Government compels, culture persuades: Why Washington is ruining America

Whenever I stood over the stove impatiently waiting for water to boil, she’d smile and say, “A watched pot never boils.” As a child, I thought she was talking about cooking. Years later, I realized she was talking about something much bigger. She understood that constant interference is often mistaken for effective action. We like to believe that if we are always watching, always adjusting, always intervening, we are making progress. More often, we are simply satisfying our own desire to feel in control. That instinct has become one of the defining features of modern American politics. Nearly every cultural disagreement is treated as a crisis demanding immediate action. Every controversy seems to require another law, another agency, another mandate, another attempt to steer society from Washington. We have grown uncomfortable with the possibility that some problems are better solved by the people living through them than by the politicians observing them. Conservatives are often caricatured as opponents of change. But that has never been the philosophical foundation of conservatism. Conservatism begins with a different question: Who is best equipped to solve this problem? Sometimes the answer is government. A nation needs courts to uphold the rule of law, a military to defend its sovereignty, and law enforcement to protect public safety. These are indispensable functions of the state. But conservatives have long questioned the assumption that because government can act, it should. That skepticism is rooted not in cynicism, but in humility. More than two centuries ago, Edmund Burke warned against the temptation to remake society according to abstract theories. A nation, he argued, is not a machine to be rebuilt whenever something appears broken. It is an inheritance shaped by generations of experience. Customs, institutions, and traditions endure not because they are perfect, but because they often embody lessons that no single generation could have designed from scratch. Burke was not arguing that every tradition deserves preservation. Some plainly do not. His point was that before discarding an institution or custom, we should ask why it existed in the first place. More often than we realize, traditions survive because they solve problems we have forgotten how to recognize. That insight feels increasingly relevant. America’s greatest strength has never been government alone. It has been civil society: families raising children, churches building communities, neighbors helping neighbors, businesses responding to their customers, and countless local institutions shaping the character of the nation long before Washington enters the picture. These institutions are imperfect. So is government. The difference is that civil society persuades, while government compels.This is not an argument that every problem solves itself or that government has no legitimate role. There are moments when public authority is necessary and indispensable. But there is an important difference between recognizing government’s proper responsibilities and assuming it should become the first responder to every cultural disagreement. Some of the healthiest developments in American life occur because free people are allowed to debate, persuade, reject bad ideas, rediscover old truths, and reaffirm the principles that have held the country together for generations. Perhaps that was the lesson hidden in my grandmother’s old saying. A watched pot never boils because hovering is not the same as accomplishing. THE POLITICS OF THE PERPETUAL CHILD: HOW GOVERNMENT REPLACED THE FAMILYAmerica has endured not because Washington has always supplied the right answers, but because free people, through the institutions they build and the traditions they preserve, have repeatedly found them for themselves. That is not complacency. It is confidence. Confidence that a free people, guided by the accumulated wisdom of generations, are often more capable of preserving what is good than any government could preserve on their behalf.Jenna Dougherty is a rising third-year law student, business graduate, and former member of Governor Ron DeSantis’s 2022 gubernatorial campaign.