Looking around, it seems pretty clear that this isn’t a problem just for BlackRock and the Democratic Party. All over America — and to a substantial degree, the world — institutions seem to be run on behalf of the people who control them rather than to support their missions or the people they’re supposed to serve.

No one would seriously argue that the federal bureaucracy places serving citizens at the top of its priorities. COVID demonstrated that public-school leaders place their own comfort and well-being above educating their students. And nonprofits, as The New Republic noted over two decades ago, have moved away from success metrics to undemanding systems that allow every project to be called successful, regardless of the actual results. Promotions all around!

This problem is worsened by what Hannah Arendt called the bureaucratic diffusion of responsibility: In a corporation, or a party or a bureaucracy, no one is really responsible, in the sense that there are unlikely to be significant personal costs to organizational failure.