I am increasingly befuddled by young men on the hard right who speak casually, even eagerly, about a complete “system reset.”
This seems to confuse two very different things: recognizing that a regime is badly disordered and possessing a viable replacement for it.
One can look at the present American order and see enormous corruption, elite irresponsibility, institutional dishonesty, oligarchic capture, and in the classical sense, extraordinary levels of injustice. I certainly do.
But it does not follow that destroying the existing order produces something better.
The classical political philosophers were much less romantic about regime change. Regimes do not normally collapse into a clean constitutional moment in which intelligent dissidents assemble, deliberate about first principles, and establish the good regime. They collapse into contests for power.
And the people best positioned to win those contests are usually the people who already possess organization, money, weapons, bureaucratic machinery, patronage networks, intelligence capabilities, disciplined cadres—or some combination of them.
The online dissident imagining himself helping draft the constitution of the new order may instead discover that food distribution, credit markets, electrical grids, courts, policing, sanitation, property records, and functioning chains of command were doing rather more work than he realized.
There is also a strangely anti-classical assumption underlying much revolutionary rhetoric: that if we can somehow destroy the corrupt system, we can escape the permanent problems of political life. However, liberalism did not invent ambition.
It did not invent faction, greed, cowardice, tribalism, vanity, erotic desire, status competition, resentment, or the lust to dominate.
Human nature survives the revolution.
Indeed, when institutions disintegrate, those passions are often given much greater freedom of action.
This is why the classical virtue of prudence matters so much.
Prudence is not an excuse for tolerating injustice. It is the political virtue that asks how justice can actually be instantiated among these people, under these circumstances, with the institutions, customs, habits, and material conditions that actually exist.
Aristotle is much more useful here than revolutionary abstraction.
The statesman does not merely ask, “What is the best regime?”
He must also ask: What regime is possible here? What can be reformed? What must be preserved? What can this people actually sustain? What happens on the morning after?
Politics deals with human beings as they are, not imaginary men created for the purposes of a theory.
That does not mean regimes never become so unjust that rupture occurs. History plainly shows otherwise. There are moments when political orders exhaust their legitimacy, institutions fail, and events move beyond the possibility of ordinary reform.
But that makes revolution a catastrophic contingency, not something serious men should yearn for. Civil breakdown is not an aesthetic.
It means ruined savings, collapsing credit, interrupted supply chains, political killings, criminal predation, unemployment, frightened children, displaced families, destroyed businesses, and young men with rifles deciding questions that courts and legislatures used to decide.
People romanticizing “the reset” tend to imagine the constitutional convention and skip the twenty miles of roadblocks required to get there.
The proper distinction, therefore, is not between complacency and revolution.
It is between restoration and reset.
A man can believe the present regime requires profound constitutional, moral, institutional, and even regime-level correction without believing indiscriminate destruction is the path to achieving it.
In fact, the more seriously one takes classical political philosophy, the harder it becomes to indulge revolutionary fantasies. And Christianity should make this realism still more severe.
There is no political arrangement that abolishes the Fall. There is no institutional reset that produces a new human nature.
Politics always begins with fallen, embodied human beings inhabiting a particular place, possessing a particular history, bound by particular loyalties, possessing particular virtues and vices. The task is not to escape those realities.
The task of political wisdom is to govern within them—to preserve what is good, reform what is corrupt, punish genuine injustice, recover constitutional order where possible, and build institutions capable of transmitting a better regime to those who come after us.
If catastrophe comes, prudence may require extraordinary action. But catastrophe itself should never become the political ideal.
A politics that requires the destruction of society before it can begin governing society is not realism. It is utopianism wearing combat boots.
Thanks for saying this, Ron. You're right over the target. There is a great amount of political opportunity before us, but the Right risks squandering it if we turn to a political vision based primary on emotional catharsis instead of prudence.
This discussion of "burning it all down" by Ron Dodson is spot on. Back in the 1990s, I imagined a federal constitutional convention done by our generation. My prediction was that we'd be shooting each other in the streets soon after.
A question to ponder: Now, 30 years later, would we be better or worse off in a reset situation?