From Kevin D. Williamson's "The Front Man" at NRO:
Instead of delegating power to a would-be president-for-life, we delegate it to a bureaucracy-without-death. You do not need to install a dictator when you've already had a politically supercharged permanent bureaucracy in place for 40 years or more. As is made clear by everything from campaign donations to the IRS jihad, the bureaucracy is the Left, and the Left is the bureaucracy. Elections will be held, politicians will come and go, but if you expand the power of the bureaucracy, you expand the power of the Left, of the managers and minions who share Barack Obama's view of the world. Barack Obama isn't the leader of the free world; he's the front man for the permanent bureaucracy, the smiley-face mask hiding the pitiless yawning maw of total politics.
Read the whole thing here.
Yes!
Why do you think they have a cow whenever anyone says "TAX CUT"?
Williamson is right. The remorseless growth of the deathless bureaucracy did not start under Obama's regime however. He's simply given it full expression.
In Canada federal elections do make some difference. Nonetheless changes have to be negotiated with the mandarinate. Stephen Harper is good at it; but they are his first constituency.
It is evident, when it comes to issues of travel from Canada to the US, that the border people enforce their own law. George W. Bush was not able to do much in that regard.
We have seen this kind of tyranny and lawlessness before in every empire that has crumbled. Once the public becomes willing, the tyrant is more empowered.
And right Mr. Williamson is about bureaucracy. How long has Trudeau been in hell and we're still fighting the monsters of political multiculturalism and francophone oligarchies?
I read this earlier.
Good piece containing an excellent j'accuse shopping summary of impeachable offences.
My only reservation was his apparent downplaying of his Marxism, for all marxist political operatives construct elaborate intrusive liberty wilting bureaucracies. There's no either/or here.
I simply cannot see this hard left America-hating radical as a mere purveyor of managerial liberalism.
And I can't see him as a mere front man to ET's "back room boys".
What is it with the American political class and the commentariat that makes them so resistant to using the M word?
The other M-word: McCarthyism.
Kathy Shaidle's article on PJM "I Was a Communist for the FBI a Half-Century Later" includes Diana West's presentation at Heritage on her new book "American Betrayal", full of truly stunning/appalling information on Communist subversion of the US government from FDR on. The article also has a link to Ed Driscoll's interview with West. All well worth reading/listening.
The exact situation prevails on this side of the border too.
There is absolutely no political will to change it. I used to think that this was only cowardice, but now I realize that politicians like it this way. It allows them to point a finger at the bureaucracy - as if it was some separate entity that they have no ability to change - and say, "I'd like to help you, but....".
So, you can mix in some comfort with the cowardice.
A particluar class in "Intro to Poli Sci" dealt with the subject of bureaucracy. When the Prof asked us what we thought what the goal of a bureaucracy was we gave logical replies like 'to serve its mandate" etc. I was taken aback when the Prof told us that the primary goal of any bureaucracy was to 'survive.' And that's accomplished by growing as large as possible, by taking on as many roles/missions as possible. Incredible.
I highly recommend "After America: Get Ready for Armageddon", by Mark Steyn. Immensely readable, as is anything Steyn writes, and he says the same thing in the book, about the huge bureaucracy - beyond the control of any politician.
The elected politicians are considered by the bureaucracy to be temps. They come and go and try to make waves, but in the end they lose an election and the bureaucracy lives on. It's agenda un-scarred.
Absolutely. To a certain extent, bureaucracies take on the trappings of business: survival, and growth in size and influence.
Unfortunately, they do it without the constraints of competition, profit and loss, or regulation.
And the dull, whipped, comfortable public - which should be exerting controls and restraint - sleeps through it all.
PROTOCOL No. 2
2. The administrators, whom we shall choose from among the public, with strict regard to their capacities for servile obedience, will not be persons trained in the arts of government, and will therefore easily become pawns in our game in the hands of men of learning and genius who will be their advisers, specialists bred and reared from early childhood to rule the affairs of the whole world.
The crux oth the break down in the American democratic system is the rise of "the big government party" - the Dems and GOP have become just 2 wings of the same bird of prey - the GOP like clandestine undeclared wars and death squads, government expansion, raiding the treasury and obliterating constitutional rights and the Dems like clandestine undeclared wars and death squads, government expansion, the police state, raiding the treasury and obliterating constitutional rights as well.
In essence elections don't matter, your gonna get the same crap pounded up your tuckas from both political syndicates. They carry forward the same unwritten agendas and those agendas ain't yours folks. McCain and Obama are indistinguishable, there is total continuity in government between GOP or Dem regimes. If you believe the democratic system works, this continuity of sameness is what you vote for now - and as HL Mencken said; "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard"
There is some validity to the argument above. However in the us well over 50000 of the top jobs are patronage positions and are usually changed out completely every change in POTUS. What has been missing is the election of a POTUS with a mandate/determination to reduce the size and power of the underlying fixed bureaucracy. We haven't seen one of those since Reagan - sort of. Nixon had plans to cut it by over 25% in his second term (from 1972 levels!!) but watergate got in the way.
Elect a Ted Cruz type and things could change. Dramatically.
Jamie;
I totally agree. Both the USA and Canada have developed a class of people who's outlook on life is that of managing all aspects of existence within society. Our education system is ran by the very progressive's that conservatives condemn. The CPC party of PMSH is not that fundamentally different, the GOP under Romney the same. A coherent conservative philosophy does not exist at the level of society where it is most needed and conservative leadership does not appear to have the ability to communicate one.
My parent's generation that survived the Depression and WW II created a society to protect those who sacrificed so much. They are mostly all gone now but those who have inherited what they sacrificed for have little understanding or appreciation for that sacrifice. It has all become a 'human right' or what the system can provide.
In Canada we tried to change all this with the Reform Party. A decade of work which culminated in forming a federal government with the remnants of Reform. During that decade (closer to 15 years) the forces that fought against us most effectively were those elements within society most threatened. Not the Liebels or NDP.
I hold little hope for this environment to change until or unless society rediscovers the virtue of conservative thought. I used to be a singular fiscal conservative but now realize that social conservatism has to be part of the package.
We have a similar situation up here in that we also have an embedded, permanent bureaucracy having far too much power in running the show behind the scenes, but since 2009 America has been in a very different situation compared to us, even compared to other bureaucracy-heavy First World countries.
They've had a large bureaucracy for a long time, just like up here since Trudeau, but the way it's been used in the last five years or so is unprecedented. The passing of an impossibly massive, untenable, bureaucracy-expanding and essentially economy-hobbling steamroller of a health care law without anyone having a chance to actually read it or begin to parse its implications, the "IRS Jihad", as Williamson puts it, during which political opponents were targeted by bureaucrats who refused to be accountable, including by pleading the Fifth, etc., the importation from Mexico, by executive order, essentially, of (in effect) Democrat voters, the ordering of states to not enforce immigration law, the ramping up of de facto lawmaking by unelected bureaucrats in the name of regulation, and just in general the executive branch's use of this expanding, million-mile long bureaucratic gauntlet as a shield to supersede/subvert both the law and the constitution are more reminiscent of a banana republic than of what we tend to - or used to - think of as "America".
It took someone getting elected, mindfully and with malice aforethought, on the basis of black vs. white division, and then using the subsequent smokescreen of constant accusations of "racism" to allow such unilateral abuse and power-grabbing. We have our own aboriginal-issue race-baiters up here in Canada, too, but the legacy of slavery in the US, combined with white Liberal guilt/stupidity, have created a disturbing and unique singularity in (American) historical terms.
The old saw that the bureaucracy is the real government has generally meant that it rolls on (largely) independent of, and not affected/changed by, a change in government; in the US under Obama, the bureaucracy quickly became the political hand of a particular - and radical - government. It's a distinction with a difference.
Gord, it's perhaps reasonable to argue that there hasn't been a 'reduce the bureaucracy' administration since Teddy Roosevelt and the Bull Moose Party. Reagan and Nixon talked the talk, but never delivered.
CT, EBD, yes to every word.
In Canada, the government has to take on the bureaucracy in the first year of a majority mandate, otherwise the government won't survive the revenge of the mandarins. When you see mini-scandal after mini-scandal coming from anonymous sources in the bureaucracy, you are seeing bureaucratic payback. Because the bureaucrats are otherwise useless to humanity they must be made to worry with massive cuts. Harper dropped the ball by not ridding us of CBC in the first year of his majority.
Yeah well, this bitterly reminds me of the US military in Nam during Tet. Of the million so odd us military personnel in country.....less than 100,000 were combat involved....the rest were logistical, administrative, clerical etc. tail....and the tail wagged the dog.
the US military in Nam during Tet. Of the million so odd us military personnel in country
Million seems like an overestimate. "U.S. strength in South Vietnam totaled more than 500,000 by early 1968."
www.history.army.mil/html/reference/army_flag/vn.html
Think I'll stick with 'exact'.
Not much more to say except both Nations now have an entrenched political Elite.That has morphed into an overcast, while creating ever more sub groups.
Produced by endless incumbent s voted in. In both Countries its become almost hereditary even in municipal elections.
(Historian Robert) Conquest's Second Law: Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.
Third one applies as well: The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies