, and the community fostered by it.
And yes, agreed on the last point. It's something both Charles Murray and George Packer have made: we expect governments to solve things we've traditionally solved otherwise (cf. Tocqueville and his observation about the American mania for associations).
You're going way back in time here, and maybe you're trying to make a larger historical statement about the US.
But, I think the comp in most Americans' minds (even if very subconsciously in the younger generation) is the WWII (and post-WWII) period of governance, which was pretty good (certainly compared to now).
I think that's fair. I still think that the WWII/Cold War era is actually the exception rather than the rule, historically, but for the purposes of what an average citizen experiences today, it's much more relevant than the Gilded Age and western expansion. While I will again raise that many Americans (such as my grandfather) did not experience what they'd call institutional excellence during the WWII era, it's pretty inarguably true that, at worst, we experienced effective partnership between public and private institutions as measured by output.
This is a great point, that many americans have a sense of “normal” which is calibrated by one of the most unusual periods in human history.