Military reverence and institutional decay.

For most of my adult life, the institutions of American governance have slowly been rotting away.

I might speculate about an earlier starting date, but the process first became evident--to me, anyway--in the debacle of the 2000 presidential election. We ought to have fixed the mistakes that prompted that debacle, and doing so should not have been hard. There is a longstanding consensus among computer security experts--at least, among those experts who don't have something to sell you--that digital technologies and voting don't mix. Paper ballots, marked in ink, counted by hand, are always preferable. This isn't hard.

Our leaders should have been motivated to listen to this advice. The fact that they were not is a key part of the story of general decay. Congress has become a derelict institution, delegating its legislative power, its tariff power, and even its warmaking power to the executive while all its in-house expertise withered away, sapping it of the ability to serve as a counterweight to what Trumpists correctly refer to as the swamp. (To expect a president, whose institutional incentives align exactly with the swamp, to be the one to drain it--this is asking too much of a saint, let alone a Trump.)

In any case, little was done to fix the problems with our elections, and the problems have continued. We take them for granted now, and we regard democracy as an inherently embarrassing part of our politics, one that is always disreputable and probably rigged. Few of us have faith in it anymore, exactly as many voices warned us in 2000: Keep up this stuff, they said, and you will lose your democracy. We certainly have, and we just might.

"But you're a libertarian. Aren't you supposed to be happy when the institutions of governance decay?" Some might ask.

Up to a point. Maybe. I am happy when certain governing institutions--NOT democracy--get closed down in an orderly and humane manner. But any institution more violent than old ladies counting pieces of paper tends to become an ugly beast in decay.

Take the military. The military doesn't experience institutional decay in at all the same way that our elections do. Over there, institutional decay looks like endless, constitutionally prohibited wars of choice. It looks like massive, money-wasting boondoggles. It looks like arms manufacturers taking over and running the show. It looks like the return of torture, and like an increasingly undisciplined and ad hoc chain of command. Paradoxically, it also looks like rising confidence in the military as the only institution in the country not tainted by the rot of all the rest. (Though this appearance is quite deceiving, and I don't really have an adequate account for it. Though I do have a parallel: In the French Revolution, few trusted the silly, newly built institutions of the Directory. The military won battles, and mass participation made it relatively egalitarian, if not democratic.)

Eventually the institutional decay of the military looks like the decay of the bonds that keep it tied to the civilian polity. It looks like rule by junta, at least if other countries' experiences are any guide. And there is no reason on earth why a libertarian should be happy about that.