Dominic Cummings has a substack where he posts the most insightful musings that I've read since I ran across The Archdruid Report back in 2016. His post about how to reboot the Government Agencies is an absolute must-read.
He is very thoughtful, and probes deeply. I think his criticism of Donald Trump is mostly fair:
And Trump showed:
1. He does not understand power in Washington.
2. He doesn’t have a CEO mindset or skillset in the Bezos/Gates/Jobs/Musk sense of being able to execute at scale and speed.
3. Like Boris Johnson, his insecurities mean he can’t face his lack of skills and trust/empower anyone to build the team to run the administration for him.
4. He has some showman skills, a good nickname game and a sporadically good twitter game. But like Johnson, he prefers to spend his time babbling about and at the media rather than the (often mind-numbing) problems of institutions and incentives you need to focus on to change big things.
This combination meant Trump made a lot of noise but got very little done.
He could not control the government. He was sometimes right, sometimes wrong, sometimes idiotic, often right in his complaints that the media were lying, but very little he said mattered because his words did not connect to power. He annoyed the swamp but he couldn’t drain the swamp — not the tiniest corner.
This is a very short overview of his thoughts on what would avoid these pitfalls:
So, the most important thing for the next GOP candidate and their team to appreciate is this: if you want to have a serious effect, if you want to have a chance of dealing with serious crises, if you want to bend the arc of culture rather than just have a cool-sounding job, then you should generally not be trying to ‘take over the institutions and run them’, you should not develop a traditional ‘reform’ agenda, instead, like Lincoln and FDR, you need to be the once-every-~70 years sort of a President who actually controls the government.
This means appointing people to many parts of DC not to ‘reform’ the department/agency but to close it while someone else runs the startup to replace it (if it needs replacing) operating on completely different legal and management principles and staffed by completely different sorts of people. This does not of course mean closing everything — there are parts of the regime that can carry on pretty much as before — it means closing and reopening those parts necessary to control the important parts of government, such as the Pentagon.
Highly, highly recommended, even though it is a very long - dare I say Borepatchian? - post.
Hat tip to Isegoria, who finds the most interesting stuff.
Excellent post and I'd agree with ALL of his ideas!
ReplyDeleteI suspect the corruption in the Swamp is so deep, so endemic, so thoroughly entrenched that NOBODY has any chance at accomplishing anything the swamp monsters oppose while still remaining within the laws and constraints imposed on the office. The Fed Gov is so corrupt it's beyond repair.....by anyone or any means short of burning it all down, executing theTHOUSANDS of criminals running it and starting over from scratch. That's not gonna happen....at least not without taking the entire country to hell in the process.
ReplyDeleteA long but excellent read. I have no illusions that Trump or anyone else can "drain the swamp." There are simply far too many critters working against it.
ReplyDeleteThe politicians are easy to see but are a relatively small number of the total critter population. As my grandfather told me very long ago, you are wrong if you think killing all those kitchen floor roaches when the light comes on makes a great difference. For every one of them there are hundreds or thousands you can't see, all doing the same thing. He encouraged stomping the kitchen floor, but he also spoke of realistic expectations.
Bureaucrats are the thousands of unseen roaches and drawing them out to be seen simply cannot happen. They virtually define "overwhelming."
Trump drastically underestimated the realities of "the swamp" in even suggesting it was possible to drain the swamp. In his appointments, he chose too many insiders loyal to the swamp, and as Cummings emphasizes, the swamp denizens are the real power. When congress handed off the responsibility of writing laws to the swamp agencies (FDA, EPA, FCC, and the other 90 billion) they essentially killed off the government. Ruling is by the regulation writers and federal courts.
ReplyDeleteI just think Cummings' trust of silicon valley seems to be based on the valley of 20 years ago. While hard to imagine it's everyone there, the way the tech companies rule for the swamp indicates sympathy for the swamp at the very least. If not outright agreement with the swamp.
As we're looking at economic collapse due to the dollar losing its reserve currency status, we need a return to smaller budgets which means dramatically less spending. The way Trump lobbied for more deficit spending because "it's not fair that Obama could do it" indicated he's not the guy to face that crisis.
i have been inside the swamp creature. there is only one way to stop it. it must be severed completely. this will be painful to all, as the creature's tentacles reach into every household. my pension would cease, as would welfare, ebt, social security et al. we would be at least temporarily vulnerable militarily. but the only way is to shut it all down, fire everybody, move the capitol to kansas and nuke dc from orbit. hear me out. most of the minions of the creature won't move to kansas. we build barracks and a meeting hall, that's it. no lobbyists allowed. congress can eat in the chow hall, army standard not air force caviar. no year round government. term limits. salary voted by referendum. voting in person, one day, no exceptions. don't just cut the head off, chop it up in little pieces and run it thru the grinder then toss it in the fire.
ReplyDeleteTrump's primary value was that of being a disruptor, both intentionally and accidentally. He didn't know how to run a government bureaucracy and hired all the wrong people to do it. He had neither a political power base nor a staff of aides who had been in DC for decades and knew how the "system" worked. And he was fighting both the embedded interests and the MSM, both of whom saw him as someone who had not "earned the right to sit at the table and lead the country".
ReplyDeleteOTOH, he was so hated that the swamp revealed its true depth while trying to destroy him. He stumbled into the truth: the media and the embedded interests were going to do whatever they could to force him to abandon his attempts to "drain the swamp" so they could return to "the status quo". And they were going to do whatever they could to prevent him from making *any* of the foundational changes that are needed.
This is not a defense of Trump as much as it is an acknowledgement that nobody elected as POTUS will ever have the power to defang the beast. The only way to begin to "drain the swamp" is to refuse to sign any bills to fund government at all: to starve the beast while cutting off its head - something no politician will ever do.
And the first to try will be Arkancided.
Current LEGAL Counted population of the USA some 334 million.
ReplyDeletePopulation in 1950 150.6 million. Some would say America at its peak. Large scale public works and such. We were an industrial superpower.
Population in 1890 when electricity became something wealthy folks had, 63 million. It was closer to 1930 when it became common. Mostly an agricultural nation. Cotton and tobacco for example was a major export.
Our government has paid folks (Welfare and such) to produce children they cannot provide for.
All paid for by the efforts of taxpayers AND DEBT, we exported to other nations in the form of Treasury Bills due to the Kissinger Petrodollar where Saudi Arabia and later OPEC would only sell oil in US Dollars. Creating a MASSIVE NEED for them all across the globe.
BTW OPEC now sells oil in Dollars, rubles, yuan, grams of gold and euros (I might have missed a few others here) so the Petrodollar is losing its "Charms" due to our Leadership abusing sanctions across this globe.
Something about feeding stray cats, they BREED more. Harsh but true.
Rules for radicals Saul Alinsky written in 1971 spoke how to destroy our Republic. Most of the radicals of that era became Collage Professors.
One of their rules was to overwhelm the social safety net with excess unproductive people. Create Us vs them social patterns. Creates useful idiots (Lenin's terms) to act as agents of change. Antifa, BLM and so on.
Seems to have worked pretty well.
Obama's Change you can step in seems realistic, eh?
We have slept and BS'ed ourselves well past the stage of semi-peaceful recovery. Any serious effort to stop this Socialist-Communist-Democrat-Republican Uni-Party elimination of the Republic involves Spanish Civil War level of destruction.
Millions of senior citizens die for lack of Social Security checks and grocery stores being stocked. That "Rifle behind every blade of grass" is SHOOTING at Whom exactly?
EBT crowd is our natural Goto to blame with their lack of self-restraint but when "Mommy, I'm HUNGRY" is the song of the land even a wonderful neighbor who has NO other options will go feral to provide one more meal to his kids.
In a Civil War (an oxymoron) our population will die off to 1890's or worse as much of the skillsets needed to recover even that level of food production AND SANITATION has been lost to common knowledge. Even if you can grow plenty of food, some idiot nearby putting his bowel movements into your drinking water can have your entire family-clan sick onto death with typhoid and such.
Oh, that and China needs more fertile farmlands. Follow the money, bribes to our "Leadership" are so much cheaper than losing a carrier and such. Getting the USA into a proxy war against Russia weakens BOTH countries.
China lets "You and Him, fight" and just has to stay out of nuke issues.
Both China and Rusia have years' worth of food and energy stored away. The USA, not so much. China also wants Russian lands and resources, but nukes are a problem.
As Michael Yon says FanPanWar. Or as I've said often enough Famine Wars.
Protect your family, build with trusted friends. Both are important when Real HARD TIMES erupts like the Bosnian ethnic cleansing.
Praying for wisdom
Good points. Trump is more of a showman and salesman than a doer.
ReplyDeleteHe was the best we've seen in a long time, but we need far better to turn the country around.
The problem with the Grand Ole Poltroons is that do nothing that they gripe about when in power. How hard is it if you have a substantial majority to abolish some illegal government agencies like the criminal ATF or at a minimum repeal a number of laws that eviscerate the Bill of Rights?
ReplyDeleteThe only Republicans in Congress right now with any sense are Rand Paul in the Senate and Thomas Massie in the House. Though I'm from Texas, Ted Cruz is a mediocrity in some ways but way less bad than the Trump endorsed Cornyn.
The last Republican who truly understood anything useful was Ron Paul from Texas.
Trump was a populist and did a handful of good things that were helpful and probably does not truly hate the working class though he is part of the big club, but there are so many things he did not do.