Where I live, the editor of the legacy newspaper, along with some journalists at his and other organizations, shamelessly aim for future jobs in the private sector or non-profit world. In 2026 they provide endless cover for people and decisions that they would have investigated in 2006.
Excellent piece. As an aside, you revealed yourself to be a master of understatement: "The institutions that sustained it have lost public trust, not entirely without warrant."
Aaron - outstanding post that reflects a valuable lesson and observation about the reality of the importance of finding and acknowledging those individuals who have demonstrated the value of taking an unbiased view of the world based on truth and caring for others and why these voices are so important in understanding and solving challenges in our country.
Institutions build trust by applying the principle of checks and balances to the people producing work within them. So for example, in an academic journal, editors are supposed to subject each citation and assertion to heavy scrutiny. Newspaper fact checkers are supposed to try to corroborate factual assertions made by sources such that an article does not need to actually describe all of its sources in the body text.
This concept of regulation through adversity was built into the settlement of the Magna Carta, which created oversight bodies to prevent abuses of kingly legal authority. Then Montesqieu developed the theory further into one of constitutional construction, which was followed by the American founders. So this idea of trusted, internally balancing institutions is a very sticky one in our culture, favored by the wealthy and powerful because it protects them from untrammeled and deadly competition. In the old days, maybe the king decides to send a minion to pierce your son's eyes with a hot poker and rip out his little tongue, as dramatized by Shakespeare in his "King John." The barons thought this a bit much and sought institutional safeguards against the whims of powerful individuals. This is why perhaps our culture puts such stock in institutions, perhaps too much even.
With public intellectuals, it is hard for them to dodge the core problems of institutional decay and loss of public trust, because they invariably rely on the authority of studies, papers, and data collected by institutions. They become a pitchman for the findings of discredited institutions with a fresh and personable wrapper. It's a pamphlet from the Dianetics Center proffered by an energetic young person and not a sermon straight from the Church of Scientology.
You could say that the public intellectual is checked and balanced by his or her competitors; that you don't need the institutions because competition for attention, trust, and authority will sort it out. But does that actually happen?
Ryan Burge is especially important to those of us who have been praying for a resurgence in conservative American Christianity. The problem is that we have a tendency to believe anecdotal reports of young conservative men flooding back into churches. Burge isn't buying any of it until he sees solid evidence, consistently, over a significant period of time.
This is useful because Burge is a center-left American Baptist who has no ideological sympathy for the theobros. Because of that and his strict empirical approach, he's immune to wishful, anecdotal thinking. It's also clear that as a pastor in a declining mainline church, Burge is painfully familiar with the shape of the decline. He's got skin in the game and he's not in my ideological or theological tribe.
All this is to say that when Burge finally reports a turning of the tide, it will truly be time to celebrate.
Where would you place Rod Dreher and Nassim Taleb in the pantheon of public intellectuals?
Where I live, the editor of the legacy newspaper, along with some journalists at his and other organizations, shamelessly aim for future jobs in the private sector or non-profit world. In 2026 they provide endless cover for people and decisions that they would have investigated in 2006.
Although not as prolific as some of the individuals on this list, one of the people whom I pay attention to is Yuval Levin.
Excellent piece. As an aside, you revealed yourself to be a master of understatement: "The institutions that sustained it have lost public trust, not entirely without warrant."
Aaron - outstanding post that reflects a valuable lesson and observation about the reality of the importance of finding and acknowledging those individuals who have demonstrated the value of taking an unbiased view of the world based on truth and caring for others and why these voices are so important in understanding and solving challenges in our country.
Thank you.
Institutions build trust by applying the principle of checks and balances to the people producing work within them. So for example, in an academic journal, editors are supposed to subject each citation and assertion to heavy scrutiny. Newspaper fact checkers are supposed to try to corroborate factual assertions made by sources such that an article does not need to actually describe all of its sources in the body text.
This concept of regulation through adversity was built into the settlement of the Magna Carta, which created oversight bodies to prevent abuses of kingly legal authority. Then Montesqieu developed the theory further into one of constitutional construction, which was followed by the American founders. So this idea of trusted, internally balancing institutions is a very sticky one in our culture, favored by the wealthy and powerful because it protects them from untrammeled and deadly competition. In the old days, maybe the king decides to send a minion to pierce your son's eyes with a hot poker and rip out his little tongue, as dramatized by Shakespeare in his "King John." The barons thought this a bit much and sought institutional safeguards against the whims of powerful individuals. This is why perhaps our culture puts such stock in institutions, perhaps too much even.
With public intellectuals, it is hard for them to dodge the core problems of institutional decay and loss of public trust, because they invariably rely on the authority of studies, papers, and data collected by institutions. They become a pitchman for the findings of discredited institutions with a fresh and personable wrapper. It's a pamphlet from the Dianetics Center proffered by an energetic young person and not a sermon straight from the Church of Scientology.
You could say that the public intellectual is checked and balanced by his or her competitors; that you don't need the institutions because competition for attention, trust, and authority will sort it out. But does that actually happen?
Ryan Burge is especially important to those of us who have been praying for a resurgence in conservative American Christianity. The problem is that we have a tendency to believe anecdotal reports of young conservative men flooding back into churches. Burge isn't buying any of it until he sees solid evidence, consistently, over a significant period of time.
This is useful because Burge is a center-left American Baptist who has no ideological sympathy for the theobros. Because of that and his strict empirical approach, he's immune to wishful, anecdotal thinking. It's also clear that as a pastor in a declining mainline church, Burge is painfully familiar with the shape of the decline. He's got skin in the game and he's not in my ideological or theological tribe.
All this is to say that when Burge finally reports a turning of the tide, it will truly be time to celebrate.