Why the Death of American Leadership may run through your Local Orchestra

In the space of a week, we have lost two significant and iconic American institutions. But the shuttering of the Kennedy Center and the decimation of the Washington Post are neither isolated nor unrelated. They represent a break in the connective tissue that used to unite Americans. This is part of a larger systemic uncoupling of our civic, political and cultural institutions from the engine that sustains civic life. It is an attack on institutions from the very digital networks that had promised to democratize them.

The history of the internet can be seen as essentially a war on institutions. Our civic operating system, organized around institutions, was assembled as a web of organizations—the regional orchestra, the city newspaper, the state university, the public library—that encouraged and promoted civic life. By bypassing or subverting these institutions, networks–as exemplified by tech-enabled platforms that could be more nimble, more “authentic,” more populist–the internet revolution offered an illusion of freedom. Instead, it eroded the vitality and ultimately the viability of the institutions we depended on for a thriving civic life. The internet didn’t just bypass institutions; it removed the buffer between raw emotion (the network) and public policy.

What we see now is a dysfunctional landscape in which The Bigs (the political parties, Amazon, Apple, big law firms, luxury brands, the Metropolitan Opera, Disney) survive only by becoming hollowed-out brand assets or vehicles for the ultra-wealthy. They mine the brand equity of the institution rather than working to create new value. Meanwhile, the institutional middle, the core of our cultural ecosystem and long under stress, becomes structurally unsustainable.

The result is that we’re left with an institutional landscape that no longer functions, and we see it everywhere:

• Newspapers across America whose business models have failed to fund news gathering. News deserts are spreading nationwide.
• Orchestras and opera and theatre and dance companies and museums that run structural deficits no matter how lean and mean they try to operate (The Minnesota Orchestra this week announced record ticket sales while running a $4 million deficit; the Metropolitan Opera drastically reduced its programming and staff last week because of persistent deficits; Broadway theatre productions, the vast number or which that can’t recoup their costs — and the list goes on and on)
• Medical centers operating at losses and cycles of perpetual cuts, while patients have difficulty just finding primary care doctors. Increasingly, timely effective medical care is available only to those who can afford concierge services.
• Universities whose business models require tuitions that make getting an education unaffordable.
• National Parks unable to fund basic upkeep or cope with the crush of visitors.
• The middle tier of the legal system has withered. While big law firms serve the Bigs, the infrastructure for civil legal aid, public defense, and mid-tier family law is broken. Justice has become a service available only to those who can pay for the premium tier.
• Scientific research and peer review are broken by viral whisper.
• Small-town and mid-sized city governments struggle to maintain infrastructure (sewage, transit, roads) as the tax base is hollowed out by the Amazons and big-box retailers and the civil service becomes a revolving door of contractors.

Consequently, the scientists and teachers and artists and musicians and journalists and civil servants who depended on these institutions to do their work are squeezed out. This systemic collapse across the middle creates more than just a service gap, it creates a leadership vacuum. Institutions once produced stewards whose loyalty was to the institution’s continuity and its public mission. But as the middle dissolves, the steward is being replaced by the scavenger.

The scavengers don’t build, they mine assets. They manage the structural break of institutional failure by stripping the gold leaf off the walls to feed the demands of the network. Because we are losing the newsrooms, the faculty senates, the orchestra boards where consensus is painfully forged, our political discourse has devolved into civic aphasia. We have the vocabulary of the network, outrage, likes, viral hits, but we have lost the grammar that institutions provide. We shout rather than govern. We have all the information of the network but none of the institutional language we need to build consensus and act.

The result is a society that can no longer do “big things” because it has dismantled the machinery required to shape a shared vision and the muscle to build. Is there a connection between the failure of the orchestra model and our civic life? Absolutely. And yet, heroically, our artists keep asking: Is it us? Could we, should we be doing something more? This self-reflection has resulted in many good things, but the bottom line is that if the larger civic culture is broken, it doesn’t ultimately matter how orchestras reinvent. The system, tragically, no longer supports this civic calling.

Institutions are the training grounds for stewards, leaders bound by continuity, nuance, and long-term thinking. In the digital network age, we have traded the steward for the influencer. The influencer is all about the bypass, ignoring the slow work of building consensus in favor of the fast, viral victory. The rebranding of the Kennedy Center is the ultimate Influencer move: it treats a “National Living Memorial” as a proprietary asset to be “disrupted.” This is scavenger leadership. It doesn’t build new cathedrals; it strips the gold leaf off the old ones it claims to be saving.

This erosion leads directly to an incompetence trap. To do “big things”—from infrastructure to social reform—a society requires a shared reality where science is respected, law is precedent-driven, and journalism provides a common set of facts. When a city loses its journalism (its critics and reporters), it loses its ability to measure its own failures, and, importantly, celebrate its good news.

As we remove these filters, our discourse becomes performative. We can no longer build bridges because we no longer agree on the physics of the river, let alone the value of crossing it. I think the systemic weakness of our orchestras and theaters is the canary in the coal mine for the larger state. If we can’t sustain the institutions that teach us how to be a “public,” we can’t sustain the leadership required to navigate the existential challenges of this century.

I think this is the part where I’m supposed to propose a new model that will fix things. Honestly, I’m not sure I have one. I do think we have to move beyond the “disruption” myth much mythologized by the Tech pioneers. And I think we need a new institutionalism that prioritizes the middle, kind of like Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s “middle powers” idea. In computing, middleware connects the user to the core data. Without it, the system crashes. Regional theaters, local papers, mid-sized hospitals– these are the “middleware” civic spaces we need to strengthen and connect us to common purpose.

We have allowed our culture to be captured by corporate consolidation that means if you don’t scale, if you’re not bigger than life, you have no power. When entertainment giants like Disney are struggling because they’re really not big enough to compete, there’s a problem.

I see heroic arts administrators and artists fighting to make the models work. Selfless civil servants battling to keep the wheels turning. Scientists and doctors frustrated by the crippled systems in which that have to work.

The closed doors of the Kennedy Center won’t signal just a construction site; they will be a monument to a civic ambition we have forgotten how to maintain. When we allow the middle to collapse, we aren’t just losing art, we are losing the civic machinery that makes our lives possible.

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