True Believers
One much-commented-upon aspect of the Bush administration has been its proclivity for appointing large numbers of ideologues and party hacks to important administrative positions. Nearing the end of a long post dedicated to the subject Mark Kleiman observes:
Now, it is the case that all presidential administrations depend on having a certain number of "true believers" scattered through the bureaucracy, in order to ensure a certain level of fidelity to the president's objectives. On the other hand, if you get too much of this, you get an administration that is likely to have a high, systemic level of administrative incompetence. I think this is a reasonable account of where we are now.
He then, however, begins to treat the Bush administration as a problem of trying in the future to "ensure that the executive branch does not overweight its political strata with ideological hacks." From my perspective, the issue with Team Bush is likely to be less that there's been a quantitative jump in the hack factor than that there's been a qualitative change in the nature of the ideological hackery. It's generally ceased to be the case that a person can qualify as both a serious member of the conservative movement and also someone who's genuinely interested in the effective design and operation of government social policy. If you believe that the correct way to improve policy in any area is anything other than "deregulate it" or "tax cuts" you no longer count as a good conservative. As a consequence, insofar as its not feasible to simply dismantle the entire apparatus of government (and it isn't) it just becomes a playground for partisanship.
To have any substantive view about how the government could or should deliver services to its citizens is, as such, a sign of liberalism nowadays. And, obviously, Bush doesn't want to staff his administration with liberals. Which is to say he doesn't staff it with people who care about how the government should deliver services to its citizens. Not surprisingly, they don't do it very well.
UPDATE: Sorry, that's a Steve Teles post I'm quoting.
Comments
Dont'cha know Matt all that's needed to cure all government ills is a bathtub and 6 inches of water? Just ask Grover, he'll tell you.
What exactly has Bush and crew deregulated? Iraq, the Patriot Act, sending agents to break up state-sanctioned medical marijuana facilities in California, the prescription drug benefit, NCLB?
No, more accurately, "Bush-era" conservatives are more prone to over-regulation, I believe. Knee-jerk, shamelessly power-grabbing, ineffectual (at best), destructive (more common than ineffectual) over-regulation. Then, they spray tax cuts all over the top of their "bad government" sundae and chow down, knowing they'll be long dead before the bill for these laws comes due to the Chinese government.
> What exactly has Bush and crew deregulated?
They have gone through the technical organizations like a wrecking ball, firing all the non-partisan technical experts, terminating programs outright where they could, and outsourcing as much of what was left as possible. Look at the FAA: for all the abuse it gets, it was a fairly competent technical organization up through 2000. The Ws have basically wrecked it and outsourced the smoking remains to their favorite contractors. Double-dipping with a vengence. And that is only one example - there are plenty of others.
Stalin was always worried about "wreckers", but ironically there probably weren't many in the old Soviet Union whereas we have them right here in the USofA.
Cranky
Not M.A.R.K., it's a co-blogger.
Most Bush II deregulation has been behind the scenes stuff -appointing managers who will not enforce rules, not collect fees and fines, executive orders, cabinet level directives on how to interpret existing regulations so as not do anything at all.
Also, I think the qualitative difference is simple and obvious. Every administation appoints some hacks, and has since Adams I. Maybe even Washington appointed a few, but cannot think of any.
But until now, the President understood that these hacks needed to be really skilled at doing something other than being a hack in order to be an effective hack.
Bush II hacks seem to be effective only at shameless display of being loyal political hacks. They can't even lie, CYA or cover their tracks well. They cannot even lie well, or lay an tangled, inconclusive and frustrating web of lies to slow down an investigation. They have apparently been evolved to function well only in an incredibly protected oversight-free environment. Some of them (eg, the NASA fundamentalist who wanted to quash secularist conspiracies like the Big Bang theory) didn't even know how to not say crazy stuff that the media would have to print prominently just for the laugh and shock value.
We will likely not see hacks like this again. They are very odd, delicate, and sometimes very groteqsue creatures that survive only in extreme but in some sense very protected environments. Like for example, them deep sea fish that blow up when you haul them to surface because of the change in pressure. An interesting natural experiment for students of social evolutionary theory.
Matt, I'm glad you brought this up. Rich Lowry has a whopper over at the Corner today (more here GRATUITOUS PLUG FOR MY BLOG). The total insensitivity these people have to issues of even minimally competent public administration is totally astounding.
When and if Jonah Goldberg wanders over here to read your posts on the topic, I imagine him making the same face your dog does when your voice comes out of the answering machine.
I hope no one will accuse me of Protestant bashing, but I recently had occasion to look at the faculty of the Domino Pizza guy's rather troubled Ave Maria University in Florida, and then yesterday I chased the TPM picture of Monica Goodling back to the site of her law school's web page and checked out the Regent faculty in areas where I am somewhat qualified to judge (humanities, languages and literature). I was astounded at how far below the Ave Maria level Regent seems to be.
There might be some kind of neocon theory of government, or life, operating here too. I remember several of the NRO and neocon types saying that they absolutely hated all Progressive Movement values, especially the idea that professional expertise in politics and government was a good thing. I think Goldberg was one of them. Were they joking? Just saying stuff to make the collectivist totalitarians rage? Or is there some kind of weird theory they have about this that would explain such hacks as we have seen on display over the last several years?
I think this is exactly right. The problem is not that Clinton had more Republicans or fewer ideologues in his administration. The problem is that the right-wing now has a bad ideology linked to extreme partisanship. The problem is the modern Republican party not Bush.
We partially know this because the Republican Congress fell down on the job too - not just the President.
It’s true that having an anti-government philosophy creates perverse incentives in governing. But Bush is actually less anti-government then, say, Reagan or Gingrich, and yet he’s taken the hackery to whole new levels.
In general, I think the more out of touch with reality a political movement’s ideology is, the more that movement will be prone to hackery and corruption. Present day conservatism is quite out of touch with reality, and thus quite hackish and corrupt.
*sigh*
I suppose it's inevitable, but it seems that Bush is going to be the new Hoover -- the rhetorical punching bag used to pummel a whole set of beliefs, never mind that the fusion of tax cuts for the hell of it economics with Bush's creeping statism has really very much to do with Conservatism as practiced before 2000.
A thought, though. It seems that Liberal is ncreasing fused with Democrat and Republican increasingly fused with Republican in blog nomenclature. I'm not sure that's right. One can be Republican without being intoxicated with this presidency (me!) or even being fundamentalist. Just as one can be a moderate and a Democrat. (See Clinton, Bill>)
The idea that the Bush Administration is run by libertarians is far-fetched. Look at the Medicare benefit, for instance.
Instead, the incompetence of the Bush Administration has more to do with an emphasis on image over substance, what I call "marketing major post-modernism," where you pick up in college the notion that some egghead over in Europe has proved that there's no such thing as truth, so, feel justified to spin away!
> There might be some kind of neocon theory of
> government, or life, operating here too. I
> remember several of the NRO and neocon types
> saying that they absolutely hated all Progressive
> Movement values, especially the idea that
> professional expertise in politics and
> government was a good thing. I think Goldberg
> was one of them. Were they joking?
1) The Radical Right has been saying this outright in the open for more then 30 years now.
2) They are not joking.
3) In the Bush/Cheney Administration, they finally got a chance to put their desires into practice.
4) They are doing very well by their measure. They may not get a full two more years (total of 8), but they are still running full steam and the damage in many cases is irreversible.
I have had this same discussion with Kevin Drum in his comments section; as a moderate-moderate-centrist he has a very hard time accepting that the Radicals might be doing exactly what they said they were going to do. Many people have this difficulty, and as a result have an even harder time seeing what is going on under their noses.
Cranky
What about the DoJ hackery? Surely prosecuting criminals is something that Good Conservatives believe is a proper role of government.
Yeah, there's somethiing to the intentional-incompetence charge. The case for appointing expert technocrats is that they'd know just what levers to pull to use all viable means to accomplish their goals. But if your philosophy is that maybe there are some means you shouldn't be using, well, that makes expertise less of a credit, maybe a bit of a debit.
What I think the big thing is, there's not really any domestic "philosophy" administrators can point to to spin politics into policy. The Democrats threw a lot of bones to their constituencies throughout the 20th century, but they could feasibly rope them together under the banners of full employment, or Keynesian pump-priming, or fulflling the Great Society promise. Likewise, the administrations of Reagan and Bush the Elder could give business a bump in a lot of little ways and call the whole thing "supply-side economics".
But "compassionate conservatism" never even got fleshed out enough to embrace, and without that veneer, the politics of policy are a lot clearer. There's no master concept to invoke against critics, and mid- and lower-level functionaries lack the message-management skills to sell their particular bits of policy politicking in a vacuum.
If progressives are such great are making government work, then why are the public schools systems in the large urban areas all such basket cases that not one Democratic politician would ever send their children to them.
The same could be send about public transporation that the children of the rich never ride.
And how about public hospitals? When your mom gets sick, you just send her off to County General, right?
If you think the children of the rich never ride public transportation, you have quite obviously never set foot in the Northeastern United States.
The same could be send about public transporation that the children of the rich never ride.
In NYC, the subway system is one of the great class-equalizers. At Goldman Sachs, everyone from the janitor to the floor trader to the investment banker takes the subway. What? You think the guy from the upper east side is more likely to drive downtown than the guy from the Bronx or from Queens? I find the same to be true of DC, though slightly less so because a lot of people from less-dense parts of the country view public transport as "low class" and prefer to drive downtown rather than take the metro-- some people are culturally incapable of understanding that you don't have to drive when a destination is only 3 or 4 miles away. Particularly for children, public transportation == freedom. And you know what? I wouldn't trust someone with George Bush's outlook on government to appoint people to run the public transportation system of a major city. That's one reason that movement conservatives are so conspicuously absent from big cities-- their "philosophy," such as it is, is incompatible with efficient delivery and maintenance of public services on a large scale.
And the rich typically move to rich suburbs where the public schools are quite good. Outside of Jesuit high schools, parochial schools favored by conservatives tend not to be able to compete with the suburban public schools systems. I suppose if you wanted to compare "liberals vs. conservatives" when it comes to public services like education, you could compare suburban public schools systems and Jesuit school systems (liberal) with southern "Christian Academies" and Opus Dei schools and see which ones come out on top.
Doesn't surprise me... the alliance between Protestant fundies and strict Catholics has always been a marriage of convenience, because the former has the true-believer rank and file to act as foot soldiers while the latter has a legitimate (if generally unpleasant, wrt human sexuality) intellectual tradition that validates their bizarre ideas. So each provides something the other lacks and in the RCC's case, that's adequate-to-excellent educational standards.
Regarding the wingnut comments above: no offense but they are braindead. Suppose you do want a minimal government. You will still need lawyers to to help the 'gummint enforce law and order and contracts and property rights, but the current WingNutAllAmericanForces sez no they agin that kina fancy pants egghead stuff. Even with a privatized mail service, somebody might want to mail in some anthrax letters them 'gummint fools. If the 'gmmint wants to contract out postal anti-terrorism services, normal people would think it would be reasonable to have a government medical person, public health person and anti-terrorism person to take a look at at things once in awhile. Because even a normal person would reasonably guess that a company like MZM that could not even move people across town in buses, would tend not to be good at high tech bio terrorism work. But current conservatives are I would just guess no longer normal people.
So, as long as we can get the current crowd ejected from the WH without doing too much more damage, I say, their opinions are just fine with me and 100% OK all around. Because once the public understands that kind of looniness, the GOP will wishfully long for day when they could even imagine seeing a 35% voter ID floating somewhere above the cirrus clouds.
I'm pretty sure that I would understand this phenomenom better if I read Rick Perlstein's book.
They don't WANT government to work! Then they can privatize,giving all the money to cronies and fellow travelers. Plus fill the gov't with kids who have the "right" connections. Voila! Instant non-functional gov't. And it's NOT their fault-it's the system. Incompetance is built into the neocon system
Assuming that there was a liberal media bias, we didn't believe the media, even though they were correct. The obvious solution, now that the media is vindicated and we were proven wrong, is to correct the liberal media bias which, as I just stated, only existed in our imaginations.
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There is definitely a sense in which ideologies are the big players here, and I still do – in many ways – wonder about the ideologies of the Bush administration. In all honesty, I think their main issue has been idealism. They expect certain things to be ideal, and have perhaps thought that certain things are ideal. It's hard to explain, really. But I think their idealism has largely backfired, and scored very little points for people of similar ideology.
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Believing is the half of the finishig. So I begin to believe, I know everything is going to be better for us after the election.
Fast forward to around 24:00 to hear my part
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You’re right. I really hope that the Bush administration will notice how bias and exclusive they are. It shows a negative impact on their constituents.
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