The Core Crisis of Our Time is an Institutional Crisis, pt. MMDCLIX

Also in anti-institutionalist news, this forthcoming book attributed to Kevin Roberts, head of the Heritage Foundation, a sometime Washington think tank, with an introduction attributed to J.D. Vance. (There are occasions where I think the listing of an author is true-to-fact, and occasions--say, judicial opinions, Ivy League admissions essays, and celebrity autobiographies--where one should avoid making a firm assumption to that effect. This is one of the latter occasions.) It is currently titled Dawn's Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America. The book's description suggests that "Washington" (and possibly also "America") should be understood here as more of a placeholder, given the number of institutions outside of Washington that it wishes to "take back." Its salvific vision is straight out of the Battle of Bến Tre:

Chapter by chapter, it identifies institutions that conservatives need to build, others that we need to take back, and more still that are too corrupt to save: Ivy League colleges, the FBI, the New York Times, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the Department of Education, BlackRock, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the National Endowment for Democracy, to name a few.

I have had interesting discussions with interesting and thoughtful conservative friends who despair of various institutions, although in my view some of their despair is overly pessimistic, or reasonably pessimistic but overly operatic. (In many instances, I have had interesting discussions with similarly thoughtful liberal friends who despair of the same institutions, generally for the same reasons.) I haven't read the book, so I'm going out on a limb here, but I don't think this book is a gateway to such conversations. If the description holds, it seems to have far more in common with those on the left whom I have criticized for taking a view of institutions that purports to be critical or reformist but is ultimately either destructive of or fundamentally indifferent to them. In any event, since my examples of anti-institutionalism generally focus on the left, given that my home institution is the academy, I offer this prominent example as a reminder, as much to myself as others, that the phenomenon is best defined as a social and not, in the colloquial sense, a political one. (May I add, despite being a big fan of capitalism and a frequent bore on the topic of everyday, small-c corruption being more important than large-C "Corruption," that anyone who makes $600,000 as the head of a former think tank should go easy on the phrase "too corrupt to save.")

Of obvious note to a) the presidential election, b) my location of the book in, as academics these days would say, an anti-institutionalist "space," and c) the general cravenness of authors, publishers, and politicians: the book until recently had the charming subtitle "Burning Down Washington to Save America."