"It is France 1791. It is Russia 1919. What it is not is conservative. In fact, it is the polar opposite of conservative. Donald Trump has far more in common with V.I. Lenin than Edmund Burke."
It is simply impossible to consider Gardner a serious thinker after writing lines like that, and the rest of that article isn't much better. One couldn't write a more pitch-perfect satire of the clueless misapprehension of what 'conservatism' means than his explicit embrace of "the ratchet" and purported duty of conservatives to help lock-in and preserve all the radical changes introduced the last time the progressives were in power, as if such must be done in the name of stability, familiarity, and tradition. Ridiculous. To be a 'conservative' once, and more properly, meant the commitment to conserve the specific content of a particular tradition and perspective, not brain-dead meta-ideological-nihilists who must be preservationists of whatever happens to exist when they are in charge.
I repeat my call for the permanent retirement of the term "conservative" from the contemporary American political lexicon so that it can go to the semantic old folks home and join all the other terms that have, after years of abuse, lost all semblance of precise meaning.
Absolutely. My first thought after reading the Gardner quote was "So, conservatives should just keep the seat warm when they win an election so that it is nice and comfy when the radicals get back in power then? There is no previous state of the world they should be trying to return the government to?"
I recall Rand (I think it was Rand) writing "Why I am not a Conservative" on exactly that point: what are they even conserving? It is one thing to say that things are pretty good the way they are, so let's not mess with it much. That is not the current state of the federal government. At this point pluck a late 20th century conservative out of time and plop them down today, and they would be considered a radical for freedom.
That is exactly what Conservatives should do, conserve the status quo hence why even leftist governments have conservatives, i.e. after Stalin's death, Stalinists were the Soviet Conservative party whereas Khrushchev was a radical liberal. As the idiom with business taxes goes "What is the best tax rate? The current one because we've already factored it into our business model and are still profitable. Change is bad or disruptive."
“It may be inferred again that the present movement for women’s rights will certainly prevail from the history of its only opponent, Northern conservatism. This is a party which never conserves anything. Its history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation. What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is today one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will tomorrow be forced upon its timidity and will be succeeded by some third revolution; to be denounced and then adopted in its turn. American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near its leader. This pretended salt hath utterly lost its savor: wherewith shall it be salted? Its impotency is not hard, indeed, to explain. It is worthless because it is the conservatism of expediency only, and not of sturdy principle. It intends to risk nothing serious for the sake of the truth, and has no idea of being guilty of the folly of martyrdom. It always when about to enter a protest very blandly informs the wild beast whose path it essays to stop, that its “bark is worse than its bite,” and that it only means to save its manners by enacting its decent role of resistance: The only practical purpose which it now subserves in American politics is to give enough exercise to Radicalism to keep it “in wind,” and to prevent its becoming pursy and lazy, from having nothing to whip. No doubt, after a few years, when women’s suffrage shall have become an accomplished fact, conservatism will tacitly admit it into its creed, and thenceforward plume itself upon its wise firmness in opposing with similar weapons the extreme of baby suffrage; and when that too shall have been won, it will be heard declaring that the integrity of the American Constitution requires at least the refusal of suffrage to asses. There it will assume, with great dignity, its final position.”
Amen, that guy nailed it better than I ever could. The difference is I don't see it as a bad thing whereas he does. The thing though that we can both agree on is that conservatives are feckless doormats and they shouldn't be. It's not they should have some mythical principles on a inviolate policy as he suggests, there is NO specific policy that is inherently conservative or liberal, it's that they simply never actually actually succeed once an issue becomes live.
Thanks on that quote btw, I'm going to add that to my quote file, I like that.
I think you are over estimating the value of not changing. If you accidentally get an arrow through your leg, while it does matter how you take it out, you don't want to just leave it in there because, well, that's the status quo now. Change can be difficult, and it is better to change towards something better rather than worse, but there are times when change is worth the cost.
I think time-frames are important here, a wound is acute, you are healing it to return to the immediate status quo. Whereas if the doctor left that bullet in your skull, it would not be the conservative method to remove it fifty years later just because you decided you didn't want it anymore.
A Conservatives position is similar, the sole argument is the specific dividing line between acute and chronic and at least in the case of politics, I'd argue that is two changes of power, i.e. at this point supporting homosexual marriage, abortion, firearm restrictions, marijuana legalization, and the complete gutting of the Constitution IS the conservative position. Many of those things are beyond two cycles, they have been the norm for a generation or two.
Wanting to revert to some mythical golden age in the past isn't uniquely conservative, the US founders were nominally liberal and were trying to return to Athens or the Roman Republic. Iranian liberals wanted to return to sharia hence it's popularity in the universities of the time, etc.
So, are you arguing that conservatives should be in favor of gay marriage, abortion, firearm restrictions, marijuana legalization and the complete gutting of the Constitution? Once something has made it past two administrations it must never change?
I’m sorry, I feel I can’t be understanding that correctly.
That is exactly what I'm arguing. They are now the accepted status quo hence Conservatives should be acting conservatively and support them remaining as they are currently implemented.
This isn't rocket science, conservatives do this routinely, i.e. they aren't still out there calling for segregation, a return to slavery, the abolishment of the police, ending suffrage, etc.
Liberals are always changing and new, Conservatives are, or should be, just yesterday's liberal victors.
Sadly I think you are right about the debasement of the concept in recent times. It is bound to get trotted out (and misused) by politico obsessives with a short political attention span. But we still do need some kind of shorthand label for what TS Eliot called "the permanent things". Anti-relativism?.... is fairly accurate but doesn't exactly trip off the tongue.
Nobody gets on to a degree course henceforth without first being able to prove they have understood Burke and Oakshott.....how about that! (only kidding of course)
I had a colleague who wrote his dissertation on Oakshott. We had some wonderful discussions, and I learned a lot. Probably most people unfamiliar with his works would as well.
It's a religious civil war. Once again the Protestants want an iconoclastic reform but are facing a secular "academic" church instead of the Catholics.
A respectable-type leftist would object that they are for these things too, and that to thus refer to them as "very conservative" would be absurdly at odds with common understanding.
As Hayek pointed out, the political terminology never made sense applied to both sides of the Atlantic because the American situation was distinct and instead of social organization based on throne-and-alter, in America liberty -was- the tradition to be conserved against the social upheavals desired by radical ideologues.
I think this post misunderstands quite how terminally far our Western 'liberal democracies' have (from a conservative perspective) unravelled these last three decades. Trump has rightly been labelled in post-election journalism as Trump 'The Disrupter'. That is the essential point - and necesssity - of the phenomenon that has crystalised around him. It won't be pretty; it won't be 'well managed'; it won't end up where its supporters think it will....all that is true but (given the scale of the destructive academia sheep-dipping of the middle class these past decades) it it still a very necessary corrective (and to be welcomed) pretty much wherever it leads.
You Arnold - as you often say - are a libertarian rather than a conservative. And I know you very much apply a "who to read rather than what to read" rule-of-thumb. But if you find the time to read my 'Madness of Intelligentsias' long essay (https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/the-madness-of-intelligentsias) you will find in it a pretty comprehensive articulation of a conservative perspective on all this.
I disagree. We have important and potentially existential challenges ahead of us with a deteriorating China that becomes more dangerous as it declines. We just escalated in Ukraine and the US needs to realign its entire alliance system. Having a SecDef who doesn’t know how to do anything but issue bans on DEI training is going to make all of that harder. Trump is a disrupter but his record in both private and public office isn’t stellar in terms of implementation. Unfortunately most of these jobs are about implementation. There are many candidates who want to change DoD and have real experience with it and other large bureaucracies. Those people are the ones he should be seeking out. Where’s Elbridge Colby or Mike Waltz? Either would be far superior. When was the last time a corporate brought in someone with no experience to do a turnaround. GE didn’t hire someone from CNBC to turn it around, they hired the guy who ran Danaher.
Is China really deteriorating and declining? Sure, 5% annual growth is slower than it used to be, but most of Europe would find such rates to be miraculous.
"Donald Trump has far more in common with V.I. Lenin than Edmund Burke."
This is just a ridiculous claim - and part of this ongoing attempt to make it seem like firing federal employees is the same as liquidating the kulaks. You know what those revolutionaries like Robespierre and Lenin did? Lots of murder - not like "we changed the policy to make it harder for disadvantaged people and lowered their chance of living to maximum life expectancy", but rather bullets in the head.
McNamara was a disaster because his diagnosis and prescription was obvious, clear, and totally wrong. Both for corporations like Ford, and for Agencies like Defense. He believed that the personalities that warred in the Pentagon were a distraction and a disease; that clear quantitative analysis should answer every question and the organization as a whole should be entirely computable, even more than legible. Dehumanizing the organization was his goal and he succeeded. A tragedy. One needs to lead people, not turn them into eigenvalues.
These departments also differ. USDA is more about SNAP than organic crops. Defense is more about procurement and prepare for future wars than morale. Frankly DoD chief has limited statutory authority over troops.
The deputies likely matter a lot in this case. The organizations will work if the leader has a clear vision, even if they are not operationally excellent. The challenge with some of these appointments is they lack operation skills or vision.
With their limited experience, the bureaucracy and its close ties to Congress, will run circles around the cabinet officials.
The key appointments will be the ones a level or two below the actual cabinet secretary. The cabinet secretary will set a policy thrust and probably be able to focus on one or two priorities at most. You have to bring in subordinates who are at least directionally aligned with the new administration and have some awareness of the bureaucratic realities they are supposed to be managing. Trump has had a long time, and his allies have had a long time, to come up with a list of people who could potentially do this. The unglamorous jobs at those two levels will be where all the action really is. We will see if it happens!
I continue to be amazed at the number of org leaders who know nothing about goodhart and conways law or act like those laws don’t apply to their orgs. These same folks get shocked by revealed preferences. This isn’t a partisan point because i think democrats are just as bad if not worse.
Agreed, my experience matches. I suspect it is because most business literature isn't about how organizations actually work in a systems and their limits sense but how with this one weird trick you can boost EBITA by X%. That is to say, it is about rituals you can do without understanding why they do or don't work, and how your organization works.
I am often reminded of the quote "Do you not know, my son, with what little understanding the world is ruled?" attributed to Pope Julius III. It works on a lot of levels.
"Quantilia prudentia mundus regatur" was Count Oxenstiern's paraphrasing of Julius, telling his son that he was good enough to represent Sweden in negotiating the Peace of Westphalia.
Eh... I am not so sure. The more I interact with those at or close to the top, the more I notice they are not terribly impressive. Above average, sure, but no where near as broadly understanding as one might believe or hope. The great danger is that as the scope of a ruler expands the amount of knowledge and understanding required also expands, and I think it does so exponentially and so quickly exceeds human capacity.
I can't believe the vast majority aren't aware of these issues. Directing and managing to avoid these problems is quite a bit more difficult and less successful.
Yesterday's post of links to consider included one from self-described liberal (I would say lefty) Noah Smith arguing that Trump and the MAGA movement represent the rise of 'petty Lenins' on social media, and today we have a post from a conservative (?) comparing Trump to Lenin. Is this just a coincidence, or is it a sign of a new meme, or narrative, emerging post-election, as opposed to the pre-election 'Trump is Hitler' meme? Is Lenin an improvement over Hitler? After all, Lenin died before he could commit sufficient mass murder to rival Hitler or Lenin's successor, Stalin. As for DOD, I note that both Trump's last defense secretary (Esper) and the incumbent secretary (Austin) came to the position after working for one of the major defense contractors. I haven't done a deep dive into the topic of defense contracting, but there is a critical literature arguing that the defense contracting process is biased in favor of very costly, technologically sophisticated weapons systems and platforms that do not necessarily perform better than their cheaper Russian counterparts under battlefield conditions. And the Pentagon just flunked its latest audit, the 7th in a row. Hegseth may indeed not be up to the task of addressing these problems, but I think AK's argument that you need someone qualified to 'manage the managers' misses the point. Maybe you do need a Lenin to clean out the place.
News just in: Dr. Martin Makary appointed to head the FDA, reporting to RFK at HHS. Makary represented a middle ground on Covid vaccines according to Zero Hedge (sorry Handle) -- not opposed to the vaccines in general, but against Biden Administration's policy of pushing boosters on young patients. I would think even AK could not quibble with this one.
I doubt anyone has the experience necessary to truly “manage” the Defense Department. Pete H. will need competent service secretaries and senior DoD officials (general counsel, budget director, congressional relations …) to assist him, no doubt. But if he sets clear priorities, establishes deadlines and deliverables, and, above all, holds military and civil officials accountable, he could achieve a great deal. We’ve had Defense secretaries who led large companies with complex organizations and they didn’t distinguish themselves at DoD.
The problem is that the management chain of command in government is not like the chain in the private sector. At lower levels, individuals following standard procedures and teams working on projects of limited scope are more similar to their counterparts. As you go up, however, the constraints and mandates imposed by Congress and the accumulated corpus of regulations and case law deprive leaders of so many essential elements of executive function and managerial discretion and flexibility - personnel matters alone make it a completely different ballgame and that's just the tip of the iceberg - that it no longer becomes possible to judge performance in such positions by remotely the same standards, and thus the criteria for selecting these sub-politicians is utterly distinct from those that would ordinarily qualify one to "run a large organization". It's just not that kind of job.
"I worry that the new Administration will move fast and break things—and not know how to fix them."
I'm not worried. I'm pretty much resigned to it happening. I remain mildly optimistic because I've always structured my life to provide options, but only mildly.
Good point, but I don’t think their goal is to “manage the managers.”
For better or worse, I think their goal is to get rid of the managers (or at least the vast majority of them.) That is a very different task, and it likely requires a very different skillset.
Agenda47 seems domestically oriented with little foreign policy emphasis other than reciprocal trade policy and more defense spending. In this regard it might be worth considering what the US might positively accomplish with respect to the horrendous democratic backsliding going on in the UK, Germany, France, and the EU generally where any semblance of political speech liberty is being crushed into oblivion. The State Department at least might issue travel advisories on the perils facing tourists with unguarded tongues. But in general the awfulness of democratic backsliding in Europe generally ought lead to a very non-conservative reassessment of US-EU relations
Let’s be careful and try to look at everything through an apocalyptic perspective. For example, 90% of Warren Buffett’s net worth was derived after he turned 65 years old during the last 30 years. In that timeframe, economic conditions were not always good. Nevertheless, they were good enough for Berkshire Hathaway to thrive even though we encountered wars, pandemic, presidents of all different skill levels, civil unrest, the GFC and so on.
Our best days may still lie ahead of us. We might just have the perfect conditions for many of us to thrive in the next 30 years as we experienced in the last 30 years. That is my hope and I plan to seize the moment.
Arnold, we’re depending on you to keep writing and keep us all sane. Thank you for your continual insights and wisdom.
Our best days are ahead. The question at hand is how much he changes the risks. Probably a bit for the worse short term but long term is much more uncertain and mixed.
"It is France 1791. It is Russia 1919. What it is not is conservative. In fact, it is the polar opposite of conservative. Donald Trump has far more in common with V.I. Lenin than Edmund Burke."
It is simply impossible to consider Gardner a serious thinker after writing lines like that, and the rest of that article isn't much better. One couldn't write a more pitch-perfect satire of the clueless misapprehension of what 'conservatism' means than his explicit embrace of "the ratchet" and purported duty of conservatives to help lock-in and preserve all the radical changes introduced the last time the progressives were in power, as if such must be done in the name of stability, familiarity, and tradition. Ridiculous. To be a 'conservative' once, and more properly, meant the commitment to conserve the specific content of a particular tradition and perspective, not brain-dead meta-ideological-nihilists who must be preservationists of whatever happens to exist when they are in charge.
I repeat my call for the permanent retirement of the term "conservative" from the contemporary American political lexicon so that it can go to the semantic old folks home and join all the other terms that have, after years of abuse, lost all semblance of precise meaning.
Absolutely. My first thought after reading the Gardner quote was "So, conservatives should just keep the seat warm when they win an election so that it is nice and comfy when the radicals get back in power then? There is no previous state of the world they should be trying to return the government to?"
I recall Rand (I think it was Rand) writing "Why I am not a Conservative" on exactly that point: what are they even conserving? It is one thing to say that things are pretty good the way they are, so let's not mess with it much. That is not the current state of the federal government. At this point pluck a late 20th century conservative out of time and plop them down today, and they would be considered a radical for freedom.
That is exactly what Conservatives should do, conserve the status quo hence why even leftist governments have conservatives, i.e. after Stalin's death, Stalinists were the Soviet Conservative party whereas Khrushchev was a radical liberal. As the idiom with business taxes goes "What is the best tax rate? The current one because we've already factored it into our business model and are still profitable. Change is bad or disruptive."
“It may be inferred again that the present movement for women’s rights will certainly prevail from the history of its only opponent, Northern conservatism. This is a party which never conserves anything. Its history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation. What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is today one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will tomorrow be forced upon its timidity and will be succeeded by some third revolution; to be denounced and then adopted in its turn. American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near its leader. This pretended salt hath utterly lost its savor: wherewith shall it be salted? Its impotency is not hard, indeed, to explain. It is worthless because it is the conservatism of expediency only, and not of sturdy principle. It intends to risk nothing serious for the sake of the truth, and has no idea of being guilty of the folly of martyrdom. It always when about to enter a protest very blandly informs the wild beast whose path it essays to stop, that its “bark is worse than its bite,” and that it only means to save its manners by enacting its decent role of resistance: The only practical purpose which it now subserves in American politics is to give enough exercise to Radicalism to keep it “in wind,” and to prevent its becoming pursy and lazy, from having nothing to whip. No doubt, after a few years, when women’s suffrage shall have become an accomplished fact, conservatism will tacitly admit it into its creed, and thenceforward plume itself upon its wise firmness in opposing with similar weapons the extreme of baby suffrage; and when that too shall have been won, it will be heard declaring that the integrity of the American Constitution requires at least the refusal of suffrage to asses. There it will assume, with great dignity, its final position.”
― Robert Lewis Dabney
Amen, that guy nailed it better than I ever could. The difference is I don't see it as a bad thing whereas he does. The thing though that we can both agree on is that conservatives are feckless doormats and they shouldn't be. It's not they should have some mythical principles on a inviolate policy as he suggests, there is NO specific policy that is inherently conservative or liberal, it's that they simply never actually actually succeed once an issue becomes live.
Thanks on that quote btw, I'm going to add that to my quote file, I like that.
I think you are over estimating the value of not changing. If you accidentally get an arrow through your leg, while it does matter how you take it out, you don't want to just leave it in there because, well, that's the status quo now. Change can be difficult, and it is better to change towards something better rather than worse, but there are times when change is worth the cost.
I think time-frames are important here, a wound is acute, you are healing it to return to the immediate status quo. Whereas if the doctor left that bullet in your skull, it would not be the conservative method to remove it fifty years later just because you decided you didn't want it anymore.
A Conservatives position is similar, the sole argument is the specific dividing line between acute and chronic and at least in the case of politics, I'd argue that is two changes of power, i.e. at this point supporting homosexual marriage, abortion, firearm restrictions, marijuana legalization, and the complete gutting of the Constitution IS the conservative position. Many of those things are beyond two cycles, they have been the norm for a generation or two.
Wanting to revert to some mythical golden age in the past isn't uniquely conservative, the US founders were nominally liberal and were trying to return to Athens or the Roman Republic. Iranian liberals wanted to return to sharia hence it's popularity in the universities of the time, etc.
So, are you arguing that conservatives should be in favor of gay marriage, abortion, firearm restrictions, marijuana legalization and the complete gutting of the Constitution? Once something has made it past two administrations it must never change?
I’m sorry, I feel I can’t be understanding that correctly.
That is exactly what I'm arguing. They are now the accepted status quo hence Conservatives should be acting conservatively and support them remaining as they are currently implemented.
This isn't rocket science, conservatives do this routinely, i.e. they aren't still out there calling for segregation, a return to slavery, the abolishment of the police, ending suffrage, etc.
Liberals are always changing and new, Conservatives are, or should be, just yesterday's liberal victors.
Right; that's why businesses oppose lowering business taxes.
Existing established businesses do as it acts as a barrier to entry against upstarts.
Sadly I think you are right about the debasement of the concept in recent times. It is bound to get trotted out (and misused) by politico obsessives with a short political attention span. But we still do need some kind of shorthand label for what TS Eliot called "the permanent things". Anti-relativism?.... is fairly accurate but doesn't exactly trip off the tongue.
Nobody gets on to a degree course henceforth without first being able to prove they have understood Burke and Oakshott.....how about that! (only kidding of course)
I had a colleague who wrote his dissertation on Oakshott. We had some wonderful discussions, and I learned a lot. Probably most people unfamiliar with his works would as well.
It's a religious civil war. Once again the Protestants want an iconoclastic reform but are facing a secular "academic" church instead of the Catholics.
I'd rather bring it back to meaning something like being for the rule of law, economic growth, personal integrity.
A respectable-type leftist would object that they are for these things too, and that to thus refer to them as "very conservative" would be absurdly at odds with common understanding.
As Hayek pointed out, the political terminology never made sense applied to both sides of the Atlantic because the American situation was distinct and instead of social organization based on throne-and-alter, in America liberty -was- the tradition to be conserved against the social upheavals desired by radical ideologues.
I think this post misunderstands quite how terminally far our Western 'liberal democracies' have (from a conservative perspective) unravelled these last three decades. Trump has rightly been labelled in post-election journalism as Trump 'The Disrupter'. That is the essential point - and necesssity - of the phenomenon that has crystalised around him. It won't be pretty; it won't be 'well managed'; it won't end up where its supporters think it will....all that is true but (given the scale of the destructive academia sheep-dipping of the middle class these past decades) it it still a very necessary corrective (and to be welcomed) pretty much wherever it leads.
You Arnold - as you often say - are a libertarian rather than a conservative. And I know you very much apply a "who to read rather than what to read" rule-of-thumb. But if you find the time to read my 'Madness of Intelligentsias' long essay (https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/the-madness-of-intelligentsias) you will find in it a pretty comprehensive articulation of a conservative perspective on all this.
I disagree. We have important and potentially existential challenges ahead of us with a deteriorating China that becomes more dangerous as it declines. We just escalated in Ukraine and the US needs to realign its entire alliance system. Having a SecDef who doesn’t know how to do anything but issue bans on DEI training is going to make all of that harder. Trump is a disrupter but his record in both private and public office isn’t stellar in terms of implementation. Unfortunately most of these jobs are about implementation. There are many candidates who want to change DoD and have real experience with it and other large bureaucracies. Those people are the ones he should be seeking out. Where’s Elbridge Colby or Mike Waltz? Either would be far superior. When was the last time a corporate brought in someone with no experience to do a turnaround. GE didn’t hire someone from CNBC to turn it around, they hired the guy who ran Danaher.
Is China really deteriorating and declining? Sure, 5% annual growth is slower than it used to be, but most of Europe would find such rates to be miraculous.
Are they lying about the 5% growth as mush as they lied previously? That's important. But China is indeed very dangerous.
"Donald Trump has far more in common with V.I. Lenin than Edmund Burke."
This is just a ridiculous claim - and part of this ongoing attempt to make it seem like firing federal employees is the same as liquidating the kulaks. You know what those revolutionaries like Robespierre and Lenin did? Lots of murder - not like "we changed the policy to make it harder for disadvantaged people and lowered their chance of living to maximum life expectancy", but rather bullets in the head.
McNamara was a disaster because his diagnosis and prescription was obvious, clear, and totally wrong. Both for corporations like Ford, and for Agencies like Defense. He believed that the personalities that warred in the Pentagon were a distraction and a disease; that clear quantitative analysis should answer every question and the organization as a whole should be entirely computable, even more than legible. Dehumanizing the organization was his goal and he succeeded. A tragedy. One needs to lead people, not turn them into eigenvalues.
These departments also differ. USDA is more about SNAP than organic crops. Defense is more about procurement and prepare for future wars than morale. Frankly DoD chief has limited statutory authority over troops.
The deputies likely matter a lot in this case. The organizations will work if the leader has a clear vision, even if they are not operationally excellent. The challenge with some of these appointments is they lack operation skills or vision.
With their limited experience, the bureaucracy and its close ties to Congress, will run circles around the cabinet officials.
"Obtaining the behavior you want from a bureaucracy is an immense challenge, especially if this is your first experience trying it."
Now there's an understatement and the source of perpetual conservative disappointment.
DeSantis would have been good this way.
The key appointments will be the ones a level or two below the actual cabinet secretary. The cabinet secretary will set a policy thrust and probably be able to focus on one or two priorities at most. You have to bring in subordinates who are at least directionally aligned with the new administration and have some awareness of the bureaucratic realities they are supposed to be managing. Trump has had a long time, and his allies have had a long time, to come up with a list of people who could potentially do this. The unglamorous jobs at those two levels will be where all the action really is. We will see if it happens!
There are an infinite number of ways to manage and reorganize a large organization, nearly all of them would make things worse.
I continue to be amazed at the number of org leaders who know nothing about goodhart and conways law or act like those laws don’t apply to their orgs. These same folks get shocked by revealed preferences. This isn’t a partisan point because i think democrats are just as bad if not worse.
Agreed, my experience matches. I suspect it is because most business literature isn't about how organizations actually work in a systems and their limits sense but how with this one weird trick you can boost EBITA by X%. That is to say, it is about rituals you can do without understanding why they do or don't work, and how your organization works.
I am often reminded of the quote "Do you not know, my son, with what little understanding the world is ruled?" attributed to Pope Julius III. It works on a lot of levels.
"Quantilia prudentia mundus regatur" was Count Oxenstiern's paraphrasing of Julius, telling his son that he was good enough to represent Sweden in negotiating the Peace of Westphalia.
No doubt there is always truth in that quote yet there's almost always far more understanding among those at the top than we are aware.
Eh... I am not so sure. The more I interact with those at or close to the top, the more I notice they are not terribly impressive. Above average, sure, but no where near as broadly understanding as one might believe or hope. The great danger is that as the scope of a ruler expands the amount of knowledge and understanding required also expands, and I think it does so exponentially and so quickly exceeds human capacity.
I can't believe the vast majority aren't aware of these issues. Directing and managing to avoid these problems is quite a bit more difficult and less successful.
I looked up the two laws. Both are very good. Thanks for the insight.
Yesterday's post of links to consider included one from self-described liberal (I would say lefty) Noah Smith arguing that Trump and the MAGA movement represent the rise of 'petty Lenins' on social media, and today we have a post from a conservative (?) comparing Trump to Lenin. Is this just a coincidence, or is it a sign of a new meme, or narrative, emerging post-election, as opposed to the pre-election 'Trump is Hitler' meme? Is Lenin an improvement over Hitler? After all, Lenin died before he could commit sufficient mass murder to rival Hitler or Lenin's successor, Stalin. As for DOD, I note that both Trump's last defense secretary (Esper) and the incumbent secretary (Austin) came to the position after working for one of the major defense contractors. I haven't done a deep dive into the topic of defense contracting, but there is a critical literature arguing that the defense contracting process is biased in favor of very costly, technologically sophisticated weapons systems and platforms that do not necessarily perform better than their cheaper Russian counterparts under battlefield conditions. And the Pentagon just flunked its latest audit, the 7th in a row. Hegseth may indeed not be up to the task of addressing these problems, but I think AK's argument that you need someone qualified to 'manage the managers' misses the point. Maybe you do need a Lenin to clean out the place.
News just in: Dr. Martin Makary appointed to head the FDA, reporting to RFK at HHS. Makary represented a middle ground on Covid vaccines according to Zero Hedge (sorry Handle) -- not opposed to the vaccines in general, but against Biden Administration's policy of pushing boosters on young patients. I would think even AK could not quibble with this one.
I am not a Makary fan. He has the combination of being sure of himself even when he is wrong. e.g. https://www.wsj.com/articles/well-have-herd-immunity-by-april-11613669731
I doubt anyone has the experience necessary to truly “manage” the Defense Department. Pete H. will need competent service secretaries and senior DoD officials (general counsel, budget director, congressional relations …) to assist him, no doubt. But if he sets clear priorities, establishes deadlines and deliverables, and, above all, holds military and civil officials accountable, he could achieve a great deal. We’ve had Defense secretaries who led large companies with complex organizations and they didn’t distinguish themselves at DoD.
The problem is that the management chain of command in government is not like the chain in the private sector. At lower levels, individuals following standard procedures and teams working on projects of limited scope are more similar to their counterparts. As you go up, however, the constraints and mandates imposed by Congress and the accumulated corpus of regulations and case law deprive leaders of so many essential elements of executive function and managerial discretion and flexibility - personnel matters alone make it a completely different ballgame and that's just the tip of the iceberg - that it no longer becomes possible to judge performance in such positions by remotely the same standards, and thus the criteria for selecting these sub-politicians is utterly distinct from those that would ordinarily qualify one to "run a large organization". It's just not that kind of job.
"I worry that the new Administration will move fast and break things—and not know how to fix them."
I'm not worried. I'm pretty much resigned to it happening. I remain mildly optimistic because I've always structured my life to provide options, but only mildly.
Good point, but I don’t think their goal is to “manage the managers.”
For better or worse, I think their goal is to get rid of the managers (or at least the vast majority of them.) That is a very different task, and it likely requires a very different skillset.
We’ll see how it works out…
Trump’s picks are Not going to Minimize the Changes to The Good Parts, but instead, are going to Maximize the Reductions of The Bad Parts.
If there were no new regulations, but only a few or many eliminated, it would be better for the world and for the American people.
If all Hegseth does is fire the generals who fail to account for $100 million or more, he would be doing a good job. I hope he also tries to do good.
I don't have the patience to watch all the videos and wish there was a summary document available, but Trump and his policy advisor designee Stephen Miller so far seem committed to the Agenda47 statement (https://www.oneindia.com/international/donald-trump-agenda-47-america-first-policy-reforms-second-term-3980797.html ). If conservatives have specific ideas on how that agenda might be practically improved, I for one would appreciate the enlightenment.
Agenda47 seems domestically oriented with little foreign policy emphasis other than reciprocal trade policy and more defense spending. In this regard it might be worth considering what the US might positively accomplish with respect to the horrendous democratic backsliding going on in the UK, Germany, France, and the EU generally where any semblance of political speech liberty is being crushed into oblivion. The State Department at least might issue travel advisories on the perils facing tourists with unguarded tongues. But in general the awfulness of democratic backsliding in Europe generally ought lead to a very non-conservative reassessment of US-EU relations
Let’s be careful and try to look at everything through an apocalyptic perspective. For example, 90% of Warren Buffett’s net worth was derived after he turned 65 years old during the last 30 years. In that timeframe, economic conditions were not always good. Nevertheless, they were good enough for Berkshire Hathaway to thrive even though we encountered wars, pandemic, presidents of all different skill levels, civil unrest, the GFC and so on.
Our best days may still lie ahead of us. We might just have the perfect conditions for many of us to thrive in the next 30 years as we experienced in the last 30 years. That is my hope and I plan to seize the moment.
Arnold, we’re depending on you to keep writing and keep us all sane. Thank you for your continual insights and wisdom.
Our best days are ahead. The question at hand is how much he changes the risks. Probably a bit for the worse short term but long term is much more uncertain and mixed.