Undead

Richard Fernandez has an interesting argument.
Expect more, not less of this. The natural impulse of a political system in institutional crisis is to dig in. Too many institutions in the West remain decades after their birth, frozen in the moment of their creation. NASA, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the university system and the United Nations rule us from the past. Public life has become a museum of memes from which nothing can escape without a mummy hand dragging the fugitive back into the darkened interior. It is perhaps no coincidence the two most popular leaders of the Western left, Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders, might credibly impersonate Boris Karloff. They are here to lead us back to 1968.

Be grateful it isn't to 1848.
In a way that's a very anti-conservative argument, but it's legitimately Jeffersonian. Jefferson thought that periodic new constitutions would be necessary. "To ensure that each generation have a say in the framework of the government, he proposed that the Constitution, and each one following it, expire after 19 or 20 years." Madison was no fan of that idea, thinking it would produce political chaos every couple of decades.

Still, a number of our institutions need serious reform; another number need to be disbanded. New institutions are needed in some cases, and in other cases we could do without some of the old ones without replacement.

2 comments:

Texan99 said...

Love the mummy image. It reminds me of what an exasperated friend used to say about business deals that clearly had fallen apart while the participants desperately tried to revive them on terms that were no good to anyone: the corpse was dragging itself along by its fingernails.

Eric Blair said...

This has been my point about people like Sanders and Corbyn; they are the undead spectres left over from all those old Soviet plots.

The stuff is like a virus.