Defending Institutions

An institutionalist consensus should sit above ideology

"Dockeney Wall floodbank, Geldeston" by Jeremy Halls is marked with CC BY-SA 2.0.

One of the strangest things about being a long-term resident of Spain is how ideological the debates can get. The “left” and the “right” hate each other and would rather walk barefoot over broken glass than cross the great divide whenever there is a hung parliament.

I put “left” and “right” in speech marks for a good reason. The “left” usually includes nationalists, who would be seen as very right-wing elsewhere; while the “right” often includes liberals, who would be seen as members of the soft left in other parts of the world.

After almost 23 years here, I am still shocked by the sterility of many of the debates, where ideas are debated based on tribal loyalties rather than their own merits. Left-leaning centrists and right-leaning centrists often have more in common with each other than with extremists on the same side of the spectrum, but ancient loyalties are so strong that they find it hard to meet on common ground. Pragmatism is often notable by its absence.

Living here so long has helped me come to realize that we often over-estimate the value of ideologies . I think we need to downgrade the importance of our baseline assumptions to our identities. Instead, the priority of moderates across the board should be on defending institutions which evolved to keep us safe.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine should act as a wake-up call to all of us. Politics has enormous downsides: War, genocide, famine, economic collapse, mismanaged pandemics and environmental disasters. Over many centuries, a number of institutions have evolved to act as floodbanks. The most important is the peaceful transition of power, which lies at the heart of liberal democracy.

Russian dictator Vladimir Putin has surrounded himself with yes-men, leading to groupthink. This in turn leads to increasingly poor decisions. Without free and fair elections, there is no way for ordinary Russians to remove him from power when he threatens their lives or their livelihoods.

There is, of course, a contrast with George W. Bush, who invaded Iraq on flimsy grounds in 2003. Term limits meant that he couldn’t present himself for re-election in 2008. An anti-war senator called Barack Obama beat John McCain, who had supported the invasion. Can you imagine if Bush had been able to stay in power indefinitely despite the unpopularity of the occupation? What would he have done next?

The second institution that protects us from potentially catastrophic downside is the free press. It is no coincidence that Russia ranks 150th out of 180 countries in the World Press Freedom Index. It is much easier for Putin’s regime to invent stories about ethnic cleansing in Ukraine or to claim that the regime in the neighbouring country is fascistic if there are no fact-checkers.

The third institution that can protect citizens from downside is an independent judiciary. Judges’ ability to enforce the rule of law in the face of elected officials who want to bend the rules is a vital floodbank, as the European Commission (EC) has come to realize in recent years.

Pragmatic environmentalists, social democrats, progressives, liberals, centrists, moderate libertarians, mainstream conservatives, Christian democrats, floating voters and moderates should all be able to agree on the importance of this institutional framework. The danger comes from populists on the left and right, who misunderstand liberal democracy, which they see as a mechanism for finding “the will of the people” rather than a way of removing bad leaders from power.

When they gain power, narcissistic and populist leaders often engage in democratic backsliding. We have a clear example in Venezuela. It is no coincidence that the country’s economy collapsed in 2010 after a number of constitutional changes in the 12 years beforehand, which eroded the country’s floodbanks while enabling the executive branch to take increasingly bad decisions.

An institutionalist approach means that we should all celebrate Mike Pence’s successful attempt to stop Donald Trump’s ploy to end the peaceful transition of power in the US in 2020, even if we disagree with Pence’s other policies. His boss asked him to blow up the floodbanks and he refused. He continued to refuse when a mob stormed the Capitol and shouted slogans about hanging him. For that, if nothing else, we should all be grateful.

Keeping an eye on institutions also helps us understand what has gone wrong in Eastern Europe since the fall of the Soviet Union. The West failed miserably when it came to providing support for new democratic institutions in ex-communist countries. We can see the results of this hands-off approach in Russia today, where the regime is often characterized by critics as a post-communist mafia state. Unfortunately, healthy institutions don’t just appear overnight or survive by themselves. They need to be nurtured carefully while they are young and defended vigorously when they are mature.

If we want to take the institutional framework further, I would recommend following the advise of journalist and author Virginia Postrel. In 2011, she published a book about the conflict between dynamism (bottoms-up systems based on experimentation and feedback loops) and stasis (top-down sytems based on central planning). She argues that this divide undercuts the conventional spectrum we know so well, with dynamists and stasists competing for the upper hand both on the left and the right.

How can we build institutions that don’t just prevent worst-case scenarios but also promote permissionless innovation, growth and dynamism? Although it is a fascinating question, I will leave the discussion to another day. The first step is to build a consensus to defend our institutions from populists and malignant narcissists. We can think about optimizing our institutions later. The comments are open. See you next week!

Further reading

The Future and Its Enemies, by Postrel

Donate to Reporters Without Borders

Donate to the the International Federation of Journalists’ Safety Fund for Journalists in Ukraine

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