This is essentially me revisiting the core concept from last week’s observation that social norms are necessary but not sufficient. Simply read this Michael Lewis essay on the attempted takeover and dissolution of the Institute of Peace by a cadre of DOGE employees who seem little more than a gang of giddy vandals.
You can read it as the narrative is designed. There are good guys resisting a group of marauding (in some cases literal) children. But I think it implies a vastly more important question that we’ve been learning the answer to every day for the last two years: are there rules? If someone does not care to follow the rules, what are the consequences? If someone is creating bespoke rules on the fly with the implied promise that you are taking on great personal risk if you do not follow their rules, are they actually rules or are they something else?
Funny thing about high level governance, it takes on a far greater “fog of war” than a more optimistic observer of institutions might expect. The shape of the current US federal government and the actions it takes appears to be determined far more by the actions of individuals willing and capable of making decisions in a fog of war. That favors people who know that rules aren’t real if they are unenforced. But it also implies the potential for far greater consequences if an authority ever decides to impose consquences for prior transgressions within the fog of war in the interest of resetting precedent for the future.
