the people who populate the institutions that exercise direct power over nearly all aspects of American life from birth to death are bureaucrats—university bureaucrats, corporate bureaucrats, local, state and federal bureaucrats, law enforcement bureaucrats, health bureaucrats, knowledge bureaucrats, spy agency bureaucrats. At each layer of specific institutional authority, bureaucrats coordinate their understandings and practices with bureaucrats in parallel institutions through lawyers, in language that is designed to be impenetrable, or nearly so, by outsiders. Their authority is pervasive, undemocratic, and increasingly not susceptible in practice to legal checks and balances. All those people together comprise a class.
He goes on to have a fascinating back-and-forth with Angelo Codevilla, with a lot of discussion of the American intelligence community.
From the Tablet, which is competing with Quillette for my vote for favorite magazine.
Arnold, a precise description of those who control your grandchildren’s lives. Your grandchildren’s challenge is to survive them. Unfortunately, many libertarians prefer to ignore their existence as if your grandchildren would have the opportunity to be raised only by their parents and grandparents (smart-boy B. Caplan seems to believe that kids can be easily homeschooled in today’s America).
Internet has inverted the insider-outsider problem. Who needs legalese when we debate in 240 characters or less. Internet Will do same for Gov schooling.
Trump was an attempt at circumventing bureaucrat control. The mission failed. We now basically live in China.
Really?
The question is how to scale democracy. How to handle delegation. If you make delegation to agencies illegal, you aren’t getting your representatives writing detailed regulatory procedures. They will delegate to a staff member instead. The evidence suggests a distinction without a difference. America is too big.
This is a bit of BS. The executive branch can reach into agencies and enforce their will on rule delegation. Trump has done quite a bit of this. Bills can change instructions. Maybe a few words dedicated to just how to do things better would be helpful.
At some point, please remind me that I owe you a complimentary pillow from mypillow dot com.
Your tireless efforts fighting for Rittenhouse’s release on bond, because you felt he acted in self defense, should not go unacknowledged.
https://abc7chicago.com/kyle-rittenhouse-rittenouse-shooting-my-pillow-ceo-mike-lindell/8153234
Kyle Rittenhouse, Lin Wood and Mike Lindell.
What could go wrong?
I will even throw in a complimentary pillow topper. Made in the U.S.A. and is fully guaranteed. I see the advertisements every day over on the Fox News.
So what you will about Lin Wood, but he took care of Richard Jewell did he not?
Regardless, you conceded previously that he is likely not guilty based on self defense. Why not advocate for the best legal team possible and an unbiased jury of his peers?
Lastly, the officers in the Jacob Blake incident will not be charged. Kinda interesting to see all of the rioting and property damage for basically no reason whatsoever. Lesson learned: don’t threaten officers with a knife. But, this should be common sense already to pretty much everyone including our first grader who owns and knows how to fire an AR-15 type rifle.
“Lesson learned: don’t threaten officers with a knife. ”
Right. Always beat officers with a flag pole, and most importantly, always be white.
Excellent take aways, good work! You and your analysis are an inspiration to all of us! Stay real.
Rather than the relentless centralization that has been seen so long, one could look to the subsidiarity principle. Assuming there is a desire to solve this problem, of course.
That is the opposite of scaling. It is a decision to dismantle much of the scaling we do have.
That becomes a bet that this will produce other organizational benefits that will outweigh the loss of scale and uniformity. That democratic decision making can and should be more granular than it already is.
My guess is you would get very, very uneven results and ultimately break up the country.
That is the opposite of scaling. It is a decision to dismantle much of the scaling we do have.
You seem to mean scalable centralized institutions of some sort, and perhaps you have a different meaning for ‘scaling’ too. I assume you want to run everything federalized and let the states wither away or something? (“Uniformity”) But that’s certainly not the only way to do it.
Note that disregarding subsidiarity triggered that civil war. So there’s that.
Most of all, what you are giving them—which really in a sense they crave more than anything else—is a sense of grievance against the rest of America. Grievance is the handle by which you push these pawns into your cultural wars.
Angelo Codevilla is underrated. I read his book Advice to War Presidents a few years ago and enjoyed it.
I tend to enjoy him. But he is a bit of a conspiratorial nut, at times.
Like, in the provided quotation, the idea that legalese is a secret language. It’s not, because it doesn’t carry the meaning. Rather, its obscurity lets the meaning reside elsewhere, namely, in the bureaucracy.
The bureaucrats don’t have meetings to decide how to oppress people. They just do their jobs. The resulting oppression is just validation of their work, and they tell themselves (correctly) that it isn’t as bad as it could have been, assuming (incorrectly) that what they did was necessary to stop the chaos.
Right, as basic public choice analysis would show, 99% of what goes on is (1) just doing one’s job, (2) with as little personal effort as possible, and (3) with an eye towards future opportunities with as much personal upside as possible, and (4) CYA – trying to make sure one stays out of trouble and isn’t left holding the bag with personal liability.
His bit with, “… in language that is designed to be impenetrable, or nearly so, by outsiders,” is, to be frank, slightly paranoid. If the language is hard to understand, that’s because of both traditional legal terms of art and also words once intended to convey the usual plain meaning in ordinary spoken English, but which have been twisted and tortured by one court or another.
It’s the “results-oriented” judges who generate almost all of the real trouble in the system. Without a fix for that, everything else is pointless.
The quote is from David Samuels.
Samuels and Codevilla certainly make a convincing case that the USA has a garbage government.
So what would Dennis C. Mueller say? The prolific commenter from Argentina recently recommended his work including 1996 book Constitutional Democracy and his highly regarded Public Choice III. Although still buried in the considerable depths of the latter, I have finished the former. I would first note that it starts with an epigraph from Thomas Jefferson’s famous observation on constitutional reform “Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched….” and it ends presciently:
“…the most fertile soil for new experiments in constitutional democracy is in Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, and the developing countries elsewhere… … the suggestion that the citizens should participate in the creation of the institutions of government that will determine their future welfare seems less radical. The possibility that they would be successful will seem less unlikely. If a few political leaders step forward and propose that a truly democratic constitution be drafted, and citizens participate in the drafting process, it just might happen. Such events occurred in Athens in the sixth century B.C., in North America at the end of the eighteenth century, and in Europe at the middle of the nineteenth century. Where and when they will occur again I cannot say, but occur they will.”
Chile is testament to his foresight. And indeed as Mueller suggests, the new constitutions of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, increase confidence in a successful Chilean outcome. From any reasonable perspective, the constitutions of these three former Soviet republics are wholly superior to that of the USA and they enjoy profoundly superior governance.
And why wouldn’t they? Their constitutional drafters, much as did the delegates to the Philadelphia constitutional convention, looked frequently to knowledge gained from the experience of Switzerland.
The notion that the USA can reform its way out of its current squalor without a new constitutional convention is fantastical at best. The downward spiral is only accelerating. If one would have hope, one might study Lithuania or Estonia both of which bear strong evidence of the fruits of authentic democracy.
“The notion that the USA can reform its way out of its current squalor without a new constitutional convention is fantastical at best.”
We don’t need a new constitutional convention. Rather, we just need the blue states and the red ones to both admit that “it’s not you, it’s me” and that it’s time for an amicable divorce. Let’s try for something new as opposed to reconciling differences that are irreconcilable.
Splitting up would be worse, and it would not be amicable.
Why exactly? Both sides hate each other. In any other context, the parties would agree to a peaceful dissolution.
I’m thinking that as part of the bargain, the red states would agree to be responsible for producing, printing and distributing the blue state entry maps to the caravans from Central and South America. Darn, in this day and age, the red states could even develop a gps enabled mapping app to guide the illegals to the blue state safe havens. (provided that it doesn’t get banned by Google and Apple).
“In 100 feet, proceed straight to your blue state destination.”
A perfect blending of ideology and technology. The great stagnation has ended.
Hans, splitting up would not be amicable because Blues would look at Red states the way they look at Poland and Hungary, and treat them accordingly.
https://www.newsweek.com/biden-big-tech-have-poland-hungary-their-crosshairs-opinion-1540063
Sounds like Blue wants to take Red to the cleaners.
edgard, we can entertain our own fantasies about the healing power of a new constitution (btw, an issue I discussed with DM after reading his Constitutional Democracy and recommending him for giving lectures in Ecuador about that power to the elites who were close to civil war). But my experience –including what is going on in Chile’s today– is that even small societies find that the best hope for some healing via the Constitution depends on strong agreement about post-Constitution processes for electing government officials, holding these officials accountable, and adjudicating political conflicts, rather than on the principles and substantive rules embraced by the Constitutional Assembly and celebrated by some intellectuals.
Look at the U.S. today. The losers of 2016 were so rotten and corrupt that they were willing to sacrifice anything to grab power again. They sold the country to the barbarians and they are stupid enough to think that the barbarians are happy to share power with old Joe and Nancy and the other decrepit democrats.
In George Orwell’s 1984, Emmanuel Goldstein writes:
“The new aristocracy was made up for the most part of bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade-union organizers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists, and professional politicians. These people, whose origins lay in the salaried middle class and the upper grades of the working class, had been shaped and brought together by the barren world of monopoly industry and centralized government. As compared with their opposite numbers in past ages, they were less avaricious, less tempted by luxury, hungrier for pure power, and, above all, more conscious of what they were doing and more intent on crushing opposition. [… .] With the development of television, and the technical advance which made it possible to receive and transmit simultaneously on the same instrument, private life came to an end. Every citizen, or at least every citizen important enough to be worth watching, could be kept for twenty-four hours a day under the eyes of the police and in the sound of official propaganda, with all other channels of communication closed. The possibility of enforcing not only complete obedience to the will of the State, but complete uniformity of opinion on all subjects, now existed for the first time.”
I read this Codevilla interview a year ago, before what Effem said became the reality. Moo cow’s response comports perfectly with his handle. Tom and Hans banter. Edgar offers 2 worthy comments: garbage govt, and the hopelessness of ‘reform’. But Lithuania and Estonia aren’t inspiring hope for anything but some Dreherish holdout enclaves.
The idea of an amicable split up is a waste of time, as noted above.
The citation of Orwell points out how prescient his novel was, but also offers no hope.
What followed on the demise of the Roman empire begins to appear as mild compared to what scenarios are conjurable now. It may take a generation or three, but things go faster than they used to.
So that leaves the Benedict option to curate the salvageable for any remnant who’s grandchildren inherit the ruins the elites leave in their wake. Not even the elitist of the elite is above the law of sin and death.
It’s a bit scary how much America has lost the earlier pioneer spirit and has taken up the bureaucratization that signified Pre-WWI Germany. The “best and brightest” from our most elite indoctrination centers look forward to their life in the bureaucracy, head bowed in hopes of late career power.
“Under such conditions the rising generation are driven by the spirit of the pioneer. They are born into a progressing society, and they realize that it is their task to contribute something to the improvement of human affairs. They will change the world, shape it according to their own ideas. They have no time to waste, tomorrow is theirs and they must prepare for the great things that are waiting for them. They do not talk about their being young and about the rights of youth; they act as young people must act. They do not boast about their own “dynamism”; they are dynamic and there is no need for them to emphasize this quality. They do not challenge the older generation with arrogant talk. They want to beat it by their deeds.
“But it is quite a different thing under the rising tide of bureaucratization. Government jobs offer no opportunity for the display of personal talents and gifts. Regimentation spells the doom of initiative. The young man has no illusions about his future. He knows what is in store for him. He will get a job with one of the innumerable bureaus, he will be but a cog in a huge machine the working of which is more or less mechanical. The routine of a bureaucratic technique will cripple his mind and tie his hands. He will enjoy security. But this security will be rather of the kind that the convict enjoys within the prison walls. He will never be free to make decisions and to shape his own fate. He will forever be a man taken care of by other people. He will never be a real man relying on his own strength. He shudders at the sight of the huge office buildings in which he will bury himself.
“In the decade preceding the First World War Germany, the country most advanced on the path toward bureaucratic regimentation, witnessed the appearance of a phenomenon hitherto unheard of: the youth movement. Turbulent gangs of untidy boys and girls roamed the country, making much noise and shirking their school lessons. In bombastic words they announced the gospel of a golden age. All preceding generations, they emphasized, were simply idiotic; their incapacity has converted the earth into a hell. But the rising generation is no longer willing to endure gerontocracy, the supremacy of impotent and imbecile senility. Henceforth the brilliant youths will rule. They will destroy everything that is old and useless, they will reject all that was dear to their parents, they will substitute new real and substantial values and ideologies for the antiquated and false ones of capitalist and bourgeois civilization, and they will build a new society of giants and supermen. ”
–von Mises, Ludwig (1945). Bureaucracy
Here’s Angelo Codevilla: “The reason why so many people did not vote for Hillary Clinton is the feeling that she and her ilk were above the law, were acting as if they were above the law, which happened to be entirely true.”
And as if on cue, here’s Hillary Clinton today: “I hope historically we will find out who he’s beholden to, who pulls his strings. I would love to see his phone records to see whether he was talking to Putin the day that the insurgents invaded our Capitol. But we now know that not just him, his enablers, his accomplices, his cult members, have the same disregard for democracy.”
In case anyone needed reminding that no debunked conspiracy theory can be so thoroughly debunked and hollow and clapped-out that Hillary Clinton would feel a little timid or abashed about giving it voice again. When nobody who matters will say this is nuts.