I grew up in a world in which most authorities could be trusted most of the time. True, it was already a cliché that Washington, D.C. was full of liars. And yes, everyone knew about medical malpractice. Even people who weren’t Marxists understood that corporations, from time to time, were guilty of committing genuine wrongs against the public. Still, overall, the people who were running things were usually accountable. There was an ingrained, unspoken sense of decency and social responsibility long before the current twisted understanding of social justice (i.e., revenge) had a chance to muscle it out. People in authority may have seen themselves as a bit better than the common run of humanity, but they didn’t quite see themselves as an entirely different species. They were the best and brightest of us, but not yet an utterly alien aristocracy.

In the last couple of decades, almost all of our institutions have failed. One after another has been caught doing things that no one ever imagined they would do. Most of us remember a time when the FBI were not the hired goons of the Democrat party, but almost always obeyed the same laws they were sworn to enforce. Most of us can remember when the Democrat party was, at least from time to time, still worthy of its name — and might cough up the occasional politician who wasn’t simply an empty cipher for the radical activists who now apparently run the DNC. More broadly, there was a time when politicians lied when they were backed into a corner, or maybe when it was expedient — but didn’t lie as a matter of course.

Corporations have always been in the business to make money, but in principle, they tried to make money by selling people things they needed or at least wanted.........

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