The conservative philosopher GK Chesterton is known for a parable about two lawmakers who encounter a fence. One, brash and overeager, announces that he can’t see the point of the fence so it should be removed. The other, who Chesterton labels the “more intelligent type of reformer,” scolds his companion, warning him that they should only remove the fence once they know why it was put there.

The point is that, before anything is changed, decision-makers should at least know why the thing that they are changing exists, lest they discover its true purpose after its removal ends in disaster.

Never has Chesterton’s wisdom been so apparent than the first months of Donald Trump’s second term, which, among other things, have seen a broadly worded freeze on domestic spending, a similar pause on foreign aid, and an indiscriminate effort to push as many federal workers out of their jobs as possible. All of these initiatives have had unintended consequences, from defunding a prison full of ISIS fighters to leaving the agency meant to safeguard nuclear material in dire straits.

Some of these decisions were rapidly reversed, but not all of them. And even a temporary error by the government can have catastrophic effects, because the government — unlike the business world — does the kind of work that must be done right every single time.

Every Social Security recipient must receive their check on time, lest they be unable to make their rent or buy food. Every hospital must be reimbursed by Medicare and Medicaid, lest they shut down and leave entire swaths of the country without care. The country still reels from a single terrorist attack that our intelligence and national security communities failed to stop a quarter century ago.

Perhaps it’s not surprising that change is happening so rapidly right now, because there is no meaningful political movement in the United States advocating for a more methodical, conservative approach.

We need leaders who believe that change should come only after careful deliberation, and that major changes call for even greater deliberation and planning.

The Republican Party, long the home of American conservatism, is now entirely under the sway of impatient reactionaries. The GOP isn’t just the party of Trump; it’s the party that made a notorious booster of quack medical theories health secretary, and that chose a Fox News host accused of substance abuse and sexual assault to lead the Pentagon — both with near-total support from Republican senators.

Democrats, meanwhile, often feel trapped into a role as the sole remaining defenders of institutions, and they chafe against that role. As Neera Tanden, recently President Joe Biden’s domestic policy adviser and now the leader of the Center for American Progress, told Politico, “it’s incumbent on us not to be defenders of the status quo.”

It’s not surprising that neither major party wants to be the voice of this status quo. Americans are discontent — according to Gallup, the last time a majority of the country were satisfied with “the way things are going in the US,” George W. Bush was still in his first term. And I am not making the case for stagnation. We don’t need to settle for broken systems; we just need to make sure we don’t make them worse in the name of “fixing” them.

But as we observe the chaos of Trump’s second presidency, where US trade policy can shift wildly over the course of any given day, it’s clear that something is out of balance.........

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