I can't stop thinking about @MarxinHell's claim yesterday that we may need a Reconstruction Congress. Given the events of yesterday I want to say something on why this makes sense to me in our contemporary situation. I will eventually write on this so this will be preliminary.

What we witnessed yesterday was a particularly acute moment of a long running crisis and social decay in American democracy. To put it bluntly, I think we can understand yesterday as one of the effects of fraying social trust in American institutions.

Now to be clear, "acute" does not mean that the fall of the US government is imminent. And one reason for that, I imagine, is that capital simply will not stand for that if it can help it.

But acute does mean that we are witnessing something serious whose long-lasting effects may not be appreciated immediately.

If I am right that we are suffering from a crisis of trust then this raises troubling questions about the prospect of resolving problems that will require collective action and institutional coordination, e.g. mitigating the effects of climate change.

Especially if we can assume that this decay of trust will only get worse within our existing social system. For instance, addressing climate change will require a complexity of knowledge and communication whose effectiveness at some point will require social trust.

Which brings me to Reconstruction and the imperative that we repair this social trust. The partial success of Reconstruction was that it attempted to move decision making power into the hands of some Black people *and* redistributed resources.

My take is that the redistribution of power and resources is a necessary condition for collective action and problem solving for at least two reasons. 1) The mechanisms of governmental bureaucracy will drawn out from the shadows and increase the democratization of knowledge.

2) People will be able to more effectively organize around their needs and build institutions that can satisfy them.

Obviously, I do not have a cookbook for how we get from A to C. I just want to emphasize how important trust is for collective action. Given that as individuals we can never know everything we often have to trust the knowledge of particular others or institutions.

But when those institutions are increasingly unaccountable, deliberately secretive, and excessively cruel this can frustrate our capacity to do the work of building effective social power.

My point is that things cannot go on like this. Although, of course, this decay can continue for a long time into the foreseeable future. But this loss of trust, I think, cannot be repaired spontaneously and we ought not wait to address this problem.

For this reason, I look at yesterday and think we do not really know what the consequences will be in the distant future. But the situation is serious and dire even though our social structure will most definitely not fall apart overnight.