When Institutions Go Bad: The Long March Effect
Institutions rot when practice overtakes purpose, and many conservatives have watched that erosion unfold in education, media, corporations, and government where outcomes no longer match stated missions or public expectations.
The result is a steady trickle of poor decisions, mounting waste, and institutional behavior that increasingly looks performative and self-referential rather than grounded in competence, accountability, or service to ordinary citizens.
The mechanism is straightforward, involving deliberate placement of activists who prize ideological victory over subject-matter expertise, followed by internal rules and incentives that reward conformity and loyalty instead of critical thinking and demonstrated skill.
As hiring, promotions, and disciplinary systems bend toward ideological tests, the technical knowledge, institutional memory, and procedural safeguards that once produced reliable results get sidelined, producing fragile systems prone to error and capture.
A single blunt line captures that descent with stark clarity and no need for qualifiers.
“When the long march through the institutions gives destructive and ridiculous people control of the institutions, the institutions become destructive and ridiculous, and then they become destroyed and ridiculous.”
Once an institution’s governance is captured by actors who prioritize signaling, decisions begin to reflect internal narratives and political theater rather than empirical analysis, operational competence, or fidelity to the organization’s charter.
Trust erodes quickly as citizens and stakeholders observe inconsistency between promises and practice, prompting withdrawal of support, legal challenges, and a search for alternatives that can fill the void left by a hollowed-out institution.
You can point to universities where curricula and hiring reward ideological alignment over scholarly rigor, to companies sacrificing long-term brand value for episodic virtue signaling, and to regulators who apply standards selectively.
Across these settings the sidelining of expertise produces clear costs, from lower educational outcomes and diminished research credibility to mismanaged firms and regulatory capture that distorts markets and harms consumers.
The warning signs are measurable: declining academic metrics, shrinking standards in professional publishing, promotion patterns keyed to political loyalty, and enforcement behavior that appears arbitrary and partisan rather than principled.
When those indicators move in the wrong direction, the institution ceases to function as a neutral public tool and instead becomes an instrument of factional advantage, raising the bar on what it takes to reverse course.
The political consequences are grave, because degraded institutions make poor policy choices by design and erode the civic trust necessary for democratic governance and market stability to operate effectively.
When citizens assume decisions are driven by factional interest, they discount expert advice, withdraw cooperation, and increase polarization, which in turn accelerates institutional decline and reduces social resilience.
From a conservative perspective the response emphasizes restoring meritocracy, clearer accountability, and decentralized oversight so decisions sit closer to the people affected and away from monolithic bureaucratic control.
That entails strengthening transparent performance metrics, incentivizing competition where feasible, and reforming governance structures to prevent single-party capture without substituting one entrenched orthodoxy for another.
Rebuilding also requires cultural shifts within organizations to reward independent thinking, protect dissent that uncovers errors, and realign incentives so professionals pursue long-term competence over short-term signaling.
Changing personnel without changing incentives leaves institutions vulnerable, so any durable fix must combine personnel changes with reformed promotion rules, conflict-of-interest safeguards, and protections for whistleblowers who expose misconduct.
If institutions are to serve citizens rather than factions, conservatives argue for policies and practices that restore the rule of expertise, due process, and legal accountability while promoting pluralism and local control.
Absent those reforms the pattern is predictable, a hollowing out that eventually destroys the capacity of institutions to deliver reliable services, and the public suffers through lower competence, diminished freedoms, and poor outcomes.
