PrintMay 23, 2017
Trump: The Beginning of the End or the End of the Beginning?
A week is a long time in politics. That’s what British politician Harold Wilson probably said.
But there is no doubt about the length of last week of Donald Trump’s presidency. And all about what? Siccing the IRS on the ACLU? Lying about an embarrassing treaty with the Russians? Oh no. Just mean girl talk about “so you know he, like, talked to the Russians, OMG?” Yes, we have finally come full circle on McCarthyism, with liberals running around shouting that “in my hand I have the names of 13 people in the Trump campaign that colluded with Russian agents to steal the election!”
I think -- I hope -- that this hysterical panic about nothing is a gift to the Trump White House. If President Trump and his people are worth anything they are learning fast and even now, as Donald Trump and Co. are Air-Force-One-ing around the Middle East they learning their lessons and are planning how to defeat the media swamp and the Deep State bureaucracy.
Ah yes, bureaucracy. There is a great piece this week by Theodore Dalrymple about his experience working in a British government bureaucracy. He leads into it by talking about a Russian that just could not make it in the Soviet bureaucracy.
The kind of person who succeeded in the Soviet Union was the kind of person I met who succeeded in the British bureaucracies with which I had to deal in my work. They were either without ability, in which case they resembled the talentless hacks whom Dovlatov met in the Soviet literary world: “They made up for the absence of talent by perfect loyalty to power.” Or, if they had ability and intelligence, they suppressed its exercise for the sake of a quiet and comfortable life.
I think -- I hope -- that all the Susan Rice unmaskings and the anonymous leaks are the work of mediocre bureaucrats that are eager to bring the president down, but not willing to risk their salaries and pensions in that fight.
Max Weber wrote that modern bureaucracies are staffs of technical experts needed for -- well he doesn’t quite say for what. In fact bureaucrats are really mediocre drones whose job is to follow orders from on high to humiliate people down low by forcing them to repeat ruling-class memes that they know are lies. Oh, and don’t forget the pensions.
It is telling that the most successful bureaucracies of the modern age, the armed forces, learned a big lesson a century ago in World War I. On the modern lethal battlefield they couldn’t win wars with a pure top-down chain-of-command. What the German army needed, wrote Gen. Hans von
Seeckt in the 1920s, was:
a soldier who, in character, capability, and knowledge, is self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated,and joyful in taking responsibility [verantwortungsfreudig] as a man and a soldier.
The result, in World War II, was that the average verantwortungsfreudig German soldier was worth about 1.5 to 2 Allied soldiers.
Now, do you think that our liberal friends in the Deep State have the least clue about this? When they are all marchin’ every day in lefty peaceful protest formation? Not at all. Their talent is to make sure that every bureaucrat in the Deep State, from the CIA to your local library, is a cowardly conformist, living in fear of the SJW file-closers.
Of course, it may be that Trump won’t get his act together; it may be that Trump’s people can’t stop leaking; it may be that the Deep State armies are too strong for the Trumpsters.
But I say that President Trump probably has the will to win; that Trump’s people should be good enough to go mano-a-mano with the dull routinists of the Deep State. And the Deep State probably doesn’t have the cojones and the culture of joyful responsibility to be the best they can be.
And there is this: “when you strike at a king, you must kill him.” That’s from liberal hero Ralph Waldo Emerson. Alternatively, “From life's school of war: what does not kill me makes me stronger.” That is Nietzsche. Whoever the mysterious Mr. Big in the Deep State may be, he certainly should be smarter than to hit the president with love taps about nothing, taking his cue from the post-election blame-shifting of Hillary Clinton that she lost because of the Russians.
Why, it’s almost as if the Deep State is giving Trump & Co. a basic training in presidenting. When he has learned how to disassemble, clean, and reassemble his political weapons in nothing flat under the kindly instruction of his Deep State DI then the Deep Staters may find that they have created a monster.
Or maybe they are smarter than we we think, and have already marched us halfway to the final Trumpageddon.
Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on U.S. government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also see his American Manifesto and get his Road to the Middle Class.
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