Peter Boghossian recently offered a blunt explanation for a pattern that keeps confusing otherwise sensible people: why do parts of the far left reject reforms that would plainly improve public institutions?

Because improvement is not the goal.

His point is simple and ugly. Widespread distrust is not an accidental byproduct of the project. It is the project. Once you understand that, a good deal of otherwise baffling behavior stops being baffling.

Most normal people still assume institutions are flawed but fixable. You identify the problem, apply targeted reforms, restore confidence, and move forward. That model only works if you believe the institution has legitimacy to begin with.

But if you believe the system is oppressive at the root, then reform becomes a threat. Reform stabilizes. It restores credibility. It gives ordinary people a reason to think the institution can work. That, in turn, weakens the deeper claim that the whole structure must be replaced.

That is the real pivot.

When an institution is judged illegitimate in principle, making it function better is not progress. It is betrayal.

You can see this logic across multiple domains.

Take policing. There are decades of incremental reforms aimed at reducing misconduct and increasing accountability: body cameras, improved training, procedural reforms, better supervision, smarter deployment. None of these require abolishing the institution. Yet much of the activist energy after 2020 did not center on reform but on delegitimization: defund, abolish, systemic rot. The point was not to make policing more trustworthy. The point was to make trust itself look naive.

The same pattern appears in universities. The legitimacy problem here is obvious enough that even casual observers can see it. Entire disciplines operate with strikingly narrow viewpoint diversity. The easiest possible trust-building reform would be to widen that range, even modestly. Boghossian’s line about putting “Republicans in sociology departments” works precisely because the ask is so small. If institutional credibility mattered, this would be low-hanging fruit. The refusal to do even that suggests that credibility is not the objective.

The pattern extends further than those two examples. Courts, media, bureaucracies, corporations, elections—again and again, incremental fixes are dismissed as cosmetic. The rhetoric moves quickly from flawed to structural, from structural to systemic, from systemic to irredeemable. Once that move is complete, reform itself becomes suspect. If a change makes the institution more trusted, it is condemned for helping preserve something that, in the activist imagination, deserves to fall.

There is, to be fair, a serious version of the opposing argument. Sometimes institutions really do absorb small reforms in order to preserve larger injustices. In those cases, reform can function as a pressure valve rather than a cure. That argument has force in isolated cases.

Applied universally, it hardens into dogma.

If every institution is corrupt at the root, and every reform is dismissed as insufficient by definition, then no improvement can ever count as evidence. Distrust is no longer a conclusion drawn from performance. It becomes a prior commitment. At that point, the argument stops being diagnostic and becomes theological.

What sharpens Boghossian’s observation is the context in which he made it. He was responding to a discussion about the strategic use of institutional distrust as a political weapon. That matters because the logic is no longer confined to one faction. Different actors now use different language to sell the same underlying message: the system is captured, illegitimate, beyond repair, and unworthy of loyalty. The branding varies. The effect does not.

Delegitimization replaces reform.

And when both ideological extremes converge on the claim that institutions cannot be repaired, the political center—where repair actually happens—begins to disappear. That is not a healthy equilibrium. It is unsustainable.

This also clarifies why evidence-based reform so often fails to persuade true believers. You can show improved outcomes. You can demonstrate lower abuse, better process, stronger accountability, fairer procedures. It will not matter to people whose real argument is not about performance but legitimacy. They are not asking whether the institution is getting better. They are asking whether it deserves to survive.

That distinction matters.

It means reform is still necessary, but not for the reason many assume. Reform is necessary for the persuadable public, for ordinary citizens who still want institutions that work and can still distinguish corruption from legitimacy. It is not likely to win over those already committed to collapse.

It also means the defense of institutions has to be more explicit than many liberals seem comfortable making it. Not blind loyalty. Not sentimental trust. Not a denial of failure. Something firmer than that: flawed, self-correcting institutions are worth defending because the alternatives to reform are usually far worse than reform’s imperfections.

Something always fills the vacuum.

It is rarely better.

Boghossian’s insight matters because it strips away a comforting illusion. Many people still assume everyone in public life is arguing, however bitterly, about how to make institutions function better. They are not. Some are arguing about whether those institutions deserve to exist at all.

Once you see that clearly, the repeated rejection of easy reforms stops looking irrational. It starts looking strategic.

And strategies aimed at destroying trust cannot be answered by trust alone. They have to be met with reforms that work and with the confidence to say, plainly, that imperfect institutions are still worth defending.

References

Primary source

Suggested supporting references

  • Pew Research Center, Public Trust in Government: 1958–2024
  • National Academies of Sciences, Proactive Policing: Effects on Crime and Communities
  • Cynthia Lum et al., systematic review on body-worn cameras
  • Neil Gross and Solon Simmons, The Social and Political Views of American Professors
  • Mitchell Langbert et al., research on faculty political imbalance