Thread that will take me a few tweets to get to the punchline, but suffer with me:
— Jarvis (@jarvis_best) April 8, 2023
The conservatives and the post-modernists lefties both believed that institutions molded character. They just put a different gloss on it. https://t.co/MXm9pTxifU
3 thoughts on “On Institutions”
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Before Trump ruined conservatism, gay FBI agents wore suits and fought gangsters. Now they just stand around in t-shirts and tight shorts.
Institutions can help, but institutions are things like family, social clubs, etc more than they are FBI or Teacher Unions- such vast bureaucracies are more like wastelands dysfunction.
George Bush’s Homeland Security wasn’t making institution, it was making creating a Cartel.
“Why do Jonah and David French take so much heat from the right? ”
Because they are backstabbers playing for the other team. They have acted with more coarse rhetoric than Trump supporters and are incapable of smelling their own stink. Institutions have nothing to do with it. Still, it was a nice thread.
I think it is a misunderstanding to think people on the right are reflexively pro-institution. The current attack is how can you be pro law and order but against abusing the legal system to persecute dissidents?
Conservatism is a reform based ideology. This means there can be respect for institutions but not blanket satisfaction or approval of them. There is a latent unhappiness with the flaws of our institutions but that doesn’t mean burn the country to the ground and start over.
Jarvis is correct in noting the need to be effective. Conservatives have struggled exercising power and in organizing people to use power. In part, this is because people on the right want to be left alone. They don’t want to play these games. This conversation is happening on the right from the establishment types down to what Jarvis calls trolls.
He has some good advice regardless of whether or not the answers come from Foucault.