Can institutions save us even when we no longer believe in them?
I’ve spent most of my professional life criticizing institutions — their failures, their exclusions, their hypocrisies, their quiet (and not so quiet) forms of violence. But like many of Donald Trump’s critics, I now catch myself fantasizing that those very same institutions will ultimately deliver his reckoning.
Think about it: How often have you woken up in the middle of the night to doom-scroll the news, searching for the one article promising that some institution — any institution — is finally putting an end to the relentless disregard for meaningful checks on Trump’s ongoing abuse of power?
Take the Federal Reserve. Not so long ago, it was common to hurl criticism at what many of us considered to be an elitist arm of rapacious capitalism. But today, we are all biting our nails and hoping that the Supreme Court shuts down Trump’s efforts to exert greater control over the Fed. We have resorted to worrying over an institution we loved to hate while remaining shocked that its integrity could be so fragile.
