Top Kill: Will the Spill Bring Down America's Imperial Bureaucracy?
The mark of a healthy empire is a ruthlessly efficient bureaucracy. I want to sidestep all the misbegotten descriptions of America's foreign policy as imperial -- a subject for another conversation -- and observe instead that, by my metric, one reason why Obama looks so ineffective right now is that our domestic imperial apparatus is proving so ruthlessly inefficient. As I claimed in my Spill Speech reax, we want a president who can at least prod that cumbersome beast into plowing, hard-charging action. That's not happening. There are a lot of polls measuring America's declining faith in its major institutions. But it's the largest institution of them all -- our administrative bureaucracy -- that's cratering in the legitimacy department right now. Read David Brooks:
In article after article, you see local officials exploding in anger. Bill McCollum, Florida’s attorney general, has called himself “absolutely appalled.” Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana said this week, “We are not winning this war.” The county commissioners in Okaloosa County, Fla., got so fed up with outside interference that they unanimously voted to give their emergency management team the power to do whatever it wants. “We made the decision legislatively to break the laws if necessary,” Chairman Wayne Harris told The Northwest Florida Daily News. Some of this rage is unavoidable when you have a crisis that no one can control. But it’s also clear that we have a federalism problem. All around the region there are local officials who think they know their towns best. They feel insulted by a distant and opaque bureaucracy lurking above.
It's more than an aloofness problem. The monster is floundering, knotted in its own tentacles. The Victorians would never let this happen, but neither would the Sun King. When Tom Friedman lavishes such revolting fawning praise over the Chinese state, it's really their four-thousand-year expertise at administrative bureaucracy that he's praising. Well here's the breaks, folks: America has never been particularly good at this. It's not in our blood. It's not in our bones. Even when we pack the government with the biggest brains and biggest hearts we can find. The solution is elsewhere. The best the President can do is neither to lead nor follow the bureaucratic beast, but to shove it out of the way.
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May '10
Re: Top Kill: Will the Spill Bring Down America's Imperial Bureaucracy?
I wonder if the bureaucracy is now too big for any executive to control. The Framers gave the president limited duties. They keep expanding over the decades, while he remains one guy. Has he responsibility for executing an unmanageable number of tasks? I think so, and so long as the president is asked to do so many things, he'll do none of them as well as he might, and fail miserably at others.
Re: Top Kill: Will the Spill Bring Down America's Imperial Bureaucracy?
Not only is the regulatory bureaucracy frustrating the capacity of the executive branch to execute -- it's actually countermanding state executives, like Gov. Jindal. It is the anti-executive branch.
Re: Top Kill: Will the Spill Bring Down America's Imperial Bureaucracy?
I wonder, James, if it is too broad a statement to say that the administration is waging a sort of war against the states? Just yesterday I read where locals in Louisiana, at the direction of Gov. Jindal, were out in barges removing oil from the water before they were stopped by the Coast Guard. The reason? The Coast Guard could not verify that the barges had the requisite number of life jackets and fire extinguishers on board each vessel. So the damage to people and wildlife continued while the feds counted life jackets. This kind of thing has earned Obama the title, "Fiddler On The Gulf." Broadening the picture a bit, we have the federal government planning to sue the state of Arizona over its efforts to protect its citizens and secure its border.
On one hand, we have the feds seizing ever more power over virtually every aspect of our lives, while on the other hand it demonstrates monumental incompetence with the things it controls. But woe be unto the local governments that actually take action to, you know, help their people. Evidently, the administration takes its buffoonery very seriously and will not have local governments intruding on the act. If not a sort of war against local authority, what is it? Proactive imbecility?
Edited on Jun 18, 2010 at 8:11amRe: Top Kill: Will the Spill Bring Down America's Imperial Bureaucracy?
Dave Carter: I wonder, James, if it is too broad a statement to say that the administration is waging a sort of war against the states? [...] Broadening the picture a bit, we have the federal government planning to sue the state of Arizona over its efforts to protect its citizens and secure its border.
On one hand, we have the feds seizing ever more power over virtually every aspect of our lives, while on the other hand it demonstrates monumental incompetence with the things it controls. [...] If not a sort of war against local authority, what is it? Proactive imbecility?
I'd just as soon leave it to the feds to announce new wars on things that aren't really wars. But there is no doubt that the response to our multiple crises has been to double down on the one thing that seems simultaneously too unitary and too cumbersome, too vast and too petty, to achieve efficient and durable solutions: big government, and, specifically, big legalism. We are living under something that looks more by the day like a Compliance State. And I'm sorry to say that, here, big business is largely of a piece with big government.
May '10
Re: Top Kill: Will the Spill Bring Down America's Imperial Bureaucracy?
Wonderful! I used to live there. Ft Walton Beach is a great place to live, and it must be saved from the ineffectual and distant feds.
May '10
Re: Top Kill: Will the Spill Bring Down America's Imperial Bureaucracy?
There was an article a few months back in NR (can't recall the author) about how Progressivism is a self-frustrating ideology in practice. The Stimulus, for example, gets tied in knots by the demands of racial compliance, EPA compliance, union compliance, this-or-that code compliance, and so on, to the point that it is simply impossible for it to yield satisfactory results. Certainly it can't yield speedy results. Your image, James, of a monster floundering in its own tentacles is perfect.
This is why the California model, for instance, can never work. Hypothetically, citizens could accept the deal of higher fee for higher service, but the tentacle-choked monster can never quite deliver on its end of the bargain.
May '10
Re: Top Kill: Will the Spill Bring Down America's Imperial Bureaucracy?
Just read that Brooks piece. Hilarious, really, because you can almost hear Brooks' talking himself out of his two-year love affair with Obama and his band of pragmatic, expert fixers, be it in healthcare, the economy, or whatever: "We have vested too much authority in national officials who are really smart, but who are really distant. We should be leaving more power with local officials, who may not be as expert, but who have the advantage of being there on the ground." Thanks, Einstein.
Jun '10
Re: Top Kill: Will the Spill Bring Down America's Imperial Bureaucracy?
Evidently, the administration takes its buffoonery very seriously and will not have local governments intruding on the act. If not a sort of war against local authority, what is it?
Dave
The one, only, truly unforgivable sin is to question, to challenge someone's authority. If that challenge is allowed to stand then authority is lessened. The wielder of that authority starts losing control, can be held responsible for his actions.
I suspect we will soon see the federal bureaucracy take some definite retaliatory action against those who've opposed their authority. Becoming completely unresponsive to the “rebels” requests for aid most probably, citing the locals actions as so disruptive as to prevent timely federal assistance.