The Reckless Unraveling of a Hard-Won Order

"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; The best lack all conviction, While the worst Are full of passionate intensity" - Yeats, The Second Coming

For all its flaws, in the annals of human progress, few moments glitter as brightly as the present age. Never before has mankind possessed such godlike implements and wealth that would have staggered Croesus. The latticework of state and international institutions, painstakingly erected over decades, is capable of banishing poverty, ignorance, and tyranny from the earth. From the Bretton Woods compact to the alphabet soup of American and global agencies (the UN, ICJ, EPA, CDC, and their ilk), the postwar order stands as a triumph of deliberate governance, a bulwark against falling into the Malthusian trap. Yet, in a bitter irony worthy of Sophocles, these tools lie rusting as poverty grows, ignorance spreads, and authoritarianism, cloaked in the garb of snarling right-wing recidivism, metastasizes across the globe.

This is no mere tragedy of missed opportunity; it is a self-inflicted wound, carved by a modern right that has abandoned the prudent conservatism of Edmund Burke and the market-disciplined skepticism of Friedrich Hayek for something altogether more feral. Burke, the 18th-century statesman, saw society as a delicate partnership between the living, the dead, and the unborn - a tapestry of inherited wisdom to be mended, not torn asunder. He’d recoil at today’s right, which trades this careful stewardship for a creed of incompetence and anarchy, a reckless impulse to smash the systems that tether societies to sanity. Hayek, who prized markets as fragile orders worth guarding, not wrecking, would join him in dismay. These are not conservatives in Burke’s mold, preserving what works through measured reform; they are thoughtless anarchists, Taliban-like in their disdain for modernity’s mechanisms. Picture Pete Hegseth in tribal gear, misogyny on the warpath, or Elon Musk’s homespun DOGE of disruption reveling in the assault on America’s essential bureaucracies - cheered by charlatans who mistake chaos for liberty. Wisdom itself despairs.

The caricatures peddled by Musk and his intellectual kin paint carefully crafted institutions like the EPA as a meddling leviathan or the CDC and their global equivalents as a cabal of clipboard tyrants. This is utter nonsense. These institutions are not perfect, but they are indispensable. Cleaner air does not materialize by fiat of the invisible hand; pandemics do not bow to rugged individualism. Yet Hayek, the 20th-century economist, offers a caution worth heeding: he prized markets as a spontaneous source of order arising from human action but not human design, and warned against the hubris of centralized control strangling liberty. His insight tempers our faith in bureaucracy. Agencies must be disciplined by competition and accountability, not wielded as blunt instruments.

Still, to disembowel them entirely, as today’s right demands, betrays Hayek’s own logic. He saw value in rules and institutions that enable freedom, not chaos. As Daron Acemoglu has argued, such “inclusive institutions” are the sinews of liberty and progress, channeling collective effort toward shared prosperity. To dismantle them in the name of “freedom” is not principled; it is ignorant, nasty, and reckless. Modern societies, successful ones at least, depend on these structures as surely as a body depends on its skeleton and the intricate network supporting the nervous system. Dismantle them, and the result will not be some Randian utopia, but chaos unleashed with a hard-right fist.

Nor is this assault confined to the machinery of state. The apostles of this creed deny the state’s role in education, health, and environmental stewardship - domains that elevate mere existence into something worth defending. They strike at the core of what makes modernity meaningful. History offers a stark rejoinder: when the state retreats, it is not the individual who thrives but the strongman. The Gilded Age of unchecked capitalism, with its robber barons and cholera-ridden slums, whispers a warning we ignore at our peril.

This brings us to a second truth, often obscured by the din of ideological axe-grinding: the bedrock of any stable, prosperous society is not the state alone, but the health of its households, families, and communities. Tocqueville saw this in America’s early bustle, those voluntary associations that knitted together a fractious people. Burke, too, cherished these organic bonds as the roots of order. Yet today’s right, in its zeal to torch the public square, risks immolating these private ties as well. A society of atomized, resentful souls, bereft of clean water or vaccinated children, is no foundation for greatness. It is a recipe for collapse.

Finally, consider the latest abomination: the Liberation Day tariff, a sledgehammer to the global trading system forged at Bretton Woods. That arrangement, born in 1944 amid the ashes of war, was no utopian whim. It was a calculated bid for collective prosperity, a recognition that trade, not tariffs, lifts nations. Hayek would nod here—economic freedom, he argued, underpins political freedom, and protectionism chokes both. Milton Friedman echoed this: “Economic freedom is an essential requisite for political freedom.” To shred this order is to invite not just economic stagnation, but a geopolitical unraveling that could rival the 1930s. Smoot-Hawley’s ghost tips its hat knowingly.

None of this is inevitable. Humanity possesses material, institutional, and moral tools to forge a world of unprecedented flourishing. That we instead flirt with anarchy under the banner of fake individual freedom is a tragedy not of fate, but of choice. The right once grasped governance as a craft - Burke with his reverence for tradition, Hayek with his respect for ordered liberty - but now swings a wrecking ball. History will judge all who could have stopped them harshly if these feckless vandals prevail.