Professor Richardson nails the essence of what makes the American democracy work:
Democracy depends on a nonpartisan group of functionaries who are loyal not to a single strongman but to the state itself. Loyalty to the country, rather than to a single leader, means those bureaucrats follow the law and have an interest in protecting the government. It is the weight of that loyalty that managed to stop Trump from becoming a dictator—he was thwarted by what he called the “Deep State,” people who were loyal not to him but to America and our laws. That loyalty was bipartisan. For all that Trump railed that anyone who stood up to him was a Democrat, in fact many—Special Counsel Robert Mueller and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, for example—are Republicans.
Authoritarian figures expect loyalty to themselves alone, rather than to a nonpartisan government. To get that loyalty, they turn to underlings who are loyal because they are not qualified or talented enough to rise to power in a nonpartisan system. They are loyal to their boss because they could not make it in a true meritocracy, and at some level they know that (even if they insist they are disliked for their politics).
It’s a microcosm of my Sectors of Society meditations. If you replace one goal with another, the methods will change in order to optimize the attainment of the goal.
If moving ahead in your career depends on excellence in whatever field of democratic government you’re in – national defense, pollution regulation, science research, law enforcement & justice are just a few examples – then you will either develop those skills or you’ll move on to some other career. In a very real sense, it’s the old Evolution In Action gig. And the organization will improve, not only because you’ve improved, but because the public perception of the goal matches the interior specification of the goal.
If moving ahead in your career depends on brown-nosing Dear Leader, then you’ll develop those skills relevant to brown-nosing. The better you brown-nose, the better your career – and excellence in whatever part of government you’re in is purely an accident. You’ll prosper in proportion to your brown-nosing.
And screw everyone who depends on the government to get things right.
We’ve seen this phenomenon in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, Communist China, even the United States during those periods in which political commissars, rather than competent experts, lead non-political portions of government. Look at Trump and most of his commissars. Or Bush II and his FEMA director Michael Brown, whose devotion to President Bush may have served him well, but New Orleans ill.
Richardson’s essay is important for its accuracy and brevity.
