The West Forgot How Its Institutions Renew Themselves
Why Washington, Lincoln, and FDR are no longer imaginable within today’s political vocabulary
Historically, the United States has renewed its institutions only in moments of deep crisis. The standard cases—Washington, Lincoln, FDR—follow the same pattern: a strong executive core, and a temporarily aligned elite coordinated around the leader’s national mission.
After FDR, this model became unintelligible and taboo. American discourse began treating charismatic leadership as suspect, invoking the specter of totalitarianism. Even FDR was retroactively reframed as a risk.
You can see this shift if you compare how people talk about FDR’s “bold experiments” to how we now talk about “norms and institutions.”
But that’s the textbook version of what happened. It is also probably wrong.
Post-New Deal governance produced a powerful administrative state that became the de facto political regime in America—what people now refer to when they say “deep state.” It also generated a professional-managerial ideology that soon set the terms of Western political culture. In practice, it:
elevated bureaucratic autonomy over political leadership
treated visible elite cohesion as inherently dangerous
in political science, quietly sidelined classical elite theory—the one framework that could have explained both the old pattern and what replaced it
trained media to treat “neutral experts” and their agencies as the “legitimate” voices, even though that neutrality rarely existed in practice
The result is a decaying administrative state paired with a political culture that lacks the language required for legitimate renewal—and a culture that, over time, has become suspicious of the one mechanism that historically achieved it: strong leadership.
This arrangement has suited the administrative states that shaped contemporary Western political discourse: it has consistently reinforced their claim to political legitimacy. It has been far less kind to the countries they preside over.
Our political vocabulary no longer contains the concepts needed to describe what Washington, Lincoln, FDR—or many non-American leaders—actually did, or how democratic leadership is supposed to respond to crisis, present or future.
Any serious talk of coordinated leadership, even in democratic terms, is now reflexively labeled “fascism.” Every strong leader is treated as “potentially another fascist.” In most cases, such leaders bear no resemblance to fascists—or to the political cultures that produced fascism. Post-WW2 political culture has, in effect, lost the ability to distinguish between authoritarianism and strong democratic leadership.
If administrative-state ideology led us here, the irony is piercing: the system protecting itself is the system destabilizing itself.
Insightful to me. Thank you.
It makes no historical difference after the 1927 McFadden Act was codified. The Act made permanent the Federal Reserve Banking System (private corporation) and ended USA sovereignity forever, up to and including today. The FRBS owns the United States. Until the FRBS is resolved, we are only a Constitutional Republic by name not function.
Here is his speech on the House floor in 1934. He could have said exactly the same speech today Nov 13, 2025.
"Mr. Chairman, we have in this country one of the most corrupt institutions the world has ever known. I refer to the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal reserve banks. The Federal Reserve Board, a Government board, has cheated the Government of the United States out of enough money to pay the national debt. The depredations and the iniquities of the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal reserve banks acting together have cost this country enough money to pay the national debt several times over. This evil institution has impoverished and ruined the people of the United States; has bankrupted itself, and has practically bankrupted our Government. It has done this through defects of the law under which it operates, through the maladministration of that law by the Federal Reserve Board and through the corrupt practices of the moneyed vultures who control it.
From the Atlantic to the Pacific our country has been ravaged and laid waste by the evil practices of the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Reserve banks and the interests which control them … This is an era of economic misery, and for the conditions that caused that misery, the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Reserve banks are fully liable.
The imperial power of elasticity of the public currency is wielded exclusively by the central corporations owned by the banks. This is a life and death power over all local banks and all business. It can be used to create or destroy prosperity, to ward off or cause stringencies and panics. By making money artificially scarce, interest rates throughout the Country can be arbitrarily raised and the bank tax on all business and cost of living increased for the profit of the banks owning these regional central banks, and without the slightest benefit to the people. The 12 Corporations together cover and monopolize and use for private gain every dollar of the public currency and all public revenue of the United States. Not a dollar can be put into circulation among the people by their Government, without the consent of and on terms fixed by these 12 private money trusts.'”
Louis McFadden (1934) [8]