Chaos Is Neither Conservatism Nor Governance

Musings on the GOP, institutions, and change management as Trump 2.0 kicks off

Photo by Peter Herrmann on Unsplash

I had a longer piece I had planned for this week, but instead I’ve been putting out fires that remind me about a basic but often under appreciated reality of human social life: predictability matters more than (almost) anything else.

Two months ago I described this administration as driving a Jeep through the federal government and it turns out I was pretty close.

Does the federal government contain bloat and waste? Of course.

But chaos is not the way to eliminate bloat and waste.

Chaotic Tradeoffs

Almost every thoughtful proponent of small government recognizes (or used to) that it’s very hard to rebuild anything good from chaos. In general, chaos creates a vacuum for bad faith actors to fill by dismantling what’s left and building cronyism, corruption, and bloat that’s worse than what we had before.

It’s nice to think that Zuckerberg or Bezos is hoping Trump is someone he could collaborate with to eliminate waste. But the reality is much more likely that billionaires like Zuckerberg see Trumpian chaos as an opportunity to take advantage of.

This chaos is not about building a better social, political and moral landscape that’s easier to navigate with fewer pits, which is what actual governing should be about. It’s about being on scene, vulture-like, to pick apart the pieces and rebuild a regulatory structure that helps them. Whether it helps anyone else seems unlikely, but I suppose we just have to wait and see.

Predictability Matters

More foundationally, government operates (insofar as it does) by allowing people to plan for the future. Right now what we have is total unpredictability, which means not only that people can’t plan for the future, but they can’t invest in anything that requires predictable rules, including education, the stock market, buying farming equipment or anything else. Being unable to invest in the future harms not just people right here and now, but also the future generations who might have benefited from their parents’ ability to make better decisions, invest in their educations, or improve their land.

Just this week on a local Facebook group, one woman described her elderly parents’ home health aide’s text that she would not be able to come to work without clarity on the Medicaid piece of the freeze. This woman cannot leave her two 90 year old parents, one with dementia, without care. So she spent the first half of the week desperately scrambling to get clarity while also making contingency plans in case she had to quit her job to stay home with them. This wasted time and energy was multiplied millions of times over this week as people struggled to understand if their children with disabilities would have services, if they would have federal loans to buy books for the college classes starting up, and whether their job would even exist the next day.

In the chaos of this week, in just my small corner of the world, we’ve had:

• Faculty and students cancel research trips abroad because they’re not sure they’ll be let back into the country on their existing visas.

• Pell Grant students not sure if their financial aid will go up in smoke and with it their opportunity for an education.

• Young faculty facing the prospect of a catastrophic delay in building their research portfolios because the NSF and NIH have effectively shut down.

• Veteran researchers with decades of research that may grind to a halt, including canceling clinical trials with patients desperate for a chance.

• Undocumented students who are too scared to identify themselves to get the help they’ll need to navigate the next four years.

This kind of uncertainty creates knock-on effects and affects the way even those who are unaffected view their jobs and their lives. The news on Thursday that General Milley’s security detail has been pulled and his retired rank as general is under threat for insufficient loyalty to the last Trump administration is deeply harmful not just to Milley, but to every other public servant, military or otherwise. Current officials see the clear and unambiguous signal that loyalty to totally arbitrary and unpredictable orders is the only way to protect oneself from professional and personal harm.

One of the critical lessons offered by institutional economists like Nobel Prize winners Douglas North and Elinor Ostrom is that institutions (as the broad rules of the social and political game) provide the framework that makes individual planning and decision making possible. Predictability of rules is, in a lot of ways, more important than the quality of those rules.

Everyone from Edmund Burke to Adam Smith recognized this reality of human social life. We often have to accept non-ideal outcomes in the social and political worlds simply because drastic changes to complex institutions - whether in the form of revolutions or massive federal freezes - entail deep human suffering and frequently make things worse in the long run.

False Conservatives

And it’s this long-held conservative belief about ensuring that change is slow and steady that makes the GOP’s capitulation to Trumpian revolutionary disruption so ironic. Conservatism is (or was) rooted in the belief that we preserve traditions, norms, and ways of life.

First, because those traditions breed affection and attachment to country that make coercive force unnecessary and;

Second because they’re the superstructure on which everything from education to economics is built. They allow us as individuals to plan our lives by following laws and rules that we have reason to believe will be stable over time.

Russel Kirk, the founder of American conservatism, had ten principles of conservatism that summarized what he called in a larger work “the conservative mind.”

I find it deeply ironic that number two is “the conservative adheres to custom, convention, and continuity” and number nine is “the conservative perceives the need for prudent restraints upon power and upon human passions.”

Even more profoundly, while Kirk aimed this arrow at modern Progressives, his admonition applies perfectly to the current Trump administration:

Change is essential to the body social, the conservative reasons, just as it is essential to the human body. A body that has ceased to renew itself has begun to die. But if that body is to be vigorous, the change must occur in a regular manner, harmonizing with the form and nature of that body; otherwise change produces a monstrous growth, a cancer, which devours its host.

Driving a Jeep through the federal government in the name of conservatism is a deeply anti-conservative act.

It’s a radically stupid act and one motivated not by any sense of conservative principles about small government but instead by a desire to cause mayhem and feed off the wreckage.

Radically Moderate Responses To Chaos

I don’t know where we go from here. But I offer a few big picture thoughts and hopefully more tangible advice later:

1. Keep the destruction visible. We need to keep highlighting the human cost of these executive orders. The costs in terms of lost opportunities, lost innovation, and real and tangible human harm. I was fortunate to spend time with ACLU President Deborah Archer on her visit to campus yesterday and she discussed the power of narrative and the need for representatives to hear the stories of suffering that this kind of chaos creates. The media needs to hear them too. Share them widely.

2. Acknowledge our part in this mess. Higher ed (and philanthropy too) has done a terrible job of convincing the average American voter that we offer something that’s worth protecting. We need to be better communicators, but we also need to earn the trust we’re asking for. There are a lot of ways we’re failing to do that and we should take ownership where that’s the case.

3. Think big about building a better model beyond the garbage binary choices that got us into this mess in the first place. That’s partly what I’m hoping to do here in some small way. Given that the GOP has completely abandoned conservatism as a system of belief, there are opportunities to build coalitions with the real conservatives and other principled people who have been left behind.

I’m not feeling the exclamation marks today, but as always, let me know what you think. Leave a comment, share, and subscribe. And go spread some kindness in the world today. We’re going to need all we can get.