The debacles of 2020—leading up to our disastrous election—didn’t arise in a vacuum. They arose because America’s institutions are badly broken.
Every significant institution in American life operates to serve the elites who run it while exploiting the parts of the public unfortunate enough to need its services. Public service mission statements exist solely for PR purposes. The few selfless, gifted, benevolent professionals in each institution—and the pockets of excellence that remain the envy of the world—are but tiny islands in a vast sea of corruption, self-interest, and egoism.
Our broken institutions belong to a national culture that has freed our elites from any sense of obligation toward “their own,” and our poor from any sense of gratitude to the society that cares for them. Instead, our elites bribe the poor to remain enraged, immiserated, and (most importantly) distant. Our poor claim entitlement to an ever-expanding list of bribes.
Consider just a few obvious examples of this institutional debasement:
Academia produces radical, debt-ridden mediocrities, ignorant of history and civics, seized with victimhood, spewing antisemitic bile, and preaching discrimination as the cure for racism. Their professors and administrators enjoy light workloads, massive freedom, professional salaries, and unrivaled job security.
Media have eschewed objective reporting in favor of shaping an official narrative that serves its own interests—and those of the rest of the elite.
American industry has offshored most of the actual industrial work to focus increasingly on compliance with governmental regulations.
The young millionaires of Silicon Valley have become the most capricious censors since the days of blasphemy laws.
Wall Street forgot that financial systems exist to ensure that resources flow smoothly to those most likely to use them efficiently—and thus removed the human element from finance.
Nonprofits value their own existence and the comfort of their leaders and donors rather than the people or causes they claim to serve.
Politicians fight bitterly over “principles” irrelevant to the lives of most Americans before compromising on packages whose primary benefits flow to themselves and their friends.
Bureaucrats identify themselves with the grand visions of their agencies’ mission statements, lording it imperiously over the good citizens they’re supposed to serve.
Most relevant today, our shambolic electoral system, reeling beneath the guilt of Jim Crow’s disenfranchisement, has spent decades increasing “access” with minimal attention to integrity. Under the nominal guise of social distancing, many jurisdictions—almost all controlled by Democrats—took every step imaginable (including many of dubious legality) to ease ballot access. Ballot integrity vanished. The result was a system lacking any insight into the custody of ballots from the moment they leave the printer until the moment a voting machine reports its tally.
Unsurprisingly, the tallies reported in a high-stakes election embodying few controls to ensure integrity incorporated numerous extreme statistical improbabilities—all favoring those responsible for eviscerating the controls, and in numbers just large enough to determine the election’s outcome.
The Supreme Court’s Choice
The federal court system is yet another broken American institution. Bald political rulings have degraded its credibility and damaged the rule of law. But when Donald Trump arrived in Washington vowing to “drain the swamp” (i.e., fix our broken institutions), the courts were the institution on which he focused most intently. America is about to learn whether his reforms restored our courts as institutions capable of making America proud.The Supreme Court will find itself in an unenviable position. The specific legal questions it addresses will be lost instantly. What America will notice is whether the court orders an investigation likely to hand the presidency back to Trump—or refuses to investigate and ratifies an electoral system lacking in integrity.
The consequences of the court’s choice are enormous. Should judicial oversight and inquiry yield a Trump victory, progressive rioting will intensify to become a full-blown civil insurrection—but the country itself will have taken an important step toward restoring America and fixing our institutions.
Should the court let things stand without further inquiry, American elections and courts will join the lengthy list of debased American institutions. We will have become the Banana Republic our rancid institutional infrastructure is designed to support. Factions of the elite will vie for power while the citizens are told how to behave and what to think.
The Supreme Court will never couch its opinions in such terms, but the reality will be clear to anyone paying attention: The court will either announce that some of our institutions still function and allow us to work on fixing the others—or it will confirm its status as but one more degraded institution in an America of the elite, by the elite, and for the elite.
