A Crisis of Coherence

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There's a scene early in The Godfather where young Michael Corleone regales his sweet, WASPy girlfriend Kay with a story about his the inner workings of his family’s business. When she recoils at the brutal nature of the Corleones, Michael reassures her: "That's my family, Kay, not me," In his idealism and desire to be greater than his surroundings, he draws a bright line to separate him from the sins of his family. By the film's end, of course, that line has been obliterated. Michael hasn't just joined the family business—he has become it, swallowed whole by the very machine he once held at arm's length.

America today finds itself in a similar position, though the stakes are considerably higher than one Italian-American family's criminal enterprise. We are witnessing what might be called the Great Fracturing—the collapse of the mediating institutions that once allowed us to live together as something more than a collection of warring tribes. The center, as Yeats warned, is not holding.

Our Incoherent Institutions

Trust in most American institutions has reached historic lows. The Pew Research Center's polling consistently shows Americans growing more skeptical of everything from Congress (approval ratings that would make a medieval plague seem popular by comparison) to the mainstream media, universities, and even previously unassailable institutions like the military and local police. But the crisis runs deeper than mere approval ratings suggest.

To paraphrase Russell Moore, the former president of the Southern Baptist Convention: people don't leave the church because they no longer believe what they were taught; they leave the church because they no longer trust that the church believes its own teachings. Over time, our institutions have been infested with parasitic norms and beliefs. They have been taken over by new leaders, and the old antibodies that once kept them insulated from the pull of populism are no longer. As a result, many have developed an allergy to their own stated purposes.

The Church involves itself in the politics of the day, and turns to conservative figureheads who preach on Leviticus more than they do on Christ. Our institutions of higher education became more focused on diversity than on the premise of the academy. Our FBI, which once enjoyed broad public trust as the nation’s premier law enforcement agency, has spent the better part of a decade under partisan scrutiny and now finds itself under the control of a partisan hatchet-man.

None of this is to say that Leviticus is not worth teaching, or that diversity is not an admirable aim, or that our law enforcement should tread lightly around politicians. But equating these new trends to the same level as the original missions of these institutions has rendered them incoherent. They no longer can portray a clear outward message for why they should exist as they do, because they don’t know why they should exist as they do.

The result is what sociologist James Davison Hunter calls "the culture war," though that term has become so debased through overuse that it obscures more than it illuminates. What we're experiencing isn't really a war between cultures so much as the collapse of the shared cultural framework that made genuine disagreement possible. You can't have a productive argument about the role of government if you can't agree on basic facts about what the government is doing. You can't have a meaningful debate about education policy if parents don't trust that educators are acting in good faith. You can't maintain democratic institutions if citizens don't believe those institutions are committed to democratic principles.

When Institutions Fail, Tribes Thrive

Into this vacuum has rushed something far older and more primitive than institutional authority: tribal loyalty. And here we encounter one of the more fascinating paradoxes of modern life. Human beings, it turns out, are simultaneously too small and too large for the world we've created.

In 1992, British anthropologist Robin Dunbar discovered through his study of primate behavior that there's a cognitive limit to the number of stable relationships any individual can maintain. This number—since dubbed "Dunbar's number"—hovers somewhere between 100 and 200 people. The finding wasn't entirely surprising; anthropologists had long noticed that hunter-gatherer societies, medieval villages, and even Roman military units seemed to naturally organize themselves around similar numbers. There's something about 150 people that represents the outer boundary of human social cognition—the point beyond which individual relationships become almost impossible to track and maintain.

Yet we live in a world that demands we interact meaningfully with hundreds, even thousands, of people. A casual glance at your LinkedIn connections, church directory, or even your high school graduating class reveals networks that dwarf anything our ancestors could have imagined. We've somehow transcended the cognitive limitations that Dunbar identified, and we've done so through what might be called mediating institutions—structures that allow us to extend trust and cooperation far beyond our immediate social circle.

You probably don't personally know the farmers who grow your food, the engineers who design your car, or the doctors who would treat you in an emergency. Yet you trust them anyway, not because you've developed individual relationships with each of them, but because you trust the institutions that train, certify, and regulate them. The Department of Agriculture, the licensing boards, the professional associations, the universities—these are the invisible infrastructure that allows modern society to function despite vastly exceeding Dunbar's number.

When these institutions work, they perform something like magic: they transform strangers into trusted partners, enemies into fellow citizens, chaos into order. When they fail, we revert to something more primitive and familiar. We retreat into tribes.

The Shattered Mirror

The retreat is already well underway. Political scientist Shanto Iyengar's research on "affective polarization" shows that Americans increasingly dislike and distrust members of the opposing political party at levels that were once reserved for foreign enemies. Parents express concern about their children marrying someone from the other party. Employers admit they're less likely to hire candidates whose political views they find objectionable. We're not just disagreeing about policy anymore—we're questioning each other's basic humanity.

This tribalization extends far beyond electoral politics. Evangelical Christians and progressive Episcopalians, despite sharing a nominal commitment to the same savior, often seem to inhabit entirely different moral universes. Academic disciplines that once engaged in vigorous but collegial debate now seem more interested in protecting their tribal boundaries than pursuing truth. Even ostensibly non-political institutions like sports leagues and entertainment companies find themselves pressured to choose sides in culture war battles that have nothing to do with their core missions.

Martin Gurri, the former CIA analyst whose book The Revolt of the Public anticipated much of our current crisis, offers perhaps the most compelling diagnosis of our predicament. The mirror in which we used to find ourselves faithfully reflected in the world, he argues, has shattered. The great narratives that once held us together are fracturing into shards, each reflecting only a partial truth while denying the validity of all the others.

Human beings are cognitively equipped for life in small, face-to-face communities where reputation matters, relationships are personal, and authority is earned rather than bestowed by God, or lineage, or ladies in the lake. We're not naturally suited for mass society, with its anonymous interactions, specialized roles, and complex hierarchies. We've made it work through hard-won institutional innovation. But as the narratives which held those institutions together come undone and they become increasingly incoherent, we devolve back into our tribal selves. That institutional innovation requires constant maintenance and periodic renewal.

The challenge is that institutional maintenance isn't particularly exciting. It doesn't generate viral content or inspire passionate movements. It requires the kind of patient, unglamorous work that career civil servants and local school board members perform—work that rarely makes headlines and even more rarely generates political donations. Yet this work is the foundation upon which everything else depends.

This work was once fulfilled by apolitical bureaucrats. The election officials, librarians, clergy, and college deans did the unsexy work of keeping our institutions functional. For most of American history, these positions attracted little attention and even less controversy. They were seen as administrative rather than political roles, requiring competence rather than public-facing charisma. But their unsexiness makes them ripe for takeover.

Local election officials spent decades quietly ensuring that democracy functioned, only to find themselves receiving primary challenges and death threats post-2020. School board meetings, once sleepy affairs attended mainly by parents and staff, now feature shouting matches over curriculum content. Medical licensing boards, traditionally focused on ensuring professional competence, find themselves adjudicating ideological disputes about treatment protocols. Even seemingly apolitical institutions like libraries and museums discover that neutrality is no longer an option.

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The Boring Work

The death of our institutions is exciting. But the patient work of rebuilding trust in the mediating structures that allow diverse people to live together peacefully will not be. In fact, it will require a rejection of excitement in favor of the consistent investment and reform, and the belief in a mission that bridges and bonds more than it divides.

It will emerge from the countless small interactions that occur when people work together toward common goals: parents collaborating on school fundraisers, neighbors organizing block parties, volunteers serving in local nonprofits, citizens respectfully participating in town halls. These activities might seem trivial compared to the grand ideological battles that dominate our political discourse, but they're actually more fundamental. They're where trust is built, where shared norms are transmitted, where the habits of democratic citizenship are learned and practiced. They're where we encounter people as individuals rather than as representatives of abstract categories, where we learn that our political opponents are also fellow citizens with legitimate concerns and valid experiences.

I have the privilege of serving on my town’s Planning & Zoning commission. If you’ve ever been to a Planning & Zoning meeting, you’ll know that they are ripe with opportunities for populist contention. Homeowners fear increased traffic; they fear the depreciation of their assets; they fear for the safety of their children. But often times, rather than devolving into shouting matches, these meetings become places where people with different opinions can come to understand the hopes and fears of the other side. While our politicians seek to demonize one another on the world stage, these active but calm meetings are where I hear phrases like “I don’t always agree with you but I respect your opinion.” This is where our institutions rebuild their trust and coherence.

When good people abandon institutions, those institutions inevitably decay. When institutions decay, they create the conditions for tribal warfare. When tribal warfare intensifies, it drives out even more good people, creating a vicious cycle that's difficult to break.

The renewal of our institutions requires a sort of moral courage. It can be exciting for a leader to announce some sexy new project, and it can be a relief to leave a crumbling institution behind. But this institutional renewal requires leaders will stay in the arena, and who will hold fast to their primary obligation over politically convenient incoherence. This means university presidents who defend academic freedom even when it's politically costly, journalists who report uncomfortable truths regardless of their personal preferences, and elected officials who prioritize a clear philosophy of governing over conveniently towing the party line.

We All Need Our Institutions

Perhaps the greatest irony of our current moment is that conservatives, who claim to value tradition and stability, have become the most effective destroyers of institutional authority, while progressives, who claim to value change and reform, have become the most reflexive defenders of institutional legitimacy. This reversal suggests that our political categories may be less useful than we imagine.

The truth is that anyone who values human flourishing should want our institutions to work well. Conservative concerns about social order and progressive concerns about social justice both depend on functional institutions capable of maintaining rule of law, enabling economic cooperation, and providing forums for democratic deliberation. You can't have prosperity without reliable contract enforcement. You can't have social justice without fair legal procedures. You can't have democracy without trusted information sources.

In the end, we face a choice that's both simple and profound: we can continue smashing institutions in the name of our preferred ideologies, or we can begin the harder work of rebuilding them in service of our shared humanity. The former path is easier and more emotionally satisfying in the short term. The latter is the only path that leads somewhere worth going.

As Michael Corleone discovered, you can't escape the consequences of institutional decay by pretending to stand apart from it. When institutions fail, everyone gets pulled into the wreckage. The question is whether we'll be passive victims of that collapse or active participants in the reconstruction that must eventually follow.