I like The Establishment and you should, too

My religion is among those that challenge their adherents to love the unlovable. Let me therefore express my sincere affection for a truly despised group: The Establishment.

Millions of Americans who agree on little else share the conviction that The Establishment is inept, corrupt and out of touch. Whether their hearts are set racing by Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders, they are sure America needs a revolution to be great again.

Really, they should get out more. To Iraq, Libya, Venezuela or any nation that lacks an Establishment: a stodgy network of long-serving elected officials and senior civil servants, elite university professors and graduates, prestige national media outlets and venerable cultural institutions and tastemakers. Such a network backed up by middleclass consensus is precisely what gives nations stability, a word that not coincidentally shares its derivation with the word establishment.

The U.S. has been blessed with 150 years of Establishment-led political stability that set the stage for historic economic growth, increased life expectancy and expansion of human rights. Disruptions that sent many nations into chaos — economic downturns, world wars, strife between racial and ethnic groups — were successfully managed by The Establishment, which preserved essential traditions and basic stability while enacting reforms such as the New Deal, Medicare and Medicaid, civil rights laws and the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Some would carp that The Establishment’s embrace of reforms in the face of more radical political demands has taken the winds from the sails of revolutionary change on the left and the right. But if you dislike The Establishment for how it defused your preferred revolution by meeting you halfway, remember it was just as good at doing the same with the revolutions you opposed.

None of this is to say that The Establishment has ever been completely fair-minded or unfailingly open to outsiders. Yet as with other changes in society, The Establishment has been very good at reforming itself, including by absorbing people of diverse religious, racial and ethnic backgrounds. It is, after all, The Establishment and not any self-styled revolutionary that is offering the country the first woman candidate with a good chance of becoming president.

Teenagers being raised by long-married parents often chafe at the rules their elders set, the traditions they keep, the mistakes they make and the conventionality they exude. Yet if those young people have a friend who is growing up in a home in which multiple divorces have occurred and the faces and rules have changed every few years, they might gain a new appreciation for the stability they have enjoyed.

American revolutionaries should likewise look at the world’s unstable nations before raging at their own country’s establishment. We would all miss it terribly if it were gone.