Gatekeepers serve an invaluable function in a healthy society. At their best, they ensure institutional competence, even excellence, and thus stability and a measure of continuity. They ensure men like George Santos never make it on a ballot, that films like Cats never get greenlit, that plans to demolish Manhattan’s Penn Station are thwarted, that editors itching to bowdlerize Roald Dahl never get hired. They make society possible. But when the barbarians have already sacked the city—or the citizens have themselves grown terminally barbarous—gatekeepers serve a different purpose. They now exist to exclude partisans of the old regime, to enforce a new status quo. Identity, loyalty, and political utility, not competence, are the new standards. The gates now exist to keep the barbarians in. Those who hope to recover the dignity of the city’s institutions must look beyond its walls for help.

In The Revolt of the Public, Martin Gurri characterizes our present political crises as contests between the “Center” and the “Border.” The Center represents established power, the collection of large, hierarchical institutions of private and public life that once shared a monopoly over information. “The Border, by contrast, is composed of ‘sects’—we would say ‘networks’—which are voluntary associations of equals. Sects exist to oppose the Center: they stand firmly against.” But, importantly, Border sects do not aspire to replace the Center. Rather than govern, they “aim to model the behaviors demanded from the ‘godly or good society.’” …

Continue reading >>>>