Lorenzo Warby on misplaced faith; Tove K on high-tech society vs. the family; Moses Sternstein on health care as the leading sector; Two views of Mr. Trump from a libertarian perspective
Fiery is right that Schedule F wouldn't accomplish much even though the question is theoretical because some Hawaiian judge would immediately kill it anyway. It's not really about Trump, Schedule F also wouldn't help whoever your vision of some ideal Republican candidate would be, either. Implementing the minimal amount of reform necessary to actually give a Republican President the same amount of control and influence enjoyed by a Democrat President is a "regime change complete problem".
Arnold sometimes says that the prime advantage of our form of democracy is the peaceful transition of power. But in fact most sovereign power that matters does not really transition in the sense of actually changing hands. As one example out of countless, when Trump came into office he issued a number of executive orders which required among other things to agencies to submit reports by a certain (reasonable) date. Many of these were around a year late and were full of errors and omissions. Everyone on team Trump involved with these efforts sooner or later woke up and realized the impossibility and futility of trying to follow the "schoolhouse rock" script of how the federal government is supposed to work, because it doesn't work that way, and no Republican can make it work that way.
Just like it's pointless to consider the merits of possible object-level reforms to immigration policy when the meta-level issue of Democrat presidents actually following the law as written is completely non-operative and without prospect of improvement, it's also pointless to try and be 'smart' about administrative leadership, legal maneuvering, bureaucracy savvy, etc. when all of that is obsolete cargo culting, imitating the mental and procedural framework of a bygone era in ritualistic cluelessness. It's true Trump couldn't fill all those positions. Republican voters also can't fill a position, that of "Actual President". They can only get a fake, 10% president. 10% of power transitioned peacefully, the rest is never going to transition without some kind of radical upheaval.
One thing I particularly like about the Jewish tradition is its relatively mild status hierarchies and the relative lack of power enjoyed by the high status people (e.g. rabbis and scholars). The Tanakh can be read in part as a record of how this was arrived at the hard way: assigning status to a variety of other possible claimants-- judges, kings, prophets etc-- led again and again to disaster. Every personality cult is a sort of worship of the golden calf, and so the condemnation of golden calf worship is a sort of intellectual vaccine (see what I did there?) against personality cults.
I wonder, what does the Christian status hierarchy look like? As a bit of an outsider I can’t quite identify a unifying theme beyond “Loves God”, and that seems to have a very wide range of expressions that are often mutually exclusive and change over time. Admittedly Christianity has been around so long that such changes are certainly going to happen, but still I don’t see a status hierarchy the way that intersectional grievance ideology has one.
I might suggest that Christianity doesn't instantiate any grand hierarchical order (unless it's within a church structure or the church gains political power, most of which I would argue is extrabiblical). But the New Testament encourages people to accept their place in whatever hierarchy(ies) the person is in and to behave accordingly. Slaves to respect their masters if they are unable to buy their freedom, children to obey their parents, youngsters to respect their elders, wives submit to their husbands, etc. Caveat being that the higher up in any hierarchy you are, the more degrees of freedom you have, and therefore more responsibility.
I would argue that the God of the Bible doesn't necessarily care how the status structure works out overall, but rather about the performance of each individual in reaction to his or her circumstances.
Just my two cents. I recognize there are many other interpretations and there are lots of big is/ought issues here.
Yea I can buy that answer for the most part. I would like to see what Warby has in mind as an answer too, or maybe it was an error of “they are replacing one religious standard with another, so they must be replacing a hierarchy with another based on that religion.”
I'm willing to say I'm a Christian insider and I had a similar reaction, and even reading Warby's essay doesn't really explain how 'old school' religions created hierarchies. At worst the situation seems to me to be one where various social hierarchies coexisted and intertwined with most religions. In some cases the great Abrahamic religions, and I think many others as well, actually provided a profound leveling effect where everyone of every status is subject at some point to evaluation based on an entirely non-human hierarchy (God). It seems to me his main complaint with what he calls the Dialectical Faith is that it is substantially missing this leveling effect so the social and religious hierarchies reinforce rather than restrict, even if only partially. It is more like those regimes that elevated the supreme human leader to God-like status rather than viewing God as an external reference point.
It's easier to see what (I think) he's grasping for when considering other religions. For example, consider the way that strict Islam maintains a large gap between the status of men and women in terms of authority, deference, autonomy, wealth allocation, etc. The exclusive authority of imams to decide certain questions of dispute and of social behavioral rules can put leaders whose rule was established on a different basis (i.e., they inherited in as successor to a dynasty) in a subordinate position, at least on those matters.
More important than establishing and influencing the manner in which social rank is granted and perceived is the cutting off of certain highly destabilizing channels in the great and perpetual social game of jousting for higher rank. In particular, the game of signaling greater righteousness through competitive sanctimony necessarily involves the effort to undermine the established normative understanding and equilibrium, for example, consider "critical theory". The opportunity to criticize existing traditional norms and introducing moral innovations sets off a process of ideological entrepreneurship that need never end and can (and historically has, repeatedly) quickly degenerated into free for alls that run to greater and greater extremes of fanaticism leading straight away into descents into mass madness, misery, and murder until, one way or another, some powerful force puts a stop to it to restore a stable order, usually by means of making it clear than anyone thinking about rocking the boat that way in the future is going to find themselves sleeping with the fishes.
I can’t get behind Tove K’s claim that we have “overcome family loyalty “. It still exists, and where it doesn’t the lack is seen as bad (who applauds abandoning one’s family?) Rather, we added to family loyalty the larger society (polis, state, religion) aspects as equal points of loyalty. If anything we expanded the group we treated as family.
From the standpoint of social development, the family cannot be considered the basis of the authoritarian state, only as one of the most important institutions which support it. It is, however, its central reactionary germ cell, the most important place of reproduction of the reactionary and conservative individual. Being itself caused by the authoritarian system, the family becomes the most important institution for its conservation.
Liberals and the left has been trying to destroy the family since *at least* the early 30s, and has more or less succeeded, despite the obvious harms caused.
Daniel Moynihan pointed this out in 1965, and was roundly hooted down by (you guessed it) liberals and the left. Now the dysfunction has spread throughout Western society, and liberals and the left appear to like it that way. (See Obama's Life of Julia video, assuming they haven't memory-holed it yet.)
I am not sure I follow your point here. Are you arguing we have destroyed family loyalty, or that we ought to do so, or just that some do applaud abandoning the family? ( I might agree that some do in theory on that last point, but that they don’t do so in particular, in the luxury beliefs vein.)
I'm saying that Western elites enact policies that destroy family loyalty, and that many elites and intellectuals applaud the destruction of family loyalty.
I agree that there is a strong tendency among some to want to reduce the family to transfer the roles and importance to the state. (Or the cult, which is the other common one.)
However, Trove’s argument is that overcoming family loyalty already happened, and that is why we have societies and have had for a long time. That’s a very different sort of claim, where I think she is very wrong. Family loyalty is still extant, such that it is being attacked currently as opposed to dead and gone.
That's not how I read her argument, and I think that's arguing more than she intended; to wit, she claims that society's victory over families occurred in the 20th century, which is entirely compatible with my evidence above.
Well, to be fair, her argument is kind of a mess: at once all of human history involves sublimating the importance of family, including Christianity, family loyalty only stopped being a problem in the 20th century (the Clintons, Kennedys and others will be pleased to hear hat) and people have stopped having families now. Although it seems odd to me that you would write both that society claimed victory over the family in the 20th century and Western elites are currently in the process of destroying family loyalty, that is no more confused than her essay.
From her piece:
"After millennia of struggle between society as a whole and the family, it looks like society as a whole finally won. The family is now so weak that it has lost its appeal. People don't even want to form families anymore. It is difficult to believe such a thing can happen. After all, family is a fundamental part of human nature.
The drive to form families is part of human nature. But it is not the only part of human nature. We also have other instincts. If those instincts are appealed to and organized in an efficient enough way, people can actually be steered away from their family-forming instincts.
It wasn't easy. It took thousands of years for such an advanced social organization to evolve. But here it is. After a very prolonged struggle, the family has finally been overcome.
...
Society finally overcame the family and an amazing productivity boom followed. But we still haven't solved the riddle of how to reproduce in this situation.
...
After thousands of years of civilization, people can finally gather across kin-groups in the service of productivity."
So... people stopped having families when? 20th century? I seem to recall a few, and quite large ones early. 21st century? Birth rates are low, sure, but hardly absent. Family loyalty in the "family loyalty is enough to cause corruption and problems to society" sense still seems like a thing. Oh, and those family suppressing Christians are the ones who are forming families and having kids at a higher rate... And we are only just now gathering across kin groups to be more productive? That seems like it has been going on for a long time, a few hundred years at least.
I think the death of the family has been rather exaggerated.
Firey’s advocacy of “Reforming the bureaucracy and rewriting statutes and regulations is hard work, requiring careful policymaking and consensus‐building” would appear to validate N.S. Lyon’s observations on the fundamental problem that Schedule F was apparently intended to address:
“This is really a struggle over who rules – i.e. the genuinely political. Which means it is ultimately a struggle over the whole structure of our system of government: are we to continue living under a “depoliticized” managerial regime, or could we see the reemergence of a more democratic republic?”
Lyon, it seems, sees a system in which a Javier Milei-type president could get on with the business of governing without having to placate legions of bureaucrat stakeholders, or turn over the steering wheel to the courts, as both desirable and achievable.
Firey, on the other had, advocates Jimmy Carter style civil service reform, built on clientelism, in which all the stakehols get massaged or bribed to stand aside and even more bureaucracy larded on top to grease the system. The system will work, he political capital to it. So the managerial regime stays in place and continues playing the same games it has played for a century.
John Cochrane’s Adam Smith Award remarks seem to offer a persuasive rebuttal to what Firey has in mind:
“As we look at a typical regulatory mess, understand too that there is a certain logic to it. Many of our issues follow the old children’s rhyme: The little old lady swallows a fly, then a spider to catch the fly, a cat to catch the spider, and on we go until she swallows a horse. And dies. Of course. The Dodd Frank Act. As I look at taxes, health care, finance, and many other of decades-old regulatory tarpits, the lesson applies. There was one decision, one original sin, one somewhat sensible path taken -- the income tax, the tax deduction for employer-provided group insurance, bailing out depositors to stop runs. The original idea worked for a while, but had unintended consequences, and was patched and patched over and over again. Each patch, an expansion of the regulatory state, has a certain logic given how the last one failed. But inevitably fell apart requiring more patches.
That insight tells you why smart people looking at the latest fiasco, but without authority or imagination to go back to the beginning and start over, can only come up with more rules that will fall apart just as inevitably. It tells you that the answer has to be a clean slate reform from the beginning.”
Both Lyons and Cochrane express faith in functionality of the US political system. Lyon writes, “But at least this little furor has revealed that the managerial state does in fact seem to be genuinely afraid of being hit where it would actually hurt, should anyone with enough political will to do so ever to come along…”
Cochrane writes:
“We are a democracy, and a responsive one. Leaders do what people want them to. They lead, perhaps, by giving voice and unity to those desires. I have known a lot of really smart people in power who get it totally. But they say, “John, if I do that I won’t get elected.” We do not elect kings and autocrats. Whispering in the Emperor’s ear is not the answer.
Our political system does respond to the chattering classes that surround politics, and to the wisdom of ordinary american voters. They need to know — to remember — to ask for freedom.”
A bit Pollyanna-ish, no? But perhaps the most soothing dream with which to indulge oneself. Pulling the country out of its current death spiral would require starting over from a clean slate, but that won’t happen. The pragmatic maybe ought concern themselves with a strategy for crawling from the wreckage.
The present bureaucratic rule is not at all "de-politicized," nor fair nor balanced. Those who believe it is have inhaled too much Pravda and should start by burning their TV sets.
The Founders did not authorize massive delegations of power because they knew it would end in corruption and ruin, which is indeed happening and is already mostly complete. Given these facts, negotiations with the enemy are a waste of effort. The bureaucracy is a Gordian knot that must be cut, and if Schedule F is prevented or fails to do the job, we will need some reformer to take the final step and become a dictator. It can't be Trump, not only because he won't do it but because despite "The Apprentice," he has amply demonstrated a complete inability to hire people who will follow his agenda and not backstab him.
“If this center-left were to regain some of its vigor, you would not want to have burned your bridges to it.” - And yet the prevailing behavior by both politicians and bureaucrats of all stripes is exactly that. Namely, instead of cooperating, the goal is to win especially if it costs the “other side”. So bridge-burning is of no concern for most as long as status is maintained or achieved with the in-group. To my eyes, the lack of cooperation and disregard for interdependence is one of the biggest barriers to political progress
That's not quite right. There are a number of fairly minor, reasonable, and common sense reforms that would make the federal bureaucracy much, much better. I've been adding to a long list for a long time. It's just that preserving the option for "bureaucrats behaving badly" is a feature, not a bug, for those who expect bad behaviors will be in their favor 95% of the time, "Rules for thee, not for me, lol!" So that means that any attempt to make bureacracy better affects one party more than the other and is necessarily and inevitable a high stakes political issue inviting political fights that must be won by any means necessary. There is thus no possibility of bipartisan agreement, consensus, or compromise on any possible reforms, so our system of goverment literally cannot get better, though it can and will continue to get worse.
The inference I draw from this is that every set of rules must sometimes be disregarded for an important purpose, if not abandoned. Because if you take the opposite position, sooner or later your rules will be gamed.
Fiery is right that Schedule F wouldn't accomplish much even though the question is theoretical because some Hawaiian judge would immediately kill it anyway. It's not really about Trump, Schedule F also wouldn't help whoever your vision of some ideal Republican candidate would be, either. Implementing the minimal amount of reform necessary to actually give a Republican President the same amount of control and influence enjoyed by a Democrat President is a "regime change complete problem".
Arnold sometimes says that the prime advantage of our form of democracy is the peaceful transition of power. But in fact most sovereign power that matters does not really transition in the sense of actually changing hands. As one example out of countless, when Trump came into office he issued a number of executive orders which required among other things to agencies to submit reports by a certain (reasonable) date. Many of these were around a year late and were full of errors and omissions. Everyone on team Trump involved with these efforts sooner or later woke up and realized the impossibility and futility of trying to follow the "schoolhouse rock" script of how the federal government is supposed to work, because it doesn't work that way, and no Republican can make it work that way.
Just like it's pointless to consider the merits of possible object-level reforms to immigration policy when the meta-level issue of Democrat presidents actually following the law as written is completely non-operative and without prospect of improvement, it's also pointless to try and be 'smart' about administrative leadership, legal maneuvering, bureaucracy savvy, etc. when all of that is obsolete cargo culting, imitating the mental and procedural framework of a bygone era in ritualistic cluelessness. It's true Trump couldn't fill all those positions. Republican voters also can't fill a position, that of "Actual President". They can only get a fake, 10% president. 10% of power transitioned peacefully, the rest is never going to transition without some kind of radical upheaval.
One thing I particularly like about the Jewish tradition is its relatively mild status hierarchies and the relative lack of power enjoyed by the high status people (e.g. rabbis and scholars). The Tanakh can be read in part as a record of how this was arrived at the hard way: assigning status to a variety of other possible claimants-- judges, kings, prophets etc-- led again and again to disaster. Every personality cult is a sort of worship of the golden calf, and so the condemnation of golden calf worship is a sort of intellectual vaccine (see what I did there?) against personality cults.
Re: regulation:
Casey Mulligan on Trump:
https://manhattan.institute/article/trumps-vast-deregulatory-landscape-goes-unnoticed-by-the-experts
Casey Mulligan on Biden:
chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/hoc_testimony_mulligan_20230614-1.pdf
I wonder, what does the Christian status hierarchy look like? As a bit of an outsider I can’t quite identify a unifying theme beyond “Loves God”, and that seems to have a very wide range of expressions that are often mutually exclusive and change over time. Admittedly Christianity has been around so long that such changes are certainly going to happen, but still I don’t see a status hierarchy the way that intersectional grievance ideology has one.
I might suggest that Christianity doesn't instantiate any grand hierarchical order (unless it's within a church structure or the church gains political power, most of which I would argue is extrabiblical). But the New Testament encourages people to accept their place in whatever hierarchy(ies) the person is in and to behave accordingly. Slaves to respect their masters if they are unable to buy their freedom, children to obey their parents, youngsters to respect their elders, wives submit to their husbands, etc. Caveat being that the higher up in any hierarchy you are, the more degrees of freedom you have, and therefore more responsibility.
I would argue that the God of the Bible doesn't necessarily care how the status structure works out overall, but rather about the performance of each individual in reaction to his or her circumstances.
Just my two cents. I recognize there are many other interpretations and there are lots of big is/ought issues here.
Yea I can buy that answer for the most part. I would like to see what Warby has in mind as an answer too, or maybe it was an error of “they are replacing one religious standard with another, so they must be replacing a hierarchy with another based on that religion.”
I'm willing to say I'm a Christian insider and I had a similar reaction, and even reading Warby's essay doesn't really explain how 'old school' religions created hierarchies. At worst the situation seems to me to be one where various social hierarchies coexisted and intertwined with most religions. In some cases the great Abrahamic religions, and I think many others as well, actually provided a profound leveling effect where everyone of every status is subject at some point to evaluation based on an entirely non-human hierarchy (God). It seems to me his main complaint with what he calls the Dialectical Faith is that it is substantially missing this leveling effect so the social and religious hierarchies reinforce rather than restrict, even if only partially. It is more like those regimes that elevated the supreme human leader to God-like status rather than viewing God as an external reference point.
It's easier to see what (I think) he's grasping for when considering other religions. For example, consider the way that strict Islam maintains a large gap between the status of men and women in terms of authority, deference, autonomy, wealth allocation, etc. The exclusive authority of imams to decide certain questions of dispute and of social behavioral rules can put leaders whose rule was established on a different basis (i.e., they inherited in as successor to a dynasty) in a subordinate position, at least on those matters.
More important than establishing and influencing the manner in which social rank is granted and perceived is the cutting off of certain highly destabilizing channels in the great and perpetual social game of jousting for higher rank. In particular, the game of signaling greater righteousness through competitive sanctimony necessarily involves the effort to undermine the established normative understanding and equilibrium, for example, consider "critical theory". The opportunity to criticize existing traditional norms and introducing moral innovations sets off a process of ideological entrepreneurship that need never end and can (and historically has, repeatedly) quickly degenerated into free for alls that run to greater and greater extremes of fanaticism leading straight away into descents into mass madness, misery, and murder until, one way or another, some powerful force puts a stop to it to restore a stable order, usually by means of making it clear than anyone thinking about rocking the boat that way in the future is going to find themselves sleeping with the fishes.
I can’t get behind Tove K’s claim that we have “overcome family loyalty “. It still exists, and where it doesn’t the lack is seen as bad (who applauds abandoning one’s family?) Rather, we added to family loyalty the larger society (polis, state, religion) aspects as equal points of loyalty. If anything we expanded the group we treated as family.
I'd disagree here. Mary Harrington's article _Normophobia_ (https://www.firstthings.com/article/2024/04/normophobia ) starts with a 1933 quote from Wilhelm Reich:
From the standpoint of social development, the family cannot be considered the basis of the authoritarian state, only as one of the most important institutions which support it. It is, however, its central reactionary germ cell, the most important place of reproduction of the reactionary and conservative individual. Being itself caused by the authoritarian system, the family becomes the most important institution for its conservation.
Liberals and the left has been trying to destroy the family since *at least* the early 30s, and has more or less succeeded, despite the obvious harms caused.
Daniel Moynihan pointed this out in 1965, and was roundly hooted down by (you guessed it) liberals and the left. Now the dysfunction has spread throughout Western society, and liberals and the left appear to like it that way. (See Obama's Life of Julia video, assuming they haven't memory-holed it yet.)
I am not sure I follow your point here. Are you arguing we have destroyed family loyalty, or that we ought to do so, or just that some do applaud abandoning the family? ( I might agree that some do in theory on that last point, but that they don’t do so in particular, in the luxury beliefs vein.)
I'm saying that Western elites enact policies that destroy family loyalty, and that many elites and intellectuals applaud the destruction of family loyalty.
I agree that there is a strong tendency among some to want to reduce the family to transfer the roles and importance to the state. (Or the cult, which is the other common one.)
However, Trove’s argument is that overcoming family loyalty already happened, and that is why we have societies and have had for a long time. That’s a very different sort of claim, where I think she is very wrong. Family loyalty is still extant, such that it is being attacked currently as opposed to dead and gone.
That's not how I read her argument, and I think that's arguing more than she intended; to wit, she claims that society's victory over families occurred in the 20th century, which is entirely compatible with my evidence above.
Well, to be fair, her argument is kind of a mess: at once all of human history involves sublimating the importance of family, including Christianity, family loyalty only stopped being a problem in the 20th century (the Clintons, Kennedys and others will be pleased to hear hat) and people have stopped having families now. Although it seems odd to me that you would write both that society claimed victory over the family in the 20th century and Western elites are currently in the process of destroying family loyalty, that is no more confused than her essay.
From her piece:
"After millennia of struggle between society as a whole and the family, it looks like society as a whole finally won. The family is now so weak that it has lost its appeal. People don't even want to form families anymore. It is difficult to believe such a thing can happen. After all, family is a fundamental part of human nature.
The drive to form families is part of human nature. But it is not the only part of human nature. We also have other instincts. If those instincts are appealed to and organized in an efficient enough way, people can actually be steered away from their family-forming instincts.
It wasn't easy. It took thousands of years for such an advanced social organization to evolve. But here it is. After a very prolonged struggle, the family has finally been overcome.
...
Society finally overcame the family and an amazing productivity boom followed. But we still haven't solved the riddle of how to reproduce in this situation.
...
After thousands of years of civilization, people can finally gather across kin-groups in the service of productivity."
So... people stopped having families when? 20th century? I seem to recall a few, and quite large ones early. 21st century? Birth rates are low, sure, but hardly absent. Family loyalty in the "family loyalty is enough to cause corruption and problems to society" sense still seems like a thing. Oh, and those family suppressing Christians are the ones who are forming families and having kids at a higher rate... And we are only just now gathering across kin groups to be more productive? That seems like it has been going on for a long time, a few hundred years at least.
I think the death of the family has been rather exaggerated.
Firey’s advocacy of “Reforming the bureaucracy and rewriting statutes and regulations is hard work, requiring careful policymaking and consensus‐building” would appear to validate N.S. Lyon’s observations on the fundamental problem that Schedule F was apparently intended to address:
“This is really a struggle over who rules – i.e. the genuinely political. Which means it is ultimately a struggle over the whole structure of our system of government: are we to continue living under a “depoliticized” managerial regime, or could we see the reemergence of a more democratic republic?”
(https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/democracy-means-never-having-to-hear)
Lyon, it seems, sees a system in which a Javier Milei-type president could get on with the business of governing without having to placate legions of bureaucrat stakeholders, or turn over the steering wheel to the courts, as both desirable and achievable.
Firey, on the other had, advocates Jimmy Carter style civil service reform, built on clientelism, in which all the stakehols get massaged or bribed to stand aside and even more bureaucracy larded on top to grease the system. The system will work, he political capital to it. So the managerial regime stays in place and continues playing the same games it has played for a century.
John Cochrane’s Adam Smith Award remarks seem to offer a persuasive rebuttal to what Firey has in mind:
“As we look at a typical regulatory mess, understand too that there is a certain logic to it. Many of our issues follow the old children’s rhyme: The little old lady swallows a fly, then a spider to catch the fly, a cat to catch the spider, and on we go until she swallows a horse. And dies. Of course. The Dodd Frank Act. As I look at taxes, health care, finance, and many other of decades-old regulatory tarpits, the lesson applies. There was one decision, one original sin, one somewhat sensible path taken -- the income tax, the tax deduction for employer-provided group insurance, bailing out depositors to stop runs. The original idea worked for a while, but had unintended consequences, and was patched and patched over and over again. Each patch, an expansion of the regulatory state, has a certain logic given how the last one failed. But inevitably fell apart requiring more patches.
That insight tells you why smart people looking at the latest fiasco, but without authority or imagination to go back to the beginning and start over, can only come up with more rules that will fall apart just as inevitably. It tells you that the answer has to be a clean slate reform from the beginning.”
(https://www.grumpy-economist.com/p/adam-smith-remarks )
Both Lyons and Cochrane express faith in functionality of the US political system. Lyon writes, “But at least this little furor has revealed that the managerial state does in fact seem to be genuinely afraid of being hit where it would actually hurt, should anyone with enough political will to do so ever to come along…”
Cochrane writes:
“We are a democracy, and a responsive one. Leaders do what people want them to. They lead, perhaps, by giving voice and unity to those desires. I have known a lot of really smart people in power who get it totally. But they say, “John, if I do that I won’t get elected.” We do not elect kings and autocrats. Whispering in the Emperor’s ear is not the answer.
Our political system does respond to the chattering classes that surround politics, and to the wisdom of ordinary american voters. They need to know — to remember — to ask for freedom.”
A bit Pollyanna-ish, no? But perhaps the most soothing dream with which to indulge oneself. Pulling the country out of its current death spiral would require starting over from a clean slate, but that won’t happen. The pragmatic maybe ought concern themselves with a strategy for crawling from the wreckage.
The present bureaucratic rule is not at all "de-politicized," nor fair nor balanced. Those who believe it is have inhaled too much Pravda and should start by burning their TV sets.
The Founders did not authorize massive delegations of power because they knew it would end in corruption and ruin, which is indeed happening and is already mostly complete. Given these facts, negotiations with the enemy are a waste of effort. The bureaucracy is a Gordian knot that must be cut, and if Schedule F is prevented or fails to do the job, we will need some reformer to take the final step and become a dictator. It can't be Trump, not only because he won't do it but because despite "The Apprentice," he has amply demonstrated a complete inability to hire people who will follow his agenda and not backstab him.
“If this center-left were to regain some of its vigor, you would not want to have burned your bridges to it.” - And yet the prevailing behavior by both politicians and bureaucrats of all stripes is exactly that. Namely, instead of cooperating, the goal is to win especially if it costs the “other side”. So bridge-burning is of no concern for most as long as status is maintained or achieved with the in-group. To my eyes, the lack of cooperation and disregard for interdependence is one of the biggest barriers to political progress
The bureaucratic state is a giant Gordian Knot. It cannot be reformed without a giant sword.
That's not quite right. There are a number of fairly minor, reasonable, and common sense reforms that would make the federal bureaucracy much, much better. I've been adding to a long list for a long time. It's just that preserving the option for "bureaucrats behaving badly" is a feature, not a bug, for those who expect bad behaviors will be in their favor 95% of the time, "Rules for thee, not for me, lol!" So that means that any attempt to make bureacracy better affects one party more than the other and is necessarily and inevitable a high stakes political issue inviting political fights that must be won by any means necessary. There is thus no possibility of bipartisan agreement, consensus, or compromise on any possible reforms, so our system of goverment literally cannot get better, though it can and will continue to get worse.
And those "fairly minor, reasonable, and common sense reforms that would make the federal bureaucracy much, much better" are ?
I'd love to see the whole long list.
You'll have to wait, but not too long. They are fodder for an essay I'm working on.
:)
The inference I draw from this is that every set of rules must sometimes be disregarded for an important purpose, if not abandoned. Because if you take the opposite position, sooner or later your rules will be gamed.
I don’t think you realize that you both disagreed and agreed with Yancey’s simple “cannot be reformed”. I’d be interested in a clarification.
On second thought, I think your position is clear; you just should have agreed at the beginning. What do you say?