The long-discontinued cartoon Pogo was famous for one particular insight that Pogo– an amiable, philosophical opossum–shared with his friend Albert the Alligator: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”
No kidding.
Is the American public ill-served by a media that has abandoned journalism for propaganda and celebrity? Whose fault is that?
Who clicks on the links about missing blonds in Aruba or Kim Kardashian’s latest selfies while ignoring well-sourced, comprehensive news reports? Who tunes in to talk radio and Faux News in order to have urban legends repeated and prejudices reinforced? America’s media is a business; it responds to the market and gives us what we demonstrably want–entertainment, not credible, verifiable information.
Are the interests of voters and citizens alike ignored by the squabbling fools in Congress? Who elected them?
And whose apathy will re-elect most of them, even after ongoing demonstrations of their inability to compromise, negotiate or do the public’s business. Even after it becomes embarrassingly clear that many of them have zero understanding of the Constitution they’ve sworn to uphold. Even after it becomes abundantly clear that they are doing the bidding of their donors rather than concerning themselves with the interests of their constituents.
Yep. We have met the enemy, and it is most definitely us.
Don Kettl is a highly respected scholar of government and public management, and he has penned a very thoughtful article–I would say a “must read” article– for a recent issue of Washington Monthly. In it, he pretends that the 2016 election is over and he’s advising the winner.
Titled “Ten Secret Truths About Government Incompetence,” he begins with the “secret truth” that government actually does a great many things with admirable competence, and works far better than most people think, sharing a long list of areas in which good government performance is taken for granted.
Kettl uses the list to warn the new President that good management will go unremarked, but screw-ups will be magnified.
He also points out that media and citizens alike fail to distinguish between embarrassing, but essentially minor, mistakes, and truly consequential ones:
You’ve benefited from the “Obama is incompetent” narrative. It increased the public’s appetite for getting you—and some fresh air—into Washington. But let’s be honest: you lucked out because of the media’s inability or unwillingness to notice, care about, or explain the difference between hugely consequential management screw-ups and only modestly consequential ones.
Failing to plan for the occupation of Iraq? Disbanding the Iraqi military? Putting inexperienced political cronies in charge of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and downsizing the agency prior to Hurricane Katrina? Now those were screw-ups—big, far-reaching, world-historic blunders that led directly to the deaths of thousands.
As Kettl says, compare that to the inept Obamacare website roll-out , where no one died, and the problems were soon fixed.
Of course, these were big stories—but they were mostly big political stories. The stumbles embarrassed the Obama administration, hinted at an underlying management problem in the administration (more on that shortly), and helped the Republicans weave a powerful campaign narrative. But the stories weren’t about big failures with huge consequences. They were about putting torpedoes below the political waterline.
Kettl also addressed one of my pet peeves: the notion that government should be “run like a business.” Addressing his mythical new President, he writes
You made the case in your campaign that government needs to learn from the best-run private companies. That’s an irresistible line that Republicans invented and Democrats—especially Obama—have come to champion. But, of course, you know that the private sector isn’t always a model of good management. Remember New Coke, Windows 8, the collapse of Chi-Chi’s restaurants, and shrapnel-filled airbags? That’s even before we get to the wholesale financial miscalculations and fraud that led to global economic collapse.
The private market has a big advantage over government: it can bury its bodies in balance sheets and deal with its failures by quietly turning out the lights and locking the doors.
The entire article is well worth reading, especially the section on outsourcing–the fact that most government work is no longer done by government, and how that fact complicates management and accountability. His reminder that so many of the problems we attribute to a President are really problems created by Congress is especially timely.
All in all, the article is an important corrective to the rampant, uninformed anti-government rhetoric meant to appeal to people who don’t have the foggiest notion what government is or does or how it functions.
It’s also reminder that We the People not only need government, we need the civic skills to make it work properly.
Yesterday’s New York Times had an editorial that began
Over the last several years, Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey has shown utter contempt for the State Supreme Court’s three-decades-old ruling in the Mount Laurel housing case, which bars wealthy towns from excluding affordable housing and requires them to write zoning laws that permit a reasonable amount of such housing to be built.
The editorial went on to describe Christie’s persistent refusal to comply with the court’s orders. It’s hard to believe that Christie was once a lawyer–a profession rooted in respect for the rule of law.
Of course, even ignoring “Bridgegate,” this is hardly the first time Christie has privileged his personal political interests over the common good. When he was first elected, he killed a much-needed, long-planned tunnel into Manhattan. As a New Jersey paper recently noted,
The ARC tunnel would have doubled cross-Hudson rail capacity – helping commuters get to high-paying Manhattan jobs and increasing property values back home in New Jersey. When Christie killed the plan – he didn’t have a Plan B. Instead, Christie grabbed the billions of dollars set aside by Gov. Jon Corzine and spent it on in-state transportation projects – which allowed him to pay for road and bridge repairs without raising the gas tax. By pulling out of the ARC tunnel and spending the money, Christie left billions in federal dollars on the table and has nothing left to contribute to a new tunnel project – rail capacity that is still desperately needed.
Christie justified that decision by saying that the project faced cost overruns; the General Accounting Office said otherwise.
I wish Christie were an anomaly, but he isn’t. In fact, Christie’s is the face of far too much of today’s politics: officeholders who are contemptuous of the government that pays them and the interests of the voters who elect them, power-hungry, self-absorbed lackeys of special interests willing to do whatever it takes to stay in the good graces of their patrons, no matter who gets hurt in the process.
What I don’t get is why these people–who appear to have no concept at all of the common good, or respect for the purpose of government–choose political life in the first place. Surely in a capitalist economy there are more appropriate venues for their narrowly-focused ambitions.
Might it be that these pompous preachers of the virtues of the market lack the ability to succeed in the real-life marketplace? Why else go into a line of work for which they are so clearly unsuited?
Politics is largely a power struggle, and when any one group or constituency amasses disproportionate power, democracy and liberty suffer. We tend to see the disproportion most clearly when money is involved–hence the current focus on the 1%–but checkbooks aren’t the only way special interests gain control.
When I was growing up, unions were powerful (yes, I’m old). In my house, they were feared and despised. Union “thugs”were a periodic feature of the landscape in Anderson, Indiana, where Delco Remy, Guide Lamp and other large automotive manufacturers were the source of most employment, and where folks who lived in our little “suburb” of Edgewood tended to come from management.
One of the reasons unions lost power was that some of them abused their (short-lived) dominance. But–surprise!–by emasculating unions, rather than simply constraining them, we enabled equivalent abuses by management. The lesson was–and is–that a balance of power is what’s important. When power is concentrated, abuses are inevitable.
So what does any of this have to do with secularism?
I spent the last weekend with a coalition of secularist groups: humanists, atheists, defenders of science and reason, among others. Their common mission is to restore the necessary balance between secular and religious-right Americans.
Here’s the take-away: in a country founded on the premise that authentic belief must be personal and freely chosen, a country where freedom of conscience includes not only the right to worship but the right to question and/or reject religion, it is unhealthy–indeed, it is positively dangerous–when the balance of political power favors biblical literalists and would-be theocrats.
Don’t get me wrong: those who want to revise history to make ours a “Christian” nation are entitled to their beliefs. They are entitled to bring those beliefs into the public square and to argue for their adoption. But they are not entitled to use the power of the state to impose their beliefs on the rest of us, or to marginalize and demean those who do not share them, or to demand that American policies reflect them.
When the voices of self-righteous literalists threaten to drown out the voices of other citizens–be they Jews, Muslims, Wiccans, secularists or Rastifarians–America has a problem. When religion is used as a weapon against science, the whole world has a problem.
In the United States, the past decades have seen a rising dominance of those I can only call Christian thugs. Much like the union thugs of my youth, these folks are flexing their political muscles. They have completely taken over one of America’s two political parties, and they have twisted and distorted the meaning of religious liberty: suddenly, “liberty” is the right of an employer to dictate the reproductive choices of his female employees, the right of a merchant to discriminate against GLBT customers, the right of governing bodies to begin public meetings with exclusionary prayers, and the right of churches to ignore laws the rest of us must follow.
These folks absolutely have a right to a place at the civic table. But so do the rest of us.
Reasonable religious folks and secularists alike, all of us who understand that government must remain a secular institution, need to emulate the gay community.
We need to come out and demand our place at the civic table.
For the past quarter-century, Americans have been bashing government–not just this or that administration or political party or elected official, but the enterprise of governing.
Want a laugh? Say “I’m from the government and I’m here to help you.” Want to indulge a conspiracy theory? The government’s giving the Alamo to the UN! Obama plans to impose Sharia law!.. Got a grudge against your state lawmakers? Push for your area’s counties to secede. Hate the feds? Put on a tricorn hat, misspell a placard and hold a rally.
The problem is, there are consequences to this constant and indiscriminate hostility to government authority, and those consequences aren’t pretty.
Guess what? When we devalue government, we shouldn’t be surprised when government isn’t done very well. When we spend our time and energy arguing whether major elements of government infrastructure should even exist, we don’t have much time or energy left over to insure that all parts of government are operating properly–that public servants are competently performing those tasks that most reasonable people believe government should do.
I will be the first to acknowledge that we have public officials who deserve our scorn, policies that are–at best–counterproductive and need to be changed, and antiquated or corrupted structures that need to be revisited. The difference is, those are criticisms of how well our government is doing–not attacks on the legitimacy of government itself.
Are some regulations unnecessary? Undoubtedly. But supervising people who care for defenseless infants and children certainly seems an appropriate function of government. Most Americans would also agree that we need laws sanctioning officials who abuse their positions for personal gain.
Americans’ attitudes toward government are a lot like their attitudes toward Congress: we famously despise Congress, but approve of our own Representative. We hate government, but not the programs that benefit us, or veterans, or grandma.
Much as we may not want to admit it, we live in a complex modern world where there are tasks that only government can effectively perform–from FAA supervision of air travel, to FDA oversight of food and drug safety, to regulations preventing banks from ripping off unwary customers…..on and on. When the agencies charged with these tasks fail to do their jobs properly, real people get hurt–planes crash, people get sick and die, and–as we’ve seen– economies fall into recession or worse.
We need to stop bashing government’s legitimacy, and instead turn our attention to how government is doing its job. We need to put down the ax and pick up the scalpel–to stop characterizing government as some sort of enemy, and begin focusing on making it better.
When we insist that “public service” is an oxymoron, we shouldn’t be surprised when we don’t get decent public service.
