Even though Yuval Levin’s The Fractured Republic is all about understanding modern-day America, it can also easily read as a parable for other institutions and organizations.  Everything is connected, of course.

So Levin’s description of our national systems and programs is particularly telling, as they are the product of specific moments but have been perpetuated long beyond that moment.  He calls these systems sclerotic:

But the truest models of sclerosis in our time are the public institutions that hail from the era of consolidation.  These are the centralized, bureaucratized programs and agencies at all levels of government (from Medicare to state welfare agencies to large school districts, among many others) that persist is the model of midcentury technocracy. . . These institutions have not kept pace with our changing society, but because our political debates are themselves deeply nostalgic, we tend to argue about whether such institutions should be kept as they are or government should be rolled back to what it was before they existed—neither of which looks very plausible.

And so you end up “stuck” with programs that have inadvertently become “sacred cows” of the national structure.  The same thing plays out often in smaller organizations and institutions.  The debate around these “sacred cows” reeks of dysfunction (and many in the conversation can sense it).  The programs remind us, though, of “better days” and have become so intrinsic to a form of group identity that it feels like a real damned-if-you-do/damned-if-you-don’t situation.

In my mind, this serves as a cautionary tale for implementing “big solutions” to anything. In the end, everyone gets “taxed,” from those who implement, those who maintain, and even those who benefit.  I think of Wendell Berry’s assertion that there are no good big solutions for big problems, only a good collection of small solutions.  That approach, of course, can lend to its own kind of chaos.  Regardless, a certain kind of humility mixed with a particular creativity seems to be necessary for understanding and success here.

(image from kassoon.com)