The Trump administration suffered from an abundance of heavyweights, “experts,” and vipers, but a notable lack of loyalty to the president’s agenda. The result was an unwillingness to subordinate D.C. political machinations to a focus on accomplishing the president’s agenda, and long periods of infighting, drift, and internal gridlock that hamstrung the Trump policy agenda in key areas.
Her essay aligns with my view that personnel failures were important, as well as my view that it is difficult for an outsider to find the right people. But she puts little or no blame on Mr. Trump himself. I am more inclined to say “You had one job,” and to fault him personally for handling that job clumsily.
Trump’s two most spectacular personnel failures were Kelly and Mattis. Key lesson for future Republican presidents: Generals don’t play well with others and DOD is at best theoretically subject to White House control. People with DOD backgrounds are generally especially well-trained and experienced in gaming the chain of command. Don’t hire them.
1. Seems like this could be true with respect to anyone with a bureaucratic background. Or anyone with a significant corporate background.
2. At which point, one kind of has to step back and recognize that it makes an impractical lesson to guide future action. Turns out pretty much everyone over the age of 40 is well trained and experienced in gaming the chain of command. Such people as required to not exist. Or more accurately, the incentives required to make such people are illegal and/or unpopular.
It remains to be seen whether Biden’s general will disappoint, but history suggests so. Shinseki was a disaster at VA. How about Alexander Haig? Even the sainted Colin Powell wound up turning in a performance that screwed his boss. The only great cabinet secretary that I can think of with a career federal civil service background is Robert Gates. He had military service too but wasn’t a general. Federal career bureaucrats are rarely picked for cabinet positions precisely because they are too good at gaming (but not up to DOD standards) and have loyalties elsewhere. DOD is different. Which other department does congress invite up to chat about budget items not funded in the president’s budget? Which other department has as many congressional relations staff and offices per capita? Which other department can choose to ignore administration budget guidelines? Ironically, the heavy reliance on a formal chain of command seems to produce slipperier than normal characters.
On the other hand there have been numerous excellent cabinet secretaries with corporate backgrounds. Malcolm Baldridge was perhaps the exemplar.
I’d say that the practical lesson is that a presidential candidate needs experience in controlling a large organization. So, all else being equal, senators are less likely to make good presidents than governors or CEOs.
This conclusion seems to badly miss the mark when the vast weight of public choice and political science say it’s the institutions and incentives that matter.
People respond to incentives, and while those generated in the public sector aren’t generated by the market, they’re no weaker for it. In fact, that might be stronger.
Faulting Trump (or anyone) “personally” to change reality seems to border on Dolchstoßlegende. People who want to see change would be better served by stepping back from the ascribing the failures to romantic reasons and looking at the systematic incentives at play.
It seems an act of denial that this is being cast as a selection problem, instead of a worst executive manager anyone has ever seen problem. He is a huge, steaming cauldron of disrespect for everyone and everything. That is the problem. Not who he chose.
Look at what happened to Jeff Sessions. He was and is deeply loyal to the cause. He drove a lot of Trump’s agenda. Trump incessantly ravaged him because he clung to a tiny shred of respect for the institution he led.
Can anyone imagine Trump thinking to himself “I know I want X, but I need to protect my people, so I’ll defer for now”?
The biggest reason Trump doesn’t get more loyalty from his government hires is that everyone understands he is loyal to no one outside of his family. How loyal would you be to someone who you knew had absolutely no loyalty at all to you?
You often hear people say that government needs to be run more like a business but this is a horrible analogy. Private businesses are mostly dictatorships run by their owners. That’s necessary to get the many benefits of having private property. But it’s a horrible model for government.
A democracy necessarily sacrifices some governmental efficiency in exchange for the consensus building required by the possibility of elections resulting in a change of power. That resulting competition more than compensates for the efficiency lost in having to build a consensus even when you think you know what to do.
The Soviets used to argue that their system was more efficient because they avoided the massive expenditures made in duplicating managements and advertising competing products in capitalist systems. They did avoid those costs but they incurred even more other costs by losing the benefits of competition.
“The biggest reason Trump doesn’t get more loyalty from his government hires is that everyone understands he is loyal to no one outside of his family. How loyal would you be to someone who you knew had absolutely no loyalty at all to you?”
This is a mostly fair criticism. When participating in a campaign or administration in any way, one opens oneself up personally to all kind of serious legal risks. Malicious prosecution of political enemies by career insiders is a constant real threat, enabled by the lack of any effective discipline mechanism against people participating in such persecutions, and the multiplicity and vagueness of the laws enabling such persecutions. Forget “three felonies a day”, every top official is committing “three hundred felonies a day” as a matter of normal, routine operation, if one is willing to push the limits to make the argument and make a (heh, literal) federal case out of it.
In such circumstances, it is absolutely and critically important to know that you have rock-solid top-cover and support and that you will be able to CYA and you’ll be taken care of by the boss if anybody tries to go after you.
Now, I admit, there are some legal subtleties, risks, uncertainties, and limits involved in exercising the pardon power. And even if technically legal, it just gives the media smearing machine more fodder to go into hysterical outrage overdrive as purported abuse of the system, violation of the constitution, abandonment of the rule of law, and grounds for impeachment.
Nevertheless, there is the problem of signaling credible commitment, and Trump make a fatal error of not using whatever pardon powers or other authorities he needed to to immediately crush the attempt to go after General Flynn especially, but others too.
Whether or not a credible message was sent to these folks “Don’t worry, we’ll take care of you”, and whether it was in fact done, the trouble is that it was done secretly, when going to bat for your boys has to be done in the most public and conspicuous manner possible to send the right signal to everyone else in the administration, or thinking of joining the administration. And indeed, the worse the reaction to using those powers, the better for the power of the signal, because it communicates that one is willing to accept high costs in order to do whatever is necessary to protect his people.
Now, rumor has it that Trump was tempted to do this, but was talked out of it by legal advisors.
Well, that was a terrible mistake. It completely ruined the incentive and dynamics of all administration officials and potential recruits for the rest of the administration. No one was going to go out on a limb and take any risks whatsoever without that kind of guarantee, and so everyone just hunkered down.
I’d like to say, “lesson learned”, but who is learning it?
No, the answer was not to be a more effective crime boss. It was to act like a leader.
Flynn was a multi-pronged disaster, and it showed just how horrific a manager Trump was that he even considered hiring him at all.
Complaints that his case was mishandled ignores the fact that he was actively under contract as a Foreign Agent to Turkey while he was National Security Advisor. This was something he has admitted in court documents. They never got around to discussing that because he made a deal, but Flynn was both deeply corrupt and unstable.
There would have been dozens of reasons for it to be necessary to fire Flynn.
>—“Trump make a fatal error of not using whatever pardon powers or other authorities he needed…”
Now there is an idea that that compensates with originality for what it lacks in contact with reality.
Trump has already set the all time record for pardoning cronies convicted of felonies and he is not nearly done yet with the pardons. If it had been a Democrat doing doing this your head would have exploded.
Any Presidential advisor’s first loyalty should be to the country ahead of the President. And real loyalty to the President still requires telling him when you think he is about to make a disastrous decision.
That goes double when the President is a reality TV star with no previous experience in government asking questions like: What good are all these nukes if I can’t use them? and Why can’t I just lock up the political opposition for treason?
Those who got pardons could have hurt Trump with truthful testimony and were rewarded. That is a display of personal self-interest, not loyalty to others.
Trump had no more loyal and effective servant than Bill Barr but Barr still had his performance trashed and was forced out by Trump in a display of just the kind of asymmetry of loyalty we are talking about here.
Tell me, little D-boy, what do you think of this
Let’s see. @DineshDSouza went to jail for an illegal campaign contribution of $20,000. How much jail time should mark Zuckerberg get for an undeclared campaign contribution of $350 million–to benefit Biden?
Goid points! Years ago I read a book by Jimmy Carter’s CIA chief, Stanfield Turner I think. He detailed how the deep state bureaucracy kept him in the dark for 4 years. The career people saw him as a figure head and messenger boy to the president. They had developed such good methods of stonewalling that he never figured out what was going on.
It took Reagan 1 1/2 years to get the CIA to deliver stinger missiles to the Mujahiddin
Bush II had some minor changes to the Washington mall that never got done after 8 years.
Remember that Bush II had to sideline the state department when he invaded Iraq because of sabotage and stonewalling
OK senator Inhofe attends prayer breakfasts across the world and said he never invites state dept personel to them in spite of their begging for an invitation because the department launches coups against any government it doesnt like whether Democratically elected or not. They carry on their own foreign policy regardless of who is president.
Trump should have taken a page from his TV show and fired a lot of people. The covil service protects all but management. Trump sould have fired all managers, promoted from within then fired those managers until he got deep enough to find responsible people.
But I think even Trump wad naive about the problem in spite of his talk of draining the swamp. By the time new presidents grasp the size of the problem they are out of office.
The obvious complementary lesson here is that if it is that hard to find competent, responsible people who will loyally implement your agenda, there is probably something wrong with your agenda and you ought to reflect on what that might be. Reflection and humility, alas, were also notorious non-strengtha of Trump.
Come on, that is just not the lesson at all. There were tens of millions of people who were wildly enthusiastic for whatever they imagined was vaguely “Trump’s agenda”, and that group had its normal share of highly loyal and highly competent people willing to join the administration, and many did.
The problem was, the system thwarted any ability for these people to work together as an effective team. The lesson is, unless you solve that problem, no one you have and nothing you do is going to make any difference.
Loyal and enthusiastic yes, competent and intelligent no. There’s no reason to assume the group of Trumpists in fact had its normal share of highly competent and intelligent people; it was a philosophy specifically designed to appeal to the poorly educated, after all.
I’m not assuming at all. I know for a fact the Trump administration has lots and lots of impressively competent and highly intelligent, hard-working people. That wasn’t the problem, but it’s also not enough.
They lacked leadership and support, which was Trump’s fault. They lacked coordination, which was somewhat the bureaucracy’s fault, somewhat Congress’ fault. They lacked rights equal to Democrats to exercise their lawful authorities, which was mostly the judiciary’s fault.
Even the mighty Google is packed with lunatics and martinets at the highest levels.
No, it’s not finding competent, responsible people loyal to your agenda, but people competent *within the relevant bureaucracy* and thus able to manage and bend it to one’s agenda. I don’t care for much of Trump’s agenda, but your inference isn’t warranted; there are many great policy agendas supported by many intelligent people that are nonetheless opposed by almost everyone in the bureaucratic agencies, and there are many terrible policy ideas that have enjoyed broad support in their relevant bureaucracies. It’s hard for even the most brilliant expert on a policy domain to impose good policy on a bureaucracy that thoroughly opposes it, and there is no reason to believe bureaucratic agencies select for people who have the best policy agendas regarding the area in which they work.
That is simply untrue.
Trump was able to get all kinds of things to happen throughout government through political operatives that appalled rank and file federal employees. There are hundreds of reported examples. Supporters gave him credit for such things all the time.
Whether it’s the State Dept, FBI, Justice, EPA, Interior, Energy, HHS, Defense, VA, CDC, Education, and on and on… he pushed aside the entrenched bureaucracy and made fundamental changes. There were major conflicts at each of those agencies. Made people angry. Made them quit. Often, confused everyone. But he usually got his way.
Trump has wielded executive branch managerial power more aggressively than any modern President has. Part of the reason he was such a bad boss was that he demanded whatever he wanted whenever he wanted, and didn’t care who it embarrassed, or what problems it caused.
“he pushed aside the entrenched bureaucracy and made fundamental changes.”
Like what?
As his libertarian critics have pointed out, his deregulatory efforts, nice as they were IMO, were far more modest than either his critics or supporters have made them out to be. Trump was less successful at ‘fundamentally changing’ the regulatory landscape implemented by the major bureaucracies than Obama was, and faced far more resistance in what he did. Most of his signature bureaucratic accomplishments merely amounted to reversing (and as often as not, only partially reversing) new rules or practices put in place by his predecessor (with just as little input from Congress). That more people quit or fired is more indicative of either the greater resistance to his agenda or his poor management skills (probably both) than of how much he actually managed to change things.
I’ll just add from my little perch – some of the more competent and loyal appointees were somewhat successful, when, on the rare occasions get support and direction from the White House.
Sure, not everyone at the career level was on board, but most people just did their job. At the White House however, where there is no real “entrenched bureaucracy” just direct Presidential control, things were a mess.
People in Departments were forced to interpret tweets to figure out what priorities should be, would get conflicting information from WH personnel offices, OMB appointees, paperwork would sit, etc, etc. The level of dysfunction, in my opinion was near unprecedented.
+1
Humility is Trump’s best quality. To quote him:
https://youtu.be/-C4j4ilP0lk
Bovard’s essay is very good, but it misses a few subtle but very important aspects of the overall situation.
First, at intermediate levels, there were actually lots of very capable and talented people working for the administration. However, they simply could not coordinate and function as a team working to achieve a common mission with unity of effort.
There are multiple reasons for this, but it’s important to understand that some of these reasons had nothing to do with Trump because they would have been beyond the control of any non-establishment figure in the same position.
Here are four of those problems:
1. Many of the best people are only really good at what they do when they are empowered by the private sector corporate structure with its unification of authorities in one individual and fast, flexible tools for administration, command and control, discipline, and especially spending. Yes, of course all these people operate under practical and legal constraints, but their coping mechanisms for doing so do not translate to a context when the constraints are two orders of magnitude more severe, which would make any private company so unmanageable as to plunge it into bankruptcy in ten minutes. The government has taxes and guns to point at heads to collect the taxes, and monopoly positions where it collects whatever fees it wants, and without all that, it would implode.
Effective people are not used to being forced into being ineffective, they are not used into requesting decentralized consensus instead of ordering actions, and they cannot handle the frustrations emotionally for long (and who can blame them?) Add to that lower pay for typical executive types, becoming a target for a relentless campaign of personal destruction and smearing, and taking on substantial personal legal risks – even potentially criminal liability risks if someone is out to get you – by virtue of one’s position. That narrows down the field or recruits quite a bit.
Many typical highly-successful people would only take a job in an administration out of something akin to vanity, the human urge to be close to the center of “the corridors of power and events” or what they think is a resume booster, or because going through the revolving door is encouraged and sponsored by their institution which, reasonably, knows they will have their own highly-placed agent to apply influence in their favor if and when the opportunity arises.
Being experienced, talented, and also temperamentally well-suited to getting things done in government, however slowly and inadequately, is a special kind of skill set, and people like that who are also on your side are hard to identify, let alone recruit.
2. The Senate Confirmation problem, with party-line votes, and GOP not willing to “go nuclear” with the 60-vote requirement. This mean that even if Trump had binders and binders of the best possible people, in a way, the better they would be at serving the administration, the worst they looked to Democrats and thus, they could never get confirmed and legally occupy any PAS position.
Only because there is still a weakening, quasi-norm that is a little embarrassing for Senators who stick around forever to have previously confirmed a particular individual only to railroad him in a subsequent nomination can *some* former administration officials like Bolton (or Democrats like Gary Cohn) get through the process. That is not a good recipe for filling positions with personnel who are able and willing to do what you want them to do, and instead, they will tend to see things the other way around.
When the norm dam broke for partisan hardball on all confirmations (i.e., anyone with track record of normal, mainstream executive levels of competence and character are generally confirmed), it initiated a rolling and under-reported Constitutional Crisis the system was not designed to handle and that no one knows how to resolve, and which the courts don’t want to touch.
3. If you can’t confirm who you want, when you want, you can’t discipline the people in those positions either. In normal orgs, the way it works is the looming credible threat of immediate termination for insubordination and not following orders, blowing off deadlines, etc. If you don’t do what you are told, you will be replaced with someone. Ok, but if there is no replacement and a statute requires an ever worse, less aligned, and less-disciplinable individual from within the institution, who you don’t even know and who will retaliate and sabotage your efforts if they aren’t on board or if you aren’t 100% polite, then you are going to get stuck with a bunch of entitled, spoiled brats doing their own thing and thinking about their next gig instead of your swords and shields behind enemy lines.
4. The information flow, standard processes, and records requirements in the federal government are completely unrealistic and unmanageable, and often times things only get done by a vast staff of administrative bureaucracy to bring some order and organization to all the chaos. But you have to be able to trust these people to do what you want and not leak. If you can’t trust them, you have little choice but to circumvent them and run everything from inner circles of informal cliques, which is just not possible to do in an effective manner. It’s like trying to fight a war with 90% of your divisions unavailable for combat.
Because the administrative bureaucracy is 90% Democrats, during a Democrat administration, a lot of things can fly by on greased skids because people are willing to bend a little and exert extra efforts to help the good causes of the good people. In any Republican administration, all this goes into reverse with sand in the works, and in an establishment-hated administration, it’s ten times worse. This is what is behind the attempt at structural reform in terms of the recently proposed “Schedule F”, but of course it comes four years too late for Trump, and some Hawaiian judge dictator will surely knock it down anyway, because reasons.
My contention is that even if you had the perfect superhuman replacements for every member of Trump’s team and, heck, Trump himself, that facing these kinds of structural obstacles would cripple their capacity to actually get anything done so long as they tried to do it in normal ways and without going to total political war with everything and everyone else, especially the out-of-control members of the judiciary.
Unless you are going to create some kind of ‘golf handicap’ system which throttles command and control authorities depending on how out of step with the elite establishment an administration is, there is really no good answer to these problems for any theoretical super-Trump-like figure consistent with the latest court-approved interpretation of the structural requirements of the current regime.
Charles Peters, the long-time editor of the Washington Monthly, was saying these same things back in the 1970s (he was a somewhat heterodox Democrat).
He knew it from direct experience, and also hired and surrounded himself with others who also did.
He actually wrote, “How Washington Really Works” about which one could make the 1984 joke that like Orwell he wrote his explanations of things going awry as a warning for people trying to avoid them, but instead they became a manual for people wanting to accomplish them.
He also founded the organization, “Understanding Government”, but it died in 2014.
But he hadn’t seen the half of it – things have gotten much, much worse since then.
Peters lived one of those crazy all-over-the-place heroic lives that were much more common in the waning days of, “Old, Weird America.” In particular, he had worked in the government bureaucracy and came to understand it intimately.
He helped start the Peace Corps under Kennedy and was a senior official, “director of evaluation”, for years. I wonder if his job was the evaluate whether the peace corps was accomplishing its purported goals (how would you measure that, exactly), or whether its workers were creating paper trails of successfully checking the boxes and the evaluation is great regardless of whether the agency achieves anything.
The long list of famous journalists who got their early gigs at WM is amazing, and he was able to use his knowledge and experience to edit those writers and improve the realism of their articles.
Who are all of these qualified and excellent people that couldn’t get confirmed?
William Perry Pendley, for BLM, who even GOP Senators didn’t want?
There are still a huge number of unfilled appointments at the end of 4 years; many there was never even an announced nomination, let alone paperwork sent to the Senate.
I think the blame falls squarely on the White House for this. The head of personnel for the past 7 months has been John McEntee whose main qualification is that he worked on the campaign for a bit and then got fired from his first White House job because gambling issues made it so he couldn’t get a security clearance. His staff has now spent the last 7 months searching for Federal employees with insufficiently pro-Trump social media feeds.
Sure, the establishment wasn’t receptive to much of the people or policy ideas, but if you don’t even put a name out there it isn’t fair to say “we never got our people in charge”.
Trahison des clercs.
The article is clearly on the side of “Trump needed to choose folks who shared his policy vision”.
An iconoclast’s administration will struggle to find personnel both experienced and aligned.
Arnold wrote earlier: a President with Mr. Trump’s outsider status could find at least one high-level staffer who could in turn bring in colleagues and former subordinates that are also highly effective.
I believe this is only somewhat true BUT I don’t see any examples of it in America after WW II (the relevant times), nor really much in other democratic countries.
The article also explicitly disagrees with Arnold:
A single cabinet official cannot redirect an executive agency by sheer force of will, gravitas, or even expertise. She requires assistance from philosophically committed, expert staff at the subcabinet level and below
Trump’s strength is in making deals. But there’s never an actual swamp draining deal on the table when an outsider wants to drain the swamp, but needs swamp rats to pull open the plug. They got into the swamp and stayed because they’re expert at NOT being drained.
Trump did far less than most Trump supporters wanted, but Trump haters can make lists of things he DID DO (like Greg G made) which indicate more effectiveness than most critics give.
I’d say NOT firing Comey on day 1 was his biggest Presidential mistake, but in the transition, walking back his “Lock Her Up” campaign idea was his worst mistake. He thought he could make a deal with Dem Deep State criminal vipers in the FBI / IC, and he couldn’t. They were guilty of obstructing justice and destroying evidence of HR Clinton’s email crimes, and were implacably against Trump.
Comey & his FBI lied, deliberately, to FISA court in order to spy on Candidate Trump. They were vipers against Trump – but also a slog to slowly replace. And they attacked Gen. Flynn, successfully enough to neutralize him. Jeff Sessions failed, utterly, to oversee those like Rosenstein who were, in theory but NOT in practice, overseeing Mueller. Ya, Sessions shouldn’t oversee Mueller – but he could watch and insure that Rosenstein was doing so. 2 years later, Mueller says the truth that there was no collusion and it was a hoax and the Steele dossier was Clinton/DNC paid for dis-information. WHO allowed this??? Well, none of it was Rod’s responsibility. Or anybody’s, it seems, other than K. Clinesmith’s one illegal lie about Carter Page. (I hope Page wins his $75 mln. lawsuit) Nor any of the agents who lied, nor of those who illegally, not accidentally, erased their phone messages on gov’t phones. To Deep State vipers, crimes not provable are not even treated as crimes. Like real but not fully provable election fraud. Or, in the case of obvious illegal server – just decide on no indictment; no trial, no crime, no problem!
The worm, not quite snake, who I didn’t follow was John DeSefano, head of Trump’s personnel from Feb. 2017-May2019.
DeStefano had no discernable expertise in personnel matters, and no connection to or understanding of Trump’s focus or the conservative movement itself.
He’s a guy Trump SHOULD have fired right away.
Trump has leadership, vision, and fast tweeting-insulting fingers, plus an “I’m always right” utter self-confidence. This style is what made him so successful AND so hated by those who don’t like his style, and usually one or more of his policies.
Trump’s style is particularly bad in COVID, where even if his policies are mostly right, people ARE going to die. And there are data based arguments to do more or less, so “experts” don’t really agree on the proper trade-off of lockdown vs economic activity, or mask wearing effectiveness. Insider swamp folk, like Fauci or others at FDA & CDC, are even more often wrong, with far less PR blame. (Recall Arnold’s post in March? blaming them.)
An outsider can only make significant progress if he has Party support – and Trump did NOT have that. His policies successes and popularity have taken most, or at least a lot, of GOP power away from the prior GOPe. The new GOP, which gained House seats despite Biden votes, is already far more in tune with Trump’s policies. Had Trump been re-elected with legal votes only, his next term would have seen far more swamp draining in practice, with more good Reps in tune with his policies.
It’s likely the next Rep President will be better than Trump was in getting good people who are in sync with his priorities. That’s one of the many non-Chamber of Commerce type activities the new, America First GOP party will focus on.
For the GOP, ending election fraud is likely to become priority number 1.
The deep state shut down our entire society and told people not to have Thanksgiving with family over a fake pandemic with a vaccine invented in January 2020 that it slow rolled until after the election.
But yeah, Trump is the greater evil. We should all be angry at Trump’s shortcomings and not his enemies.
Internet comment sections are widely recognized for their low quality, but please help to keep this one an exception. Lockdowns were not imposed by shadowy unelected “deep state” figures, but by governors and mayors with either the explicit agreement or the implicit concurrence of state legislatures and city councils. You may not like their decisions, but it is crystal clear who is responsible, and you will have the chance in the next state and local elections to vote for candidates who share your views.
A climate of fear was created by people of a certain class based on misinformation. Decisions were then made that none of us got a say in which violated what we would normally consider inviolable rights that are outside of political reach.
Elections don’t happen that often, and with the vaccine coming its not even likely to be in the news cycle by the time democratic feedback is allowed in many instances.
Then there is the matter of any of the existing electoral options providing what you want. In California for instance Democrats have a super majority and they support affirmative action, but a ballot proposition on the matter just failed spectacularly. Despite this, I expect institutions in CA to continue to practice affirmative action and courts to ignore it. What feedback mechanism do people have to enforce this? Isn’t the undesired status quo just going to drone on in spite of popular mandate.
It’s the same with pandemic lockdowns and restrictions. Even if unpopular, there is no clear way to get what the people want if the decision making class is again them.
Tell me, in a couple of years am I going to be able to vote for someone who will retroactively not lock down my (insert electoral district here) in the past? Is that going to be an option on the ballot?
asdf,
Even though you appeared to be replying to him, you missed Kurt’s point completely. With all your blaming of “the deep state,” “a certain class,” and claims that “none of us got a say” you are somehow overlooking the fact that, IN EVERY CASE where a lockdown was ordered that was done publicly by an easily identifiable elected state or local official. There just isn’t any kind of “deep state ” or “class” mystery about who is responsible for what with these lockdowns.
In many cases, officials ordering lockdowns were Republicans. In most cases these officials are more popular than before the pandemic started. In all cases they are keenly interested in their own personal popularity and how the level of public support for what they are doing because it could cost them their jobs in the next election.
>—” Decisions were then made that none of us got a say in which violated what we would normally consider inviolable rights that are outside of political reach.”
This is a transparently fake pseudo-libertarian quasi-democratic argument as a representation of your real personal views. You have long been arguing for a race based, not a rights based, set of government policies in this comment section. You are eager to advocate authoritarianism and state sponsored torture and eugenics regardless of their popular support.
You are eager to see government eugenic policies based on the belief (in your immortal words) that “the children of the dysgenic need to die.” You are eager to see government polices that decide that whole groups of people are “worthless” based on nothing more than their skin color.
So then, the idea that you have any kind of commitment to a viewpoint based on universal human rights or respect for majority opinion is a half hearted and transparently insincere pose.
Now I understand that a real libertarian could make a tranny of the majority argument but such a view is based on a concept of universal human rights that you simply don’t hold. You are ultimately a collectivist who sees the world as an interaction between groups more than individuals. You are constantly describing to us how individuals must chose sides between hostile groups in a zero sum world of Hobbesian Social Darwinism.
I happen to live far from where you do. I don’t have enough knowledge of the conditions where you live to even have an opinion on what (if any) level of Covid lockdown should be in place there. I do agree the data seems to show that schools should remain open in most, if not all places.
What is it exactly that you are personally prevented from doing in the current level of lockdowns that is such an outrage? For the most part you can go out and easily get a way with taking as much personal risk of catching the virus as you want as long as you do it with other people who feel the same way.
One of the biggest complaints you have made here is that your mother-in-law is afraid to visit you and voluntarily chooses not to. Of course in your mind this should be blamed on some media conspiracy and certainly not on the fact that she is responsible for her own decisions and is probably much more influenced by your own loudly proclaimed contempt for masks and distancing. Ever consider that might have been decisive in her accessing the risks of visiting you?
One thing never changes. You are always the victim. When you supported lockdowns, you were the victim of those who wouldn’t comply with them and put you at risk against your will. Now that your views on that have flipped, you are the victim of the other side. You should have your own grievance studies department.
Greg,
None of the candidates that were in office when this started ran on a platform of “this is what I will do if we have a coronavirus”. We have no clue what people want out of elected officials. Nor are they likely to have any timely and effective mechanisms for making those desires known or retroactively changing what was done.
Elected officials themselves do not even follow their own policies! They tell people not to get together for the holidays, then they do themselves. They tell them not to gather in groups, then that attend BLM marches.
There are objectively true facts about reality. They are true regardless of how the opinion making class shapes public opinion. Andrew Cuomo can win an award for doing a good press conference, but his actual decisions on the coronavirus are abysmal. What am I supposed to learn from that? That people are easily manipulated and that anything can be done to me at any time if you have the right messaging? Cause that’s all I get from that. Objective reality remains the same in spite of this.
“What is it exactly that you are personally prevented from doing in the current level of lockdowns that is such an outrage?”
For one, we were locked in our homes for months.
If we try to travel to visit family, no matter the risk profile of that travel, we are ordered to quarantine which is a big imposition.
Schools are closed, which is a big fucking deal. My kids daycare also has had to deal with rolling closings based on state imposed criteria neither we nor the owners consider reasonable. In addition, they recently forced the toddlers to wear masks all day long, which both the school and I are against. I’m personally against masks in many instances where I don’t think they serve any purpose, especially when its forced on my young children. My neighbors have it worse, their kids daycare puts little six foot squares in the ground and they aren’t allowed to leave them. I weep for a generation of kids being told to fear others.
There are other things that pop up all the time and I could list them all. My anniversary event got cancelled because even thought its outdoors and over a huge area where people can spread out, it was technically over the random 25 person limit that my governor slammed down one day because “cases are up.” My kids had to leave the playground the other day so a guy could spend 20 min spraying it down with some kind of disinfectant, even though immediately before and immediately after they are touching all the same surfaces right after one another and coronavirus doesn’t spread on surfaces. The water play fixtures at the local pool are all turned off because for some reason the pool is safe but not the water slide? That’s SCIENCE right there. I’m also glad my lifeguard perched on a tower all alone has to wear a mask in the hot sun all day…I hope he takes it off if he actually has to get in the water or save anyone (you know, the only time he won’t be socially distances). Ditto my friend that installs hot solar panels on roofs n the summer by himself all day, he loves wearing a mask that makes his face hot and hard to breath. Several local amenities are closed or at reduced hours/capacity. All of our towns Christmas events got cancelled (they could have a BLM march, but not a tree lighting). I dunno, that’s just random stuff off the top of my head.
The government has spent how many billions in pandemic bailouts which will eventually be taxed from me or my children to pay for. It’s a pretty big bill.
Beyond that, its now apparent that a vaccine could have been available by at least the summer if there was no FDA or CDC. We could have done a human challenge trial and been done. We also could have had cheap fast at home testing a long time ago, which would have greatly reduced the burden of the pandemic. Want to see people for the holidays? Take a 15 minute at home test that cost $5 to make sure its safe. Absent government this whole thing becomes a non issue.
Instead I’m sitting here reading a presentation from the CDC about how 80 million young healthy “essential workers” need to get the vaccine before my Dad because old people are “too white” so even though not giving it to the old will lead to more death by their own math we have have to do it because “racial justice”.
“Ever consider that might have been decisive in her accessing the risks of visiting you?”
No, because she doesn’t visit anyone regardless of what masks or distancing they do or the actual level of risk. She isn’t even visiting people in her home state barely at all, she rarely lives in the house. She has fear beamed into her house all day and she believes it. It’s a tragedy, but I’m sure you relish the pain you support.
The truth is we engage in safer practices then lots of people we know to protect my Dad. That doesn’t matter. The bluecheck class wanted fear, they got fear.
—–
I have consistently argued that the government should not be in the business of subsidizing people who can’t support themselves when the size of that support, now or in the future, will constitute a.
You have interpreted this as death camps. That is your problem, not mine. I suspect you lie about this because your own position is weak and you are afraid to defend it on the merits. I do expect that if the government stops subsidizing the weak, fewer of them will survive/be born. I don’t lose sleep over that, but apparently you lose so much sleep you are willing to use violence against others to prevent it, in fact you are willing to use UNLIMITED levels of violence if that is what it takes. You’ve said so yourself. That is the item being debated in the thread you keep bringing up. You will murder people if that is what it takes to subsidize the existence of anyone you so desire.
The simple truth is I have no clue what you think objective truth is or what state do you want the world to be in. I want a future were people live ever more fulfilling lives of ever greater potential. You want what? In the thread you keep bringing up, apparently in the long run you want greater human suffering and a complete collapse of industrial society.
asdf,
>—” Absent government this whole thing becomes a non issue.”
There isn’t any place in the world where this is a non issue. Of course that doesn’t stop you from feeling entitled that it be a non issue for you and viewing yourself as a victim because it isn’t.
And let’s not pretend you are any kind of anarchist. You are an enthusiastic authoritarian when it comes to government powers being radically expanded to do things like torture people in support of the government policies you want.
You are not required by government to stay locked in your home. Quarantine rules are effectively voluntary guidelines in most cases. Millions of people violated them to visit family over Thanksgiving. Many are dying of the virus as a result but few, if any, have been prosecuted for it. Let’s not pretend that respect for the law is what’s keeping you from visiting family. Your mother-in-law is afraid of the virus (which is now the leading cause of death in America) not the law.
>—“I have consistently argued that the government should not be in the business of subsidizing people who can’t support themselves…”
Yes, but you ARE in favor of government subsidies for those who CAN support themselves but would be incentivized by those subsidies to have even more children who meet your preferred racial and eugenic profile.
>—“You have interpreted this as death camps.”
Nope. I never have interpreted it that way and that’s why you can’t show where I have done so, can you?
I have pointed out, by quoting the exact words you said, (“The children of the dysgenic need to die.”) that if you can make policy changes that have the passive effect of of causing the child deaths that you think you so badly “need” that those deaths are an explicit goal of the policy for you.
>—–” I weep for a generation of kids being told to fear others.”
Do you think that knowing you feel they “need to die” might cause a child of the “dysgenic” to be a little fearful?
Irony is so dead.
“You are an enthusiastic authoritarian when it comes to government powers being radically expanded to do things like torture people in support of the government policies you want.”
In what way? Where? You keep dodging the question.
You support using unlimited violence to secure material aid in unlimited quantities for the maintenance of unlimited individuals even if it would lead to the collapse of industrial society and mass die off. This is your stated position! It’s monstrous.
“The children of the dysgenic need to die.”
This is a statement of fact. If they don’t die, then inevitably the genetic potential of the society degrades to the point where it can no longer support such children, and they die anyway. Either now or in the future.
I take Gregory Clark’s view that industrial society came about in large part due to eugenic survival patterns that created a people capable of the modern industrial revolution. I take the third worlds continued poverty as emblematic of the fact that if this process were to reverse the collapse of industrial society and mass die off is an inevitability.
It isn’t an *opinion* that dysgenic children will inevitably die off in numbers that cause them to have lower survivability then the general population. Its an *inevitable* fact over a long enough timeframe, irregardless of our own desires or efforts.
The only question is whether we should use violence to excellerate that process in a way that will destroy the modern world. You say yes. I say no. Maybe we will get to see when a few billion Africans blitz us over the next few decades.
“Quarantine rules are effectively voluntary guidelines in most cases.”
Then why are schools and businesses closed? Why did my daycare close against the owners wishes? Everything I listed and plenty I haven’t are enforced. My schools daycare got a call from the government telling her what she HAD to do, or else. The playgrounds I tried to go to early in the summer were in some cases literally welded shut. And I have zero doubt all the money they spent this year won’t come out of someones pocket. Etc.
I agree that many people, gripped by fear due to propaganda, are indeed hurting themselves above and beyond strict government limits. That’s a tragedy for most of us, but a bonus for you I guess.
I also think you should give more credence to the fact that normies really just have a hard time defying the law, even when its not enforceable. Its true that if my mother in law decided to drive down here (a plane or train might be different, I don’t know if they are stopping people at the airport) she might be able to avoid quarantine restrictions. But that’s just not what law abiding normies do. They follow the law no matter how dumb it is and no matter how much it hurts. In a sane society that might even be a virtue of sorts, but alas we don’t live in a sane society.
“might cause a child of the dysgenic to be a little fearful?”
The dysgenic already blame me for all their problems and think I deserve to die and they deserve whatever they can take from me by any means. That’s the literal position of say black people vis a vis white people. It’s like their thesis statement on existence.
asdf,
>—“In what way? Where? You keep dodging the question.”
I don’t recall ever being asked the question before but you have frequently expressed admiration for the use of torture in Singapore as well as the restrictions on free speech and political expression there.
>—“You support using unlimited violence to secure material aid in unlimited quantities for the maintenance of unlimited individuals even if it would lead to the collapse of industrial society and mass die off. This is your stated position! It’s monstrous.”
I don’t know what you are referring to but you seem to think I support open borders. I don’t and never have. I do think prospective immigrants should be judged as individuals, rather than be judged “worthless” simply based on their skin color as you have advocated. I do think that some immigration is healthy and beneficial.
>—“I take Gregory Clark’s view that…”
You take an OPPOSITE view from Gregory Clark on the morality of a government sponsored social safety net. He understands HIS OWN WORK , in his own words, as “an argument for limiting social inequality within each society.” He has written admiringly of the much more extensive government sponsored social safety nets in Nordic countries. He does NOT view this as something that will lead to their downfall. He most certainly does NOT conclude from the fact that some people start life with a genetic advantage that this gives them the right to try and engineer the deaths of the “dysgenic.” He views that genetic advantage as an unearned lucky break, not an ethical license to practice Social Darwinism. Your views are a grotesque perversion of the conclusions he draws from his own work which he just might understand a little better than you do.
>—“I take the third worlds continued poverty as emblematic of the fact that if this process were to reverse the collapse of industrial society and mass die off is an inevitability.”
The third world has seen, in just the last generation, far more people lifted out of poverty than in all of previous human history.
>—“The dysgenic already blame me for all their problems and think I deserve to die and they deserve whatever they can take from me by any means. That’s the literal position of say black people vis a vis white people. It’s like their thesis statement on existence.”
Your paranoia and hostility and perpetual victimhood are your own psychological issues that you are projecting onto others.
You may vote but naturally it won’t count.
Misapplied rage. Trump clashed with the deep state but surrounded himself with the swampiest of creatures e.g. Barr. Didn’t help him. Who knew, right?
I think a big issue is that Trump’s personnel were mostly either 1) ordinary Republicans loyal to an ordinary Republican agenda, not specifically to his agenda, or 2) sycophants and careerists who were, at least superficially, loyal to his agenda, but not very competent. I think the key problem is pretty simple: Trump’s unintelligence, laziness, and susceptibility to flattery made him unable/unwilling to find good people who could implement his specific policy agenda, led him to just pick relatives or sycophants, or to just outsource his personnel appointments, like his court appointments, to the GOP ‘establishment.’
Trump also struggled to even have an internally coherent, temporally stable policy agenda, and it’s difficult to be loyal to something that doesn’t quite exist.
Arnold, you have invited some readers to express their disagreements with Trump’s personnel decisions. Reading their comments I laugh at their passion but in particular at their idiocy because they ignore too many things to pass judgement when referring to specific instances. Like you, they don’t refer to instances in which Trump would have chosen the right people. Should I assume that he has been at least not bad in the other 95+% of his personnel decisions?
Yes, it’s cheap to talk against Trump now. The ones that talked badly about Trump well before he appointed people for his administration were rotten and corrupt democrats and their lackeys (most likely, reader Greg G used to repeat his lies well before January 20, 2016). Please show me your evaluation of Obama’s personnel policy and how it compares with Trump’s.
BTW, I hope you start commenting on Biden’s choices right now, well before they are confirmed.
Arnold, I have just read some of Tyler’s latest MR posts and the comments. I cannot stop laughing at Tyler’s idiocy: he had the resources long ago to do serious research about the pandemic but he prefers to entertain by referring to some ideas out of context and linking to people like him that didn’t know anything about the pandemics and had never done serious research on any issues (I mean de Ross and Matts that share with him a preference for entertainment).
I wonder how is doing serious research about the U.S. response to the pandemic, and why the federal government that had spent huge amounts in the past 50 years was not ready. I laugh at the idiots that blame Trump for the federal agencies that were not ready because they have yet to provide reliable and relevant evidence that the agencies were ready in December 2016 but not in December 2019. Phony journalism as practiced by the NYT and other Tyler Cowen’s friends is no substitute for serious research.
Do you think the Mercatus Center has done any serious research? Please give references.
Hey, at least the agencies were ready to fight for diversity and social justice.
Those that say Repubs should have gone nuclear: hope they are consistently applying that when Dems have just a slim 51 majority too.
Basically, saying that DJT couldn’t get good folks to execute his agenda: you are conceding that he was a snake oil salesman. Nothing more. Nothing less. And more importantly, nothing to brag about. If you lay out a vision in campaign but couldn’t find people to buy into that and translate that into a executable mission/plan, what the eff were you out promising? What does it say about those that bought the BS hook, line and sinker?
This suggests a question to me: what if it is impossible for an outsider to honestly campaign on “I will change X and Y”? What if the personnel and procedures make if impossible for a president to change things without people who are impossible to find? Should the dissatisfied just give up and say, “That’s life”?
My worse view of DJT assumes that he only wanted to spend some time at the WH –just to die thinking that he was able to sleep at the WH. DJT thought that if Obama became president, anyone could do it. Obama had been a typical parasite all his life, but he was charming and promised the paradise that young people had been waiting for, and more importantly, he did nothing as president –he just let all sorts of progressives to advance their agenda so he could enjoy the president’s celebrity status. To get it, DJT needed a good excuse and he thought that to stop the progressives was a good one. DJT was not ready for a campaign in terms of what intellectuals want but neither Obama and the creepy Biden were. DJT realized that campaigns were to destroy the competition. He never prepared himself to govern and he was surprised to be elected –he underestimated how rotten and corrupt Hillary was (as well as Obama, Biden, and all Ted Kennedy’s heirs). DJT didn’t have the Party’s support to form government as most previous presidents, but he didn’t care because most members of the Party’s Old Guard didn’t like him.
Even in my worst scenario, I’m willing to acknoledge that at least DJT was able to slow down the progressives by making clear how rotten and corrupt they are. You should remember why Biden was regarded rotten and corrupt in 1987, and how Ted Kennedy used him to do dirty work. I’m willing to bet that a majority of Americans will dismiss Biden&Co at the latest by January 20, 2025 (regardless of what the radical leftists decide to do).
For the past 7 decades, I have seen how politicians destroy themselves (first they are loyals to the wrong people, and then betrayed by those waiting in the closet). And I see that today in the U.S. and the other 3 countries which I follow closely. In Spain, the fight within each of the two main coalitions is as strong as the high-tension fight between the two coalitions. The same in Chile with the difference that in Chile the President’s coalition is “the conservative” (a very wrong label) while in Spain it’s “the progressive”. In Argentina, the President’s Peronist coalition that won easily in late 2019, now it’s threantened by both internal factions and the fragmented opposition. Yes, the political competition in the four countries have achieved a high degree of tension that one is inclined to think that something big must happen to stop so much malice. In old times, we should have expected the recent escalation to be accompanied by increasing violence.
>—” In old times, we should have expected the recent escalation to be accompanied by increasing violence.”
So much nostalgia for the “old times” when America was great and it was easier to get away with thuggery to achieve political power. Nowadays everyone has one of those damn phones that shoot video in their pocket and it’s a lot harder to get away with just increasing the violence when you want to.
[name-calling not welcome–ed.], you are fast to demonize everybody that doesn’t share your loyalty to rotten and corrupt democrats. Ted Kennedy inherited a passion for thuggery while Joe Biden, Ted’s little lackey, applauded. The same applies to Hillary (anyone living in DC during 1993 remembers her misdeeds) and Obama (in Chicago people still remember how he won his first election and how easy he forgot black Americans once he moved to DC). Thanks to DJT, today a lot of people have learned about the rotten and corrupt democrats and their little lackeys.
The WP is the house of your rotten and corrupt masters:
https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/421328/
I for one welcome police body camera footage.
As to your point, we could for instance see a few months ago that there were plenty of anarchists violently and unauthorizedly policing those of the people who wanted to record the demonstrations.
Isn’t that the question on practically everything?
“This is unjust, but seems unlikely to change. Should I assume the rules as given and unchangeable or work to change them?” Is there a time, place, or issue where that isn’t something people ask.
There are many things that each of us would like to change. Today, however, there is just one thing that many people living in constitutional democracies would like to change: to reinforce the rules of political competition to prevent tensions that may quickly escalate up to violence. Is that reinforcement probable? Hardly because it’d require the strong support of a very large majority at a time in which several minority factions have gotten foreign support.
Casey Mulligan provides an anecdote from the White House trenches, confirming that personnel decisions are crucial:
http://caseymulligan.blogspot.com/2020/12/how-economics-helped-end-pandemic.html
That was an awesome link. Thank you for posting that. Casey Mulligan even composed one of Trump’s tweets! Nice!
https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/1083866566314389504
Rachel Bovard sounds like a true fan of Trump’s campaign platform and a fan of Trumpism and expresses sincere criticism of where Trump fell short in executing his agenda. Kling never wanted Trumpism to succeed so I don’t look to him for criticism on tactical mistakes towards that goal.
Even when Trump took up causes in health care or K-12school choice; I suspect Kling ultimately supports those agendas, but refused to support Trump in advancing them.