To the dismay of many, I’ve long been a fan of Chesterton’s Fence, the concept that one ought to know why a fence was put up before tearing it down. Among the reasons why others disagree is that it means things people want done now have to wait until the analysis is completed. Whether that thing is the deportation of all immigrants, legal or not, or the eradication of language that might offend, it’s a stumbling block for people on both ends of the political spectrum.

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

==H.L. Mencken

People know what they want and they want it now. Some would call this immediate gratification. Some would call this the death of deliberative thought. Some would even call this the tyranny of process.

In a year when the United States seemed more split than ever, Americans united in one way: We demanded results and we wanted them now. From ICE raids designed as a theater of terror and GLP-1 shortcuts for weight loss, to A.I.-generated term papers, rampaging DOGE bros and summary Alien Enemies Act deportations, America raged against the journey and clamored for the destination, no matter what the lawyers and the chatbot therapists said. Outcomes seemed to be all that mattered. Winners win. Losers follow rules and talk it over.

The pattern was most conspicuous in a Washington that swept aside norms, starting with President Trump’s Inauguration Day assembly of billionaires and followed by a Project 2025-led smashing of the traditional rituals of administration. Regular order in Congress gave way to federal shutdown, ad hoc continuing resolutions and forced votes on bills like the Epstein Files Transparency Act. With impoundments, the White House upended the Constitution’s carefully choreographed system for enacting spending bills. “Detain first, think later” became the angry spirit of immigration enforcement, even as the “Department of War” (renamed without the required congressional process) launched “kinetic strikes” that summarily executed dozens of alleged drug couriers.

But liberals in exile bristled at process, too. The autopsies of the 2024 election results bemoaned Biden-era failures to deliver infrastructure like electric vehicle charging stations and affordable rural broadband. Thanks to a best-selling book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, “abundance” became a governing philosophy committed to clearing away decades of accumulated government processes. No longer would subway tunnels, highway miles, housing starts and high-speed rail hang in the balance of endless NIMBY delays. Even the libs said build, baby, build.

For those who bristle at the notion of delaying gratification until it’s been subjected to some degree of scrutiny, deliberative thought, maybe even discussion, the argument is that the process takes forever, becoming an end in itself that makes change too difficult, if not impossible, to achieve. Some shoot without aiming. Some aim without shooting. Neither is a good way to get anything good accomplished.

And indeed, they have a point. Process tends to become an end in itself. Process becomes never-ending, where the arguments go around and around and around, never reaching a resolution or ultimately ending with a decision to do, or not do, something, whether it’s a perfect outcome or merely a trade-off between imperfect options. The point is that process has value, and beats the crap out of mindless, knee-jerk actions and reactions, but that process has to be directed toward an ultimately goal, the decision to be made, which thereupon puts an end to the process even though one (or more) side feels that it didn’t get its way.

But why do we need to spend, or waste as some would say, our time diddling about with process when we know what we want? Because the alternative isn’t just poor decisions that result in harm and damage, but violence.

The staccato drumbeat of political violence was perhaps the ultimate shortcut around process. From the arson at the Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro’s mansion in April and the murders of the Minnesota state representative Melissa Hortman and her husband in June, to the assassination of the prominent political firebrand Charlie Kirk in September, observers of the American scene came away with the palpable sense that standard operating procedures were fast disappearing.

We know who’s evil and what needs to done about it. Hopefully, most of you will reject the very notion of violence as the mechanism by which the lack of forward progress is overcome, but society includes all kinds of folk, including those who suffer from whatever pushes them to violence as the means by which goals are accomplished. This may be violence directed at individuals, or violence in the streets such as the George Floyd “mostly peaceful” riots.

Having spent the past decade watching norms erode, process ignored and very loud people demand action without any serious thought as to whether that would be good, decent and fair, people are coming to the realization that while goals need to be achieved, process matters to assure that the goals are right and that the means by which they are achieved won’t do greater harm than the failure to accomplish those goals.

At the apex of their midcentury authority, the processes of American government rested on a sense of shared purpose and mutual trust. Regaining some of that ephemeral collective sensibility will be America’s struggle in 2026 and the years to come. A persistent, if battered, attachment to the value of basic procedural fairness suggests that there may be some common ground yet.

Will 2026 bring a return to the common ground of basic procedural fairness? Some are beginning to recognize that rushing blindly ahead hasn’t proven to be as great an idea as previously thought. Whether that means they ready to slow down and give some thought to actions first remains to be seen. Similarly, whether that means they’re willing to accept decisions after serious thought, even if they aren’t the decisions they prefer, remains to be seen as well.