In praise of Washington insiders

As Yuval Levin writes in his profound forthcoming book, “A Time to Build,” Trump is an example of a person who wasn’t formed by an institution. He is self-created and self-enclosed. He governs as a perpetual outsider, tweeting insults to members of his own cabinet. At its best, the impeachment process is an attempt to protect our institutions from his inability to obey the rules.

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The wider disease here is “outsiderism” itself. For a half-century our culture has celebrated the rebel, not the organization man; the free individual, not the institutionalist. That’s fine and in many cases good, but over the decades this outsider pose has hardened into an immature cynicism: Everybody’s corrupt. No one is to be trusted.

“The populism of this moment in our politics is fundamentally antinomian, mistrustful of authority, and cynical about all claims to integrity,” Levin writes in “A Time to Build.” “Our age combines a populism that insists all of our institutions are rigged against the people with an identity politics that rejects institutional commitments and a celebrity culture that chafes against all structure and constraint.”

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