The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship invited me to address the topic “Can Institutions be Reformed?” at its annual forum in London last month. ARC, founded by Baroness Philippa Stroud and psychologist Jordan Peterson, is a conference that focuses on the West’s failure to cultivate its traditional values, which provided the world with history’s most successful societies.

I asked the audience: Why, at this moment in history, are we asking how institutions should be reformed, or if they even can be? For decades we have been aware that institutions were failing—incompetent, wasteful and corrupt governments; biased and dishonest journalism; agenda-driven schools and universities.

My answer is Covid. The mismanagement of the pandemic hit us personally and exposed a massive, across-the-board institutional failure. It was the most tragic breakdown of leadership and ethics that free societies have seen in our lifetimes.