Old Orderists vs. New Orderists

Legacy vs. outsider institutions, restoration vs. reinvention: The fault line running through today's politics.

Brink Lindsey, a senior vice president at the Niskanen Center, wrote an interesting take on a major fault line in our society between what he calls the “brokenists” and the “anti-brokenists.”

So what leads normally careful and level-headed writers to swing so wildly in criticizing my book? I believe that their reaction is a reflection of a newish intellectual fault line running through today’s embattled liberal center — by which I mean those people on the center-left and center-right who share more common ground with each other than they do with either the populist right or the “woke” left. That fault line consists of disagreement over the severity of the problems confronting contemporary liberal societies and the connection between those problems and the undeniable political crisis that alarms both sides.

Call it the division between the “brokenists” and the “anti-brokenists,” after the Alana Newhouse essay from a few years back, “Everything Is Broken,” that helped to bring the fault line into view. Brokenists, like myself, regard the political upheavals of the past decade as an understandable but misguided reaction to serious underlying maladies. The furious energy on the political extremes is due to legitimate frustration with a deeply flawed status quo; the problem is that the remedies proposed by those on the extremes are considerably worse than the disease. Anti-brokenists, meanwhile, concede that there are plenty of problems these days, but they insist that there are always plenty of problems; what has changed is the emergence of conflicting “derangement syndromes” that render people unable to handle living in a fallen, messy world and itching as a result to burn everything down and start over.

Each branch of liberal centrists sees the other as deeply mistaken in its response to the rise of extremism. Anti-brokenists — and I’m putting the authors of the two book reviews in question in that camp — worry that people like me are lending aid and comfort to the enemy by substantiating their exaggerated complaints about the status quo. Brokenists, meanwhile, believe that extremists have risen to power by filling a vacuum created by centrist complacency and neglect. In this view, which I share, dismissing widespread disaffection from established institutions and governing elites as so much hysteria and entitled whining is doomed to failure. It will only add fuel to the extremist fire. [emphasis added]

I’d like to reframe this within the context of what I call the American Transition. In this framework, America is in a liminal period between an older order that’s in decline, and a newer one that has yet to fully emerge. This makes the future up for grabs in a way it hasn’t been in much of our lives, causing political and social upheaval, and creating a lot of uncertainty and unease.

Old Orderist vs. New Orderists

To me, the fundamental divide is between those who are still committed to the old order, and those who are trying to build a new one. Think of it as the “old orderists” and the “new orderists.”

Those committed to the old order believe it is still the best answer for the realities of today’s world. What’s wrong is primarily that we have strayed from it, and thus we need to course correct to go back. We need to restore our political norms, our commitment to trade, our postwar institutions, our traditional alliances, bourgeois values, etc.

This does not mean a rote adherence to the specific formulas of yesterday. The old orderists agree that there are new challenges, and that continuous updates are needed. But they believe the previous basic institutional, ideological, political, social, and cultural frameworks remain sound guides to the future.

The new orderists think that the old order, particularly in how it evolved in the post-Cold War world, is no longer fit for purpose. New technological, institutional, political, etc. paradigms are required. This doesn’t necessary mean the old order is “broken,” only that new approaches are needed for new times.

They too don’t believe that the entire old order needs to be jettisoned. In many domains it may be sound, or require simply evolutionary change. But their focus is on building the new rather than trying to restore the old.

Few people fall completely into one camp or another. And probably few people conceptualize themselves within this framework. But I think these two groups capture something of the divide.

Legacy vs. New Institutions

The old orderists tend to be clustered in legacy institutions, while the new orderists are in newer ones. This makes sense in that the legacy institutions are a product of the old order. Those institutions and the people in them thrived in the old order, and thus tend to think more positively of it. (It’s similar in a sense to how successful, high-functioning regions like Utah or upscale suburbia have been less friendly to Trump-style politics or disruption).

New orderists, those focused on key aspects of an American Transition, tend to be clustered in newer or outsider institutions and movements (though not exclusively). Some examples: Foundation for American Innovation, Institute for Progress, Economic Innovation Group, American Affairs Journal, the Abundance Liberals/The Argument, AI Industry, the AI Safety Movement, Effective Altruism/Rationalism, American Compass, Palladium, Works in Progress/Stripe Press, the Democratic Socialists of America, the “Tech Right.” Perhaps Lindsey would add the Niskanen Center to this list. Some older organizations are part of this as well, notably the Claremont Institute and to some extent the Heritage Foundation.

This spans groups ranging from right to left, from the center to the political edges, but they share some commonalities in that they are looking to address today’s challenges through new models.

Not all of these groups would probably think of themselves as new orderist. My impression is that the people at the Economic Innovation Group (EIG) would not, for example. But they are very much working on a core problem of geographic inequality that requires new models to address. And they are doing it via a new, standalone organization, which says something.

It’s interesting that to date the old orderist institutions have by and large not seemed interested in taking on the kinds of initiatives that these newer organizations are working on, or co-opting the people involved in them.

The Abundance Liberal movement is particularly instructive to look at. As the movement germinated, many of its key figures exited major institutions. Matthew Yglesias went independent a bit earlier. Derek Thompson and Jerusalem Demsas left the Atlantic. Ezra Klein is the main figure still at an establishment institution, the New York Times. It will be interesting to watch his future. Perhaps these are all coincidences, but it shows even fairly mainstream figures have tended to end up outside of legacy institutions when taking on topics that are new orderist in nature.

The Problem with Populism

This framework also helps us understand the problems of various populist political movements. Trumpism is very critical of the old order, but is largely not looking to create a new one. There are cases where the administration is doing that, such as with its work on creating policy frameworks for AI, or onshoring critical manufacturing. The great legacy of the first Trump administration was a reset in our view of China, in which the Trump position was adopted by mainstream elites.

However, a lot of the Trump vision is more reactionary than future oriented. We see it in energy policy especially, in which Trump wants to see an America burning lots and lots of coal to generate electricity, and where coal mining is still an aspirational industry. He’s both attacked green energy - not just by ending future subsidies, but by trying to cancel already approved and under construction projects - and rolled back fuel efficiency rules.

Not all of his moves here are necessarily bad. The key is that they are retro oriented. Rather than looking forward to a new model, it’s about going back to an old 1970s style America of coal plants and gas guzzlers. It is deconstructing rather than constructing.

In some respects this is the worst of both worlds. It’s disruptive of the current order but without building a better or more viable future one. This is a problem that has bedeviled that part of the American right. It hasn’t yet been able to articulate a positive view of the future. (One exception is various forms of localism, but these are predicated on either exiting from mainstream society, or the continued future decay of mainstream society).

Many of the groups on the left, particularly in the DSA, neo-socialist space, do have a vision for a future order. It’s just a bad one, built around some combination of degrowth, wealth taxes, identity politics as the foundational ordering principle of society, and more in that line.

A Time to Build

Regardless of your feelings about old vs. new orders, the right disposition is to be constructively working on building positive future models to address the major challenges and opportunities we face. That’s why I think some of the most interesting work today is coming out of places like IFP, EIG, American Affairs, and the Abundance Liberals.

America is the protean nation. Its genius has been inventing and reinventing itself for the future over and over again. It’s been America that’s often created the future, as Tanner Greer so brilliantly described in his essay. We are a dynamic nation. And it would be strange indeed we were to be technologically and economically dynamic, while remaining institutionally, politically, and culturally stagnant.

This is why we need to have the courage and spirit of adventure necessary to embrace change and dynamism, and go out and build a positive future once again.