Conservatives no longer trust the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Liberals—or more precisely progressives—no longer trust the local police. We have a problem.

The tension between too much domestic security and too little runs back to the country’s founding. It often finds its way to the Supreme Court in cases involving the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable searches and seizures by the government. Those debates can be intense, but ultimately the system adjusts.

What’s going on now is different. The U.S. is already amid a crisis of confidence in what we call our governing institutions. That word, governing, is taken for granted, but it took a long time for governing to become a fact of daily life. Consider the opposite of governing elsewhere—mayhem, chaos, anarchy.

We may be inching closer than we imagine to the opposite of governing. Urban crime, mindless and random killings, tent-city homelessness, parents shouting at school boards, and the images of an FBI raid on a former president’s home. Instead of adjusting, many are turning away from the institutions that provide the bedrock of domestic tranquility.

[Ya THINK? ~ Beege]