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Zen-ish Thoughts About Dueling, the Mafia, and Trump

The less people trust civil institutions to protect them, the more they turn to personal violence, or to someone who will commit violence on their behalf.

This is not a moral observation. It is a structural one, and once you see it as such, a surprising range of phenomena that are usually treated as "unrelated" problems snap into focus as instances of a single dynamic.

When Violence Is Rational

Before the widespread availability of civil courts and government-provided law enforcement, personal violence was justifiable in many circumstances. Of course violence could be performed unprovoked, disproportionately, or barbarically, but the mere fact of meeting force with force was sensible in a world lacking a formal institution for fair adjudication and enforcement. Personal violence was the appropriate technology for that world. As a genuinely nice guy, I don't like acknowledging that, adn you might like to reject this conclusion too. But …

Without courts and law enforcement, if someone stole your livestock, dishonored your family, or failed to pay a debt, you had two options: Absorb the loss and define yourself to the community as someone who can be abused without consequence, or provide consequences yourself. Certainly speak nicely first, but that's unlikely to get very far with someone who stole your sheep. The state was not an option because the state, in any meaningful modern sense, barely existed. In a competitive world populated in part by unscrupulous people, pacifism was an option that invited further abuse. Personal retribution, however problematic, made sense.

Millennia of evolutionary pressure, along with cultural preservation and glorification of personal retribution find all of us sometimes in that mode even when we have much better options. Some of us live in or very close to that mode all the time. That, to me, is something we ought to fix.

Honor culture in general, and dueling in particular are instructive. To modern eyes dueling looks like an absurd ritual, two men standing twenty paces apart and firing at each other over an insult – even cooperatively taking turns while they shoot at each other one at a time! But dueling made sense under pre-institutional conditions. It simultaneously deterred others from going against you, and made personal reputation something much more tangible than "honor" conveys to the modern mind.

Even if you never used a firearm before in your life, it would be hard to miss someone at twenty paces with a modern gun, but in those days of misfiring, inaccuracy, and intentional misses to satisfy form without actually killing resulted in far fewer dueling injuries and deaths than one might imagine. In fact, it was preferred over dueling with swords, and legal when dueling with swords was banned, in part because it was less lethal, and in part because it reduced the role of skill! It was more performance than action. People were injured. People died. The risk of that was critical, but the achievement of it was not the commonly desired outcome.

It was what behavioral scientists call display behavior. Very real, even if primarily symbolic. Many animals "fight" this way, avoiding actual physical fighting unless pressed beyond a fairly high threshold. Dueling was about maintaining a reputation for enforcement (including commitment up to the risk of being killed) in a world where reputation was the only enforcement mechanism available. Personal honor was in its way a precursor to civil law – the rules that must be enforced for us to consider ourselves civilized.

Legal prohibition of dueling had a remarkably limited effect. For example, Louis XIV outlawed it in France in 1679, making it a capital offense with death for the offender and forfeiture of noble titles and confiscation of estates for his survivors. Even in the face of those penalties, his officers fought an estimated 10,000 duels during the several following decades before dueling actually came to an end. What precipitated the actual end was the credible extension of civil authority into disputes that had previously been private, along with an increase in dueling deaths as firearm technology became more reliably lethal. As the state became an accepted adjudicator of civil disputes and enforcer of civil law, and as civil law expanded, personal enforcement became at first unnecessary and later not just archaic but "barbaric and stupid". Barbaric and stupid is in the eye of the beholder, in the context of the culture.

Note well that the concept of the duel – a violent contest to "prove" who is right, to defend "honor", to create and maintain a "don't mess with me" reputation – persists to this day in many forms, from bar fights to criminal enterprises to international wars. Even our allegedly civilizing legal system is only a sublimation of the same dynamic, not a different idea. It's not about finding the truth or about what is morally best. It's about which champion prevails within the confines of a highly ritualized contest. Sounds like dueling to me. We weakly express a preference for truth and justice, but we sacrifice them as a matter of routine, often even as a matter of policy.

Look how not-archaic and not-stupid even brutal personal enforcement is in contexts where no civil authority is credibly present. If you are in a criminal enterprise, you cannot rely on the courts to enforce your contracts, protect your territory, or protect your right to retain property you illegally hold. If you live in a place where the police in particular or the government in general repeatedly aid anyone other than you, and they take unwarranted actions against you and others deemed to be like you, you are not going to call on these agencies to assist you. If you appear to have access to appropriate institutions but they repeatedly let you down or actively harm you, at some point you learn contempt for those institutions, or at least not take them seriously, instead of continuing to trust and defer to them. If you are in the MAGA sphere of influence, in which all civil institutions are seen as suspicious malignancies, everything is permitted in the name of self-defense.

The Dynamic

Individual violence, organized crime, and political violence fill the vacuum when civil institutions don't exist or when they are not deemed credible, or not powerful enough. This is sad, objectionable, terrible, but not actually difficult to understand.

Why did the American South maintain a dueling culture long after the North had abandoned it? Southern civil authority was less developed and less trusted. Disputes were more likely to fall outside the reach of courts. Dueling persisted because the social conditions that dueling addressed persisted.

The South also illustrates that distrust of institutions can be deployed selectively. When federal Reconstruction enforcement withdrew from the South after 1877, White Southerners who regarded the Reconstruction as illegitimate occupying forces immediately reverted to personal enforcement via lynchings, night riding, excessive conviction of Blacks on little or no evidence, convict leasing (of largely Black labor) backed by terror, and systematic disenfranchisement maintained by violence. These same people probably would have thought it crazy and scandalous to violate a court order regarding a business deal, but impediments to even the most extremely violent and terrorizing racism were considered illegitimate on their face.

In each case, litigated business deal or criminal violence, one imagines he is just doing what any sensible person would do. It looks rational to them. Selective compliance with institutions is something people do all the time, in many areas of life. Given what's at stake in religion (for example eternal torture or eternal bliss), one might expect this would be the one arena where consistent compliance would reign. But literally every member of every religion selectively holds as sacrosanct the teachings they happen to agree with at the same time the same person ignores teachings from the same religion if they happen to find them to be too much of an imposition for their personal comfort.

The Sicilian Mafia arose in the mid-1800s under the following key conditions:

The Mafia effectively arose as a private governance and protection system in places where the official state was absent, ineffective, corrupt, foreign, or otherwise illegitimate in the eyes of locals. The Mafia's core innovation was organized, selective, reputation-based coercion. Politicians and business people utilized the Mafia to enforce their contracts, intimidate striking employees, manipulate elections, because everyone saw what happens to people who don't comply with the Mafia. It was a short step from selling violence and protection as services to using coercive power and protection rackets independently for the Mafia's own economic and political interests.

The same structural logic helps explain the Yakuza in postwar Japan, the IRA in Northern Ireland, and the Black Panther Party in the United States. The Yakuza, like the Mafia, were fundamentally criminal at their origins, extracting money and power through rackets and coercion. The IRA was fundamentally political in origin, seeking to expel an occupying force by any means necessary. The Black Panthers were born in response to racially motivated oppression and murder. They were a political and social movement that ran community programs (free breakfasts, clinics), though some members engaged in criminal or violent acts. These differences should not obscure the shared origin dynamic: Each arose to provide adjudication, protection, or social order where state institutions were weak, absent, or experienced as hostile.

Manufactured Illegitimacy

Fabricated threats offered to an anxious public work better than genuine threats because they can be constantly enlarged and altered without the bother of having to be true. Politicians have leveraged this since the dawn of politicians. That is, they find that lying about imagined or greatly exaggerated threats posed by their opponents, some ideology, or some group, is way more self-serving than helping people get along and find understanding and mutual benefit.

Until recently, that came with a caveat of needing not to get caught in one's lies, to preserve the appearance of playing fairly, honestly, openly, and with principle. Trump has systematically dismantled that constraint, and the GOP has assisted him, partly because his base either has lying-blindness when looking at Trump, or as we will emphasize below, one's Liberator is allowed to walk a broad path. That very allowance even reinforces the idea of how special he is, how much leeway and reward he deserves for all the "good" he is doing.

Trump has spent years, from before his first campaign and throughout both of his presidencies, engaged in systematic delegitimization of American civil institutions. According to him:

Each such claim is wildly disproportionate to the facts or in most cases entirely false. Why doesn't that go against him? Because the net effect has been that a large group of Americans who already experienced civil authority as illegitimate and hostile to their interests got their view validated, and the "evil" was exposed on one of the world's largest stages thanks to him. It is a Liberation.

You don't fret much over the scruples of your Liberator. And when your group is exactly the group the GOP has cynically courted and empowered ever since it became too politically expensive to be openly racist, you get, "What insurrection?" You get, "Trump is our Savior, chosen by God." You get anything but honesty and accountability.

After the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Republican Party made a conscious strategic move to court the racially resentful White Southern vote that the Democrats had lost. What began as sometimes explicit and sometimes thinly veiled racist appeals gradually expanded into a coalition built around cultural displacement and grievance. Simply put, alienated White Protestants in the South were a group large enough to win elections, in search of a party that would "set things right" in their view. The GOP was a failing political party so interested in its own preservation that it didn't care whose they had to pander to in order to secure electoral wins, and in any case they largely agreed with the racist position, and with the paranoia that the only good government is small government.

Their track record displays ample contrast between their rhetoric and their actual behavior. They are not fiscally conservative and are consistently bad for the national debt. They don't care about families, or people in general, and they do not consider life even slightly sacred. When they say "small government and States' Rights" they specifically mean small governmental impact on people who are already privileged and powerful, and coercive federal government constraining everyone else. But the lies in their rhetoric are so much what their base wants to hear that facts literally don't matter. From Spiro Agnew's railing against "effete intellectual snobs" to Trump's insistence that immigrants are eating people's pets, the modern GOP has become more and more brazen and effective in its manufacturing of fake threats with real payoffs.

Agnew's career was ended when he was caught taking bribes and evading taxes. Trump's career is largely composed of taking bribes and evading taxes. This is what the GOP calls progress, because they are still in power, and that's all that really matters to them. Certainly, some of them sincerely believe that authoritarian, coercive cultural narrowing is a good thing. Many of their supporters definitely do. Some of them are just happy to go along for the ride in their high-paying jobs with great benefits, lots of power, prestige, and money, and a lifetime pension for a few years of work.

By the time Trump arrived, decades of deliberate cultivation had produced a base primed to believe that the institutions of American life were arrayed against them on purpose and with prejudicial malice. Trump did not invent the persecution narrative. He inherited a machine built to stoke it, and became its most provocative, unfettered, unhinged stoker.

While being the most institutionally connected and protected Americans, White Protestants were given a bold cover story of their alleged persecution and displacement, attuned to their existing resistance to civil rights, women's rights, science, and anything not ethnocentrically male White Protestant and recognizably part of their cultural traditions. They were told the country is being taken from them, that the institutions that once protected their dominance now work against them, that they are the most put-upon group in America. Since the country is "theirs" (implied by it "being taken from them"), it must have always been meant to be theirs, hence the fact-denying hallucination that this country was intentionally founded as a Christian nation. Given the low quality of American education (not in the top ten, and arguable not in the top 20), and especially of their education (8 of 10 of States with the worst education are Red), trampling over historical facts is as simple as making an unfounded and indefensible assertion. Trump is great at that, and his crew members revel in following his liberating lead.

The numerical and cultural preeminence of White Protestant men has truly waned, but their actual circumstances continue to primarily reflect their own choices in education, physical and mental health practices, de facto social policies, and who they vote for – in short, the culture they proudly perpetuate. Their so-called persecution is a fabrication, but that does not diminish the extent to which that fable helps them embrace violence and oppression, and support Trump's violence, and his destruction of democratic principles and governmental institutions that they continue to depend upon in apparent ignorance, or refuse to utilize, or actively sabotage. These are people who think ObamaCare is horrible socialism but ACA (ObamaCare's other name) is great. These people reliably rail against gun control, and suffer the most from gun-related crime and death. They are people who don't fund their education institutions, and complain that people find them to be uneducated. These people keep inventing new disguises for Jim Crow laws, and take offense when they are called out for being racist. When people describe them as both mean and stupid, it's not baseless slander.

It is worth noting that Trump's coalition is not exclusively White Christian men. The champion / liberator dynamic does not require that person to share the tribe's demographic profile. Indeed, they may rally behind such a person precisely because not being one of them is part of the reason he or she can do for them what they will not or cannot do for themselves. Some Trump supporters, including many women and people of color, are driven by claims he is good for the economy (which is very clearly not true), that he advances conservative values (which is very clearly not true), that he hates who they hate (we have a winner!). You don't question your Liberator.

This is why facts don't enter into the discussion in a meaningful way. This is why looking for dialog with Trump supporters instead of just condemning them is like expecting the Jehovah's Witness who knocks on your door to be genuinely interested in converting to your religion. There are reasons for being a Trump supporter (traceable paths that lead to that), but there are no moral justifications that survive a moment of scrutiny.

More specifically, nothing he could do and certainly nothing he has actually done could justify any one of thee things: Lying as a matter of policy. Incompetence that kills in a pandemic, destroys cabinet level agencies, and repeatedly harms the public interest. Sexual assault bragged about. Governmental violence against non-violent citizens. Imprisonment without trial. The emotional torture of parents and toddlers as deliberate policy. Impeding the prosecution of pedophiles. Usurping congressional powers. Ignoring court orders. Fomenting insurrection. Simultaneously ruining the economy while enriching himself. Destroying the country's international reputation. Violating domestic and international law by threatening and attacking two countries.

And yet about half the country wants him to violate the Constitution yet again to stay in office indefinitely – because he is "our God-appointed Savior". Why? Because he attacks the institutions these people imagine have been on an escalating campaign to eradicate them – facts be damned. That is all. There is a problem with our culture that has nothing to do with Trump, precedes Trump, created Trump, and sustains Trump.

The Protection Racket

The defining feature of a protection racket is that the threat being protected against is substantially created or maintained by the "protector". The Mafia does not simply respond to a dangerous environment. It creates and manages the danger that makes protection necessary. It "protects" you against the very things it produces. "Protection racket" is not a metaphor for Trump. It is a plain-language description.

Trump spent years proclaiming the institutional illegitimacy that made him seem necessary. He continues to do so every time he speaks. Each attack on the courts, the press, the electoral system, the civil service, and anyone who displeases him is not merely an immature and fact-free expression of grievance or an exercise of power. It is maintenance work on the infrastructure of his power. This ongoing stream of fabricated threats is the set of problem he produces, from which only he can provide "protection".

This Dynamic Scales From Personal to International

The United Nations was intended to be for nations precisely what civil courts are to individuals, a trusted third party capable of adjudicating disputes and enforcing those judgements, making international violence as unnecessary and illegitimate as dueling with pistols. That vision has failed. The Security Council veto ensures that great powers can never be held accountable by the larger body. The relative economic and political power of the member states has everything to do with their influence in that organization, and debate and enforcement have been biased enough to destroy the institution's credibility as a neutral arbiter. Self-serving politics and offstage pressuring, negotiating, and trading favors, the antithesis of what the UN is supposed to be about, play a gigantic role in its actual operation. This is an institution that has done a great deal to ensure it is not seen as legitimate.

The result is exactly what the dynamic described here predicts. Nations revert to personal enforcement, which at the nation-state level means war, proxy war, and nuclear arms contests. Collectively these are modern and large scale dueling-style devices, partly display behavior meant to deter an actual fight, and partly real fighting with real deaths and devastation. The rhetoric of international conflict is saturated with honor culture language, respect, humiliation, strength, weakness, enemies who must be made to pay, because the underlying psychology is identical to the psychology of the pre-institutional duel.

What This Explains

The inverse relationship between institutional trust and use of violence, whether personal, political, or military, is not a new observation in political science or sociology. State capacity theorists have documented it. Honor culture researchers have traced it. Historians of organized crime have described it in detail. Students of international relations have their own vocabulary for it.

The point here is that these are all instances of a single dynamic. The man defending honor with a pistol, the Mafioso enforcing a contract, the political movement rallying behind a champion, and the nation launching a war it reliably frames as self-defense are all responding to the same underlying condition with the same underlying logic: Institutions to handle this either don't exist or are not deemed legitimate, so I have to do it myself or get a champion, and since it's self-defense, lethal force is explicitly allowed and most horrific acts will be ignored.

Institutions earn legitimacy by delivering on their promises equitably, and lose it when they fail to do so. We have arrived at a point in the US where a very active minority, including the impoverished and the unfathomably wealthy, is now capable of and apparently quite interested in destroying the meta-institution of democracy itself.

What Legitimate Institutions Actually Look Like

The question is not whether we know what legitimate institutions look like. We do. The question is whether we are willing to build them:

These are not wild, leftist fantasies. Ideas of this type are not only obvious. There are existence proofs that they work. Here are a few examples.

Portugal was not a promising candidate for institutional innovation. It had lived under dictatorship until 1974. It was a traditional, and traditionally Catholic country. And in 2001 it was facing a public health crisis that tradition could not respond to effectively. Roughly 1 person out of 100 was addicted to heroin. As in most countries, addicts were either incarcerated, left in the misery that narcotics addiction brings, or died. With over 40% of sentenced inmates serving time for drug offenses, the crisis continued to worsen. There as elsewhere, the conventional, traditional, righteous retribution model was a complete failure.

Under new law, personal possession and drug usage began being treated as a health matter, handled by medical and social work people instead of a crime handled by prosecutors and prisons. Portugal stopped punishing people for having a problem and started trying to solve it. The conflict between drug user and the government did not disappear, but its character changed: Where the state had been an adversary to be avoided, it became – imperfectly, unevenly, but measurably – a resource to be utilized. Treatment access within 30 days of applying for it went from 25% to 66%. Overdose deaths fell 77% over 20 years. Public support for the approach rose from 38% to 82% – because the institution was delivering on its promise. Portugal did not eliminate its drug problem, and it has poverty, immigration issues, and other problems. But they made one particular institution legitimately responsive to people's needs, dramatically improving the lives of over a hundred thousand people, and tens of thousands more over time, while reducing government spend and having a net positive impact on the whole country.

Instead of "defending honor" by punishing drug addicts who were already miserable and dying anyway, instead of institutionalized retribution for a transgression, an institution that began to legitimately live up to its promise to actually help people materially reduced a real problem for individuals, families, and society. It was not impossible. It was not economically infeasible. It was a policy choice.

Explicitly guided by research rather than prevailing sentiment, beginning around 1960, Finland embarked on a program to radically reduce incarceration rates without having a corresponding rise in crime. Most Finnish prisoners now serve their sentences in open facilities – they live in unlocked rooms, hold outside jobs, and return each evening. The explicit design philosophy is that a prisoner is a citizen serving time, not an enemy being warehoused like a prisoner of war set on destroying the country. The institution delivers the sentence without stripping the person of the dignity and habits that make reintegration possible.

What happened with this in the long-term? Today, Finland incarcerates 60 people per 100,000 residents. The United States incarcerates 1,160% as many (per capita). The re-imprisonment rate within two years of release in Finland is roughly half the American rate.

A state that treats a problem based on empirical data instead of political pandering can build institutions that make things better. It delivers on its promises and earns a relationship with its population that build trust and pride. Finland has domestic violence, racism, and a growing far right. It is not a perfect civilization. But where it made one institutional change carefully and supported it consistently over decades, good results followed. It was not impossible. It was not economically infeasible. It was a policy choice.

America has its own proofs of concept, the best of which are sadly under deliberate attack by our own government.

Before Social Security, old age in America was a private problem solved privately or in most cases, going unsolved. Between a third and a half of elderly Americans lived in poverty. Pause. A third to a half of grandparents who worked their entire lives and still had families who cared about them nevertheless lived in poverty.

Thirty states had pension programs by 1935, but only 3% of the elderly were actually receiving benefits, and the average payout was just 65 cents a day (just $15 today). How many senior citizens can live anywhere in America on $15 a day, even if they own their own home with no remaining mortgage? That's right, exactly zero. So these pensions were performance without substance, something politicians could pretend had merit. The conflict between the needs of the elderly and the capacity of any institution to meet them was brutally resolved: About two-thirds of people lived only about five years past retirement, half of them in poverty, and without health insurance.

Due to Social Security, elderly poverty fell from roughly 35% in 1960 to under 10% by the mid-1990s. The National Bureau of Economic Research found that increased Social Security benefits explain essentially all of the decline in poverty that occurred between 1967 and 2000. People who had been trying to manage an unmanageable problem alone – or dying with it – now had an institution that showed up for them reliably, month after month. Social Security is the most politically defended program in American history, not because politicians protect it but because the population protects it against politicians. We are now faced with the threat of losing this actually successful institution because some politicians find it advantageous to cast it as both economically infeasible (despite its decades of self-funded existence), and as a form of – gasp – "socialism" for "losers".

Here is a dirty little secret about Social Security. The original Act excluded agricultural and domestic workers – occupations that not just coincidentally encompassed roughly 65% of Black workers at the time. Why? The insistence of Southern politicians determined to ensure that federal benefits would not disturb the racial and economic order of the South. The exclusion was incompletely corrected in 1950. This best of all programs is deficient, but why does it succeed where it does? It succeeds where it has been allowed to prove its legitimacy by delivering on its promise so people don't have to solve everything on their own.

In 1962, 48% of elderly Americans had no health insurance. Private insurers had largely declined to cover them – too old, too sick, too expensive. America is the land of capitalism being so over-emphasized that profit matters more than death itself, even in government policy. The market had rendered its verdict: this population was not worth serving, not worth saving. The government, it was argued, had no role to play in this. In 1964, only one in four elderly Americans had what was then considered adequate hospital coverage. People who needed medical care either paid until bankrupt, relied on family until family couldn't, or went without care, even if it would have been life-saving.

The opposition to fixing this was organized, lavishly funded, and explicit about its strategy. The American Medical Association launched Operation Coffee Cup in 1961, distributing to the wives of physicians across the country a vinyl record on which a middle-aged actor named Ronald Reagan warned that Medicare was "a short step to all the rest of socialism," that if it passed, doctors would be told by the government where to live and where to practice, and that "you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it once was like in America when men were free." The women were instructed to play the record at coffee gatherings and then have their guests write personalized letters to Congress. The AMA described Medicare as "the most deadly challenge ever faced by the medical profession."

The term "socialized medicine" was coined at the dawn of the Cold War specifically to suggest that anyone advocating healthcare access must be a dreaded communist. It worked. Medicare was defeated repeatedly over a span of two decades before finally passing in 1965.

What followed made the prediction look ridiculous. Within three years of implementation, nearly 20 million beneficiaries had enrolled. The uninsured rate among the elderly fell from 48% to what is today 2%. Life expectancy at age 65 increased by 15% within 20 years, compared to increasing only 5% in the preceding 15 years. Seventy-seven percent of Americans now describe Medicare as very important to the country.

Barely known today, an early benefit of Medicare was the elimination of hospital segregation. Participation in Medicare required provider compliance with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Hospitals that wanted Medicare reimbursement – which was essentially all of them – had to integrate. In less than four months, hospitals integrated their medical staffs, waiting rooms, and patient floors. The gap in access that the market had maintained for decades closed rapidly once an institution arrived that delivered equitably as a condition of participation.

This is what the "horrors of socialized medicine" actually produced: an institution that served people the market had abandoned, enforced civil rights the market had ignored, and earned legitimacy durable enough that sixty years later it remains one of America's greatest success stories – not because politicians protect it, but because the population protects it against politicians. Reagan's prediction was not just wrong. It was precisely inverted. Freedom was not curtailed. It was extended – to the 48% of elderly Americans who had been one serious illness away from destitution, and to the Black Americans who had been turned away from hospitals that their own taxes helped fund. The "horror of socialism" turned out to be: Grandma and grandpa could see a doctor instead of suffering for the crime of being too old to work in a country where health insurance only goes to employees and rich people.

And yet, the fabricated fear of the "horrors of socialized medicine" continues to threaten the destruction of Medicare even now. Decades of life-saving and quality of life help to millions of people be damned. If I hurt Medicare, even knowing it will hurt the people who vote for me, I will win election because even death is better than the so-called horrors of socialized medicine (according to me and my incredibly manipulable voters).

Social Security and Medicare together currently keep roughly 22 million Americans out of poverty. They are imperfect, unevenly distributed, and still incomplete. They should be expanded, not curtailed. And they are currently under deliberate attack – not to improve them, but to degrade their delivery enough that people lose faith in the institution itself, so we can get rid of them. Why? Because scary rhetoric is the bread and butter of the GOP and they want to be in power more than they want good things for the people they are meant to serve.

Administrative costs at the Social Security Administration are less than 1% of total spending. Cutting 7,000 Social Security employees – less than 0.1% (less than one tenth of one percent) of operational costs – does not produce meaningful savings. What it does do is increase delays, close offices, interrupt benefits distribution, and tell 70 million people that the institution they paid into across their working lifetimes and depend upon to pay their bills during their retirement years is an unreliable institution. Why? Because politicians who work with a salary 2.93 times the national average, get top tier healthcare and innumerable perks, and get a lifetime pension after working only a few years think everyone else should work until age 70 and then just die without bothering anyone.

Social Security and Medicare were not impossible, not economically infeasible. They were a policy choice. Their destruction is also a policy choice.

Germany in 1945 presents the most complete institutional collapse in modern history. Every institution of civil society – courts, press, universities, churches, the civil service – had been forcibly drawn into the service of the Nazis, and the war destroyed what was left physically, morally, and financially. The question facing the people who designed the Basic Law of 1949 was not abstract. They knew, from direct and recent experience, what happens when institutions fail and champions are given power to "fix" things. They had just lived through a most catastrophic version of that story.

Their response was to build institutions specifically designed to resist that dynamic. Emergency powers were tightly constrained, because Hitler had used Weimar's emergency provisions to seize control legally. The Constitutional Court was granted real authority to overrule parliamentary majorities, because majorities can be captured by demagogues, and by their own self-interest in reelection. A "militant democracy" clause allowed the banning of parties that sought to destroy democratic institutions from within. These were wildly ambitious but not unachievable ideas.

Over the following decades, millions of West Germans transferred genuine civic loyalty to democratic institutions rather than to ethnic identity, historical mythology, or strongmen. By the end of the century, the Constitutional Court became the most trusted institution in the German state. Verfassungspatriotismus – constitutional patriotism, loyalty to the values and structures of the constitution itself rather than to any ethnic or nationalist idea of belonging – was not a natural sentiment. It was deliberately cultivated, and when it was it took hold. This was not impossible, though it certainly seemed so. It was not economically infeasible, though the economy had collapsed. It was a policy choice, and they took it.

Despite its historically unprecedented accomplishment in banning its own worst actors, Germany is not immune. Germany today has the AfD (Alternative for Germany), which has ties to extreme right wing groups that are themselves illegal or barely skirting the law. An asset Germany has that the United States lacks is a constitution explicitly designed to resist this, institutions that have accumulated genuine credibility over 75 years, and a living cultural memory of where the alternative leads. So far, the institutions have held – not because Germans are better people, but because someone deliberately built institutions that are worth holding up. Will they fail? They may. But Germany has given us an amazing example of good policy doing good things no one had a right to expect. If it fails, it will only be because it did not go far enough, not because it was not the right direction to take.

Closer to the daily life most of us live, we know a lot about the conditions in which crime thrives. Reforming those conditions produces better results than attempting to reform people whose circumstances make crime, like dueling, a rational if regrettable response. Moving toward a more level playing field – economically, in healthcare, in education, in basic food security and housing – is not charity. It is the mechanism by which institutional legitimacy is built and violence is made unnecessary, archaic, barbaric, and stupid instead of valuable and inevitable. Those improvements also deprive bad faith politics of its most essential fuel.

Each of the ideas mentioned here is a policy choice, always resisted as if they violate an inevitable law of nature, economic feasibility, or moral correctness. In fact, each of these is morally correct and realistically achievable, and in many cases proved out by already operating well in one country or another. The interest in pursuing them currently in the US gets described as unrealistic, un-American, radically leftist evil – which is itself evidence of how far the protection racket has advanced since Reagan, Friedman, et al. convinced the US of the history-denying proposition that unrestrained self-interest is the engine of progress for all. It is, always has been, and logically cannot help but be the opponent of progress for all.

The tenuousness of accomplishments of the type used here for illustration is an important message. Humans and their societies are so inescapably diverse and vulnerable to manipulation that a utopian steady state will never be achieved. Despite the understandable desire some people have to manufacture a non-diverse population with an unperturbable guidance system, the human condition precludes such an outcome, as history has shown at every opportunity. The conclusion? We don't get to opt out of paying attention and staying engaged unless we are willing to passively side with the next resurgence of needless suffering, whatever form it happens to take today.

Stop accepting that government-run means poorly run. The DMV and the Post Office are punchlines precisely because we fund and administer them in a way guaranteed to produce that result. That is a policy choice, not a law of nature or a requirement of economic feasibility.

Privatizing essential services has not improved them. It has made them profitable for some and inaccessible to others. We have the privatized and most expensive healthcare system in the developed world, producing great stock returns and super wealthy CEOs, along with third-tier public health outcomes, and millions of people who cannot afford essential medications or insurance itself. This is what institutional abandonment looks like. This, sadly, is what actual American priorities look like, stripped of their rhetoric.

Building institutions that deserve trust is not a giveaway to the undeserving. It is the only alternative to the cycle of optional suffering this essay has described. More simply, how could building institutions that deserve trust not be the right thing to do? It's really not complicated, just difficult.

Dueling ended not because people became more civilized, but because something better was offered and made credible. That is how a culture becoming more civilized actually happens. Portugal showed it in a particular domain. Finland too, and has kept it going over decades. Social Security and Medicare showed it here, in this country, against fierce opposition, and the results have outlasted every attempt so far to take them back. Germany showed what it looks like to build institutions specifically designed to prevent the worst from happening again – and shows, right now, that the worst is always trying to happen again. We need to build institutions worth holding onto. We need to actively hold onto them with ongoing vigilance. It's exhausting. It's boring. It's maddening. It's the only thing that works.

We won't fix this just by voting. We have to move things in the right direction by voting. It's essential. But much more than that we have to fix our culture so the sort of problems discussed here are fatal to politicians instead of being fatal to the general population, and to institutions that should serve the people. How do we fix our culture?

It is a much longer term proposition than just the next midterm election. That election will either shift us away from the madness and call the GOP to seriously think about its direction, or set us up to unleash the fully unconstrained authoritarianism we fought WWII to stop. Vote. Certainly vote. Do not tolerate anyone you know not voting – non-voters have determined the outcome of all modern US elections. Do not tolerate anyone you know not being open about the vote they will cast and why. Do not let the "but he's good for the economy" crap go by without noting that he has been terrible for the economy, and even if he was good for it, that cannot stand as justification for what else he and the GOP have done, are doing, and will greatly worsen if our votes do not stop them now.

Even with the best outcome in the midterm election, we must do more to change the culture. You must discuss controversial subjects with family, friends, and acquaintances. You must carry your values into how you conduct yourself at work, and what you stand for and won't stand there. You must get very clear about what you teach your children, what you say in the communities you participate in, and what you refuse to stay silent about. The work lies in the example you set, and the people and events you exalt and celebrate, and the people and acts you call out for being vile. It is you, and it is me. It is not some imaginary politician-savior. It is us knowing there is no such thing, that no one is coming to rescue us except for us. It is on us to do the uncelebrated and mundane work of making the world one in which we want to live, of which we are justifiably proud, one we are content to give to our children and grandchildren.