It is pretty astounding when you think about it. 243 years of American Democracy have come and gone – and the Republic has withered challenges that it has survived and prospered from. But the thing that most Americans failed to realize was, just how easy it could have been not to survive those challenges. Especially in the current day – when the reigns of government have been given over to the incompetent and the cruel. About 6 months ago, one of my favorite writers summed up the dilemma very well:
“In my life, I have watched John Kennedy talk on television about missiles in Cuba. I saw Lyndon Johnson look Richard Russell squarely in the eye and and say, “And we shall overcome.” I saw Richard Nixon resign and Gerald Ford tell the Congress that our long national nightmare was over. I saw Jimmy Carter talk about malaise and Ronald Reagan talk about a shining city on a hill. I saw George H.W. Bush deliver the eulogy for the Soviet bloc, and Bill Clinton comfort the survivors of Timothy McVeigh’s madness in Oklahoma City. I saw George W. Bush struggle to make sense of it all on September 11, 2001, and I saw Barack Obama sing “Amazing Grace” in the wounded sanctuary of Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina.
These were the presidents of my lifetime. These were not perfect men. They were not perfect presidents, god knows. Not one of them was that. But they approached the job, and they took to the podium, with all the gravitas they could muster as appropriate to the job. They tried, at least, to reach for something in the presidency that was beyond their grasp as ordinary human beings. They were not all ennobled by the attempt, but they tried nonetheless.
And comes now this hopeless, vicious buffoon, and the audience of equally hopeless and vicious buffoons who laughed and cheered when he made sport of a woman whose lasting memory of the trauma she suffered is the laughter of the perpetrators. Now he comes, a man swathed in scandal, with no interest beyond what he can put in his pocket and what he can put over on a universe of suckers, and he does something like this while occupying an office that we gave him, and while endowed with a public trust that he dishonors every day he wakes up in the White House.
The scion of a multi-generational criminal enterprise, the parameters of which we are only now beginning to comprehend. A vessel for all the worst elements of the American condition. And a cheap, soulless bully besides. Watch him again, behind the seal of the President of the United States. Isn’t he a funny man? Isn’t what happened to that lady hilarious? Watch the assembled morons cheer. This is the only story now.”
~Charles P. Pierce
Lest you think his description is inaccurate or overwrought, I would point you to a recent book I finished, one by Michael Lewis entitled, The Fifth Risk. The book examines the dangers and consequences that happen when the government is turned over to people who have no idea how it works or is supposed to work. Like his other books, it’s a very readable and scary account of how unprepared the Trump Team was to assume the complicated business of governing a country as large and diverse as the United States is.
In the book, Lewis provides documentary evidence of how government employees, regardless of their personal political beliefs, tried their best to facilitate a smooth transition of power to the new administration. It highlights how most Americans, Trump included, do not understand how government actually works, and what the purpose of government is – which is to provide services and protect all of its citizens, not just a privileged few. By using examples from departments that are not in the limelight as the bigger ones such as State and Defense – he highlights the contributions and dedication to their jobs that most government workers have. They work out of a pledge of service and deserve more appreciation than current Chief Executive is giving them.
His technique is deceptively simple: The stories are told through sketches of brilliant, eccentric people, experts in their fields, who tend to speak in the same effervescent, colloquial way that Lewis writes. You can’t help liking them. Now, though, Lewis has taken on his most difficult challenge: He has chosen to apotheosize three obscure government agencies — the Department of Energy, the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Commerce. In “The Fifth Risk,” his heroes are federal bureaucrats.
Why these departments? Well, they are enormous data collection and analysis factories. And Donald Trump either doesn’t care about them or understand what they do, or doesn’t like what he imagines he understands, and has sent minions intent on crippling their work. Lewis believes that essential government functions like protecting nuclear waste (Department of Energy), food safety and feeding the poor (Agriculture) and predicting the weather (Commerce) are under threat. Early on, he introduces us to John MacWilliams — a classic Lewis character — a former investment banker with expertise in the energy sector who is cajoled by Barack Obama’s splendid energy secretary Ernest Moniz to go to work for the government. “Everything was acronyms,” MacWilliams recalls. “I understood 20 to 30 percent of what people were talking about.” But the people were impressive. “There were physicists everywhere. Guys whose ties don’t match their suits. Passive nerds. Guys who build bridges.” And they certainly weren’t in it for the money.
MacWilliams’s job at the D.O.E. was risk assessment. Lewis is a risk assessment junkie — whether it’s the risk of investing in ballplayers (“Moneyball”) or mortgage-backed securities (“The Big Short”). At the D.O.E., the risks are potentially cataclysmic — preventing dirty bombs from exploding at the Super Bowl, tracking nuclear weapons so they don’t get lost or damaged (they’re called “Broken Arrows”), preventing plutonium waste at the government’s facility in Hanford, Wash., from leaking into the Columbia River. Lewis asks MacWilliams to list the top five risks. The first four are predictable: Broken Arrows. North Korea. Iran (that is, maintaining the agreement that prevents Iran from building a nuclear bomb). Protecting the electric grid from cyberterrorism. But the fifth, most important risk is a stunner: “program management.” Hence, the title of this book.
It’s a great read and, sadly, a frightening one because it highlights a dangerous hypothesis about Trump and the gang of grifters he has recruited. Either they are criminally incompetent, or they mean to destroy all that is good within America so they can reap a substantial ill-gotten fortune. Either way, it threatens the average citizen.
The risk a society runs when it falls into the habit of responding to long-term risks with short-term solutions. … ‘Program management’ is the existential threat that you never really even imagine as a risk. … It is the innovation that never occurs and the knowledge that is never created, because you have ceased to lay the groundwork for it. It is what you never learned that might have saved you.”
Last Friday, Lewis had an interview on Bill Maher. It should be required viewing, especially for the group of morons located over here. It is about 10 minutes long, but it is worth your time.
The money quote, “It is a testament to the stupidity of the American People that they can be made to believe that there is such a thing as a deep state”.
“There was a rift in American life that was now coursing through American government. It wasn’t between Democrats and Republicans. It was between the people who were in it for the mission, and the people who were in it for the money.”
― Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk
This is your Republic, it is being slowly destroyed in front of your eyes.