Institutions as Guard Rails

November 6, 2024
Posted by Jay Livingston

Half a score and seven years ago, I said something (here) that I am now rethinking:

Authoritarianism has always had some allure to some Americans, especially in times of crisis. In the Depression, people like Huey Long and Father Coughlin played to this sentiment with some success. But in the end they failed, and most people today have never heard of them. To some extent, it’s because of the eventual good sense of the American people. But more likely, our success in avoiding a Godfather government stems from the enduring institutions of our society and government. [emphasis added]

Now I am not at all sure about those institutions.

I was blogging in response to a HuffPo piece by Philip Slater, who was dismayed by the popularity of Mafia media — The Godfather, The Sopranos, Goodfellas, etc.

Americans love the mafia because it represents a totally authoritarian system in which mistrust, cynicism, slavish obedience, and rash, violent decisions prevail. That seems to be the kind of world most Americans are looking for today.

But Slater was thinking not just about the movies but about real-world politics as well:  “Americans were so willing to elect and re-elect the most secretive, despotic, and anti-democratic administration in the history of our nation.” He was talking about George W. Bush.

My take then was that what we like to see on the screen is not always what we want in real life.

Here is a system that rewards its virtues —loyalty, respect, honor — and punishes transgressions surely and swiftly. If your real world is full of uncertainty and moral ambiguity, if virtue is not always rewarded and wickedness not always punished, you might take comfort at the end of the day in the unclouded vision of the media’s mafias.

Now I’m thinking about that final sentence of my 2007 post, the one about “the enduring institutions of our society and government” that might act as guard rails.

America has now a elected a man who has already tried, with some success, to undermine or dominate the institutions that might constrain him — the courts and the rule of law, the legislature and the electoral process, the media. And he has promised to use the full powers of the presidency to continue this project, replacing the professionals in federal agencies with people chosen not for their experise and competence but for their loyalty.

What institutions are left?