Binary thinking might appear to make things simple, but in all likelihood the issues become more muddled and distorted.

Though the lawyerly society corrected the problems of the past, it has produced two pathologies that weaken the United States today.

The first is an elevation of processes over outcomes. In American government and society, designing new rules and committees have so often become the substitute for thinking hard about strategy and ends.

Sometimes I think that the United States’ tech competition with China— chaotic policymaking under Trump, porous implementation under Biden— has ended up in the worst of all worlds. These restrictions have scorched China’s most dynamic companies without killing them, which riles them up to break free of American restrictions.

I want to invoke the classic line by professor Grant Gilmore, in a text often assigned to first-year law students: “The worse the society, the more law there will be. In hell there will be nothing but law, and due process will be meticulously observed.

Americans have to trust that society can flourish without empowering lawyers to micromanage everything.