Conservatives do not have anywhere close to the resources liberal groups do, and they rarely engage in the same level of monitoring and activity to stop or change government policies and regulations. For example: I know someone who works in an agency that gets constant demands for meetings from liberal advocacy groups in a very important policy area. The groups meet regularly with the political appointees who head that agency to question and criticize the policies of that agency and to make demands. This same agency never gets calls or requests for these types of meetings from conservative groups, despite the importance of this particular policy area.
This is a common experience throughout the executive branch.
One of the biggest problems faced by conservatives is caused by the inherent nature of Washington. The city is like a Pennsylvania coal town of a hundred years ago. It is a company town, and everyone either works for the company (the federal government) or makes money off of the company (lobbyists, lawyers, contractors, and advocacy organizations).
The company newsletter for too many people in Washington is the Washington Post, and each morning everyone in Washington picks up the company newsletter to see if they are being talked about. All of this provides a very distorted vision to individuals who inhabit Washington for too long. After a while, too many start to care what the Washington Post and everyone else in Washington says about them. This is absolutely fatal for Republicans (and conservatives), because they inevitably compromise their principles to avoid criticism in the editorial pages and the company’s social life. The only conservatives who stay conservative in this company town are those who not only do not care what the Washington Post or the New York Times say about them, but realize that if the liberal media actually approve of what they are doing, then they must be doing something wrong. Such individuals are often too rare among political appointees.
Conservative political appointees who are not personally concerned about media criticism can still be affected by White House staffers. Even when Republican presidents do not care about criticism of their policies, that attitude does not always transfer to their staff.
Many of those staff members, particular the younger ones, think it is their job to minimize negative stories about their administration. All too often, a negative story will prompt a telephone call from a White House staffer to the political appointee in charge of the office that is the subject of the story. The tenor of the call is always the same: why are you in the news and why are you generating negative stories about the administration and the president? These types of calls affect political appointees exactly as you would expect — they change their behavior to avoid upsetting the White House, and the only way to do that is to continue liberal policies and not make any changes. Not only do you need conservative political appointees who are unconcerned by media criticism, you need a White House staff that does not get concerned about such criticism and realizes it means their political appointees are effectively implementing conservative policies.
Finally, the executive branch suffers from a “bubble” effect that isolates them from the outside world. Unfortunately, this is a particularly acute problem for the staff of the president in the White House, the West Wing, and the old Executive Office Building. Initially, Republican political appointees have a pretty good grip on the pulse of the nation’s voters and the grassroots base. Many of them have worked on a two-year presidential campaign where they got a very detailed picture of the important issues faced by the country and the kind of public policies the grassroots base support. This is usually very different than the accepted wisdom in Washington.
The situation may be out of control before many of these individuals ever get to Washington, DC. We must not forget that one usually has to be an intellectual whore to make it through the typical university graduate program. This is especially true regarding the process to obtain a Ph.D. It must be added that thankfully both the New York Times and the Washington Post may be out of business in the next few years. Alternative media outlets like Pajamas Media, Fox News, and countless conservative radio talk shows are making a huge difference. Lastly, center-right citizens now realize that their backs are to the wall. They will ultimately be hunted down and destroyed if they don’t fight back today.
It will never happen, Hans. The Behemoth is a Hydra with 30,000 dendrites from K Street sprouting heads which sprout more dendrites. If you could squeeze down on the balloon full of goo in the center, which you rightly state won’t happen, the goo will just ooze out into the network of NGOs and foundations until the next election comes and the center gets another shot of goo.
With this article you gave not only the effects, but you correctly pointed out the guilty: the pseudo conservatives, the annointed appointed scions of the Hamptons oligarchs, the cowards.
We approached the tipping point in the 30s, then passed it long ago, in the 60s. Nothing will stop the fall short of revolution or utter conquest from without.
The head of the commission was afraid it would “lead to a ‘mutiny’ among the career people at the commission.”
A mutiny sounds like a good idea to me.
if the will isn;t there to fix this now (and it isn;t) then it will become more difficult with time. which probably means you will be able to write this story again in 4, 8, 12 years etc.
a massive cull is probably the only way to do it as stated above. unfortunately at the end of Obama’s first term there will be a doubling of these same employees not a reduction.
as with most cronic problems the problem grows faster then the solution.
A revolution can solve the problem if the new government realizes that current civil service work regs need to be scrapped and rewritten. The advantage of a successful revolution is that you can then go to these leftist bureaucrats and tell them that they are fired effective immediately. I would tell them that their entire pensions will go into the general fund to help remedy the damage they have done. /daydream
Excellent three-part piece! Depressing, but illuminating, to the extent that light can be emitted by gloom. It reminds me of what happened to Frank Gaffney when he was working on a film that was supposed to be aired on PBS, but whose message ran afoul of the prevailing wisdom. His personal inclinations made him into an alien in the most fundamental sense of the term, one who is deprived of linkage from those who would otherwise be his social peers, or at the minimum, his natural collaborators!
All the devilish mechanisms described by Hans A. von Spakovsky may well be an inevitable consequence of prosperity. As it happens, the ancient Chinese character for “governement agent” clearly represents a fat man sitting under a roof, so the burden of officialdom has been chronicled before!
The drastic measures required to roll back this massive runaway corruption may simply be impossible to even initiate in prosperous times. But prosperity is not to be taken for granted, and burdensome administration is not helping the prospects of economic vigor.
Should things get dicey, the luxury of feeding the fat cats may well evaporate, and the notion of limited government may become appreciated again. I hope we don’t have to wait until the economy crumbles to attack the weight bearing down on it.
We can limit how long a civil service worker can be employed by the government. Pass a law to limit the employment contracts of all civil service employees to something like 10 years. Then give them a partial pension to supplement the retirement planning they do in their real careers. There isn’t one government job that should take more than five years to learn completely, so the efficiency of experience is not a factor here. Okay, none of the gutless wonders in Washington will ever pass such a law. Also, none of the idiots we send to Washington are competent to manage the replacement hiring. I just remembered, these nincompoops will try to fix an economy by printing money so they can spend it, so how do we expect them to do anything right? Oh well, let me know when the shooting starts.
TO: Maggie, et al.
RE: MUTINY, You Say, Mr. Christian!
Be prepared to shed ‘blood’, babe.
That is IF you have the ‘courage’ to ‘resist’.
But then again….
….unless you’re willing to give ‘everything’ for liberty….
….you don’t have what it ‘takes’ to establish and sustain it.
Regards,
Chuck(le)
[The Truth will out.....]
I hate to burst everyone’s bubble but most non-appointed government employees are Indepedants, not Democrats.
Jeez, Hans, so you didn’t get confirmed. Get over it. Maybe if you hadn’t been up to your armpits in all those sleazy Deep-South voting laws designed to keep blacks from the polls, you’d have had an easier time with those eeeeeevil liberals.
No wonder that the term bureaucrats has for hundreds of years been synomynous with bad government.
Shef,
That was a typical presumptuous hack job by a typical useful idiot, who has heard his echo so many times that he suffers unknowingly from his unwarrented superiority complex.
To which of this myriad of voting laws do you object? I thought most of those were eliminated 50 years ago, but then, I was here. Get some help, smart guy. You need a real education.