I've spent a fair amount of my professional life as a bureaucrat, at both the state and Federal level. For my father, whose study of bureaucracies was his occupation, and whose Depression-era childhood led him to prize stable employment, this was his dream occupation for me. I did not prize stability quite as much as he and my mother did (see my previous post), but the work that I did in government gave me an appreciation for how much important work is done by bureaucrats behind the proverbial scenes, away from politics and media exposure.
If anything, I think that one of the reasons Americans value government so little is because the media tends to focus its coverage on the political circus, which is both easier to understand and more entertaining, and thus easier to ultimately translate into profits. It's harder to get a handle on the inner workings of many government agencies, and describe the workings of those agencies in a way that makes people think that their tax dollars are working, sometimes in ways they've never appreciated. I'd like to take a few moments, and several lines, to try to do my part in correcting that imbalance.
Paul Volcker, who died earlier this month, played two major roles in the 20th and 21st centuries. As chair of the Federal Reserve in the Carter and Reagan Administrations, he played perhaps the most important role in bringing inflation under control by tightening access to money to an extent that was painful for Americans across the board, and led to what was accurately described as a "double-dip" recession. The pain can't and shouldn't be minimized; those of us who lived through it remember it very well, and those who didn't can learn all about it from pieces like this one. But it brought inflation under control for nearly four decades, and did much more than the Reagan tax cuts to set the stage for economic growth in the '80s. Two decades later, when those tax cuts and later ones brought the nation to the brink of another Depression, he worked with Barack Obama to pull the the economy back from that brink, and to re-regulate the financial players that almost pushed all of us over it.
You can, of course, debate whether his Fed policies could have been less severe, or whether he should have been tougher on Wall Street when he worked for Obama, as the Nation article to which I've linked does My own view does not go quite as far as the Nation does in taking Volcker to task on both fronts, but there's something to be said for its perspective. It fails to take into account, however, of how inflation was eating the economic life out of America in the two decades before Volcker came on the scene, or Volcker's own willingness to concede, in his later work, that business excess needed to be reined in. What is indisputable, at least in my opinion, is that Volcker's work overall has had an impact equal to, if not greater than, the impact of the Presidents for whom he worked.
The same may yet be said of the six witnesses from the T**** Administration who testified before the House Intelligence Committee and who uniformly established the fact that T**** put a political price tag on military aid to a crucial ally. Some were political appointees--T**** appointees, for that matter--but others were career bureaucrats who saw themselves as working for the interests of the nation as a whole. They put themselves in some degree of peril for reprisals from a political party that lives on reprisals, but they did it anyway. They proved that the label "bureaucrat" can be shared with the label "patriot."
Then too, we all might not be here sharing our views electronically and/or otherwise if it weren't for the work of George Kennan, whose development of the policy of "containment" with respect to the Soviet Union and its expansionist tendencies may very well have prevented both nations from launching a war that neither one could win. You can read more about Kennan and his work here.
If all of this feels a bit like a ramble, I apologize. It leads, in any case, to a simple point.
We hear and read a lot these days about the "Deep State," or "the Swamp," an alleged invisible empire of sinister, intractable forces within the national government, supposedly self-interested to the point of leading the rest of us inevitably down the path to our destruction. This empire is never described in detail, of course, and that's in no small part because the real swamp is not in our government but around it--the pollsters, the lobbyists, the various trade associations, the law firms, and even certain media outlets. All of which have a vested interest in getting something out of government, and all of which can do so far more easily by getting the rest of us to hate government with all our hearts. And, because all of these swamp creatures are skilled in the art and science of persuasion, they've had decades of success in generating that hatred.
Well, I am here to tell you that bureaucrats are not necessarily members of the swamp. Or, for that matter, nothing more than bureaucrats. They are people. They are patriots. They see themselves as public servants, often with far more conviction and clarity than many of the politicians who make it their business to deprecate bureaucrats. They work hard. They are willing to take risks, even personal ones. And sometimes (and nowadays more frequently than is desirable) they are the last line of defense between democracy and kleptocracy.
I'm not writing this simply to defend my own experience in working within government, or to get you to think that government is always here to help you. I am asking you--in fact, I am literally begging you--to remember that bureaucrats are an indispensable part of a government of, by, and for the people, that government can't function without them, and that they are people with lives, families, priorities, and concerns, just like you. Probably like someone you know. And, in any case, like me.
Think about that very carefully, the next time someone comes along in an election and tells you that they, and only they, can solve all of our troubles.
They're telling you that because they don't want to be watched, or thwarted, by the people who have the most knowledge and experience when it comes to solving them. Because they don't want to solve our problems, or your problems. Just theirs.
They'll tell you that bureaucrats are the enemy. Because it makes it easier for them to conceal who the real enemy is.
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