Once upon a time, in a land known as Washington, DC, the experts wisely governed the people, and the people were happy. Everything from the nation’s nuclear arsenal to the Internal Revenue Service was run with precision and, most of all, trust. The happy people trusted the experts to always do the right thing which they did.
But one day, all of that changed for the worse when the Bad People came to this happy land and turned everything upside down for no good reason than just to be mean and bad. Declares Brooke Harrington of Dartmouth College in the New York Times:
In the weeks since President Trump unleashed Elon Musk’s initiative, the Department of Government Efficiency, on our federal institutions, it has profoundly destabilized basic systems we count on to make our society function.
Harrington continues:
It’s as though the current administration is running Franklin Roosevelt’s first 100 days in reverse: Instead of rebuilding institutions and public trust at a moment of national peril, it seems to be trying to unravel both — and is creating a moment of national peril.
This threatens to destroy what’s left of Americans’ faith in government. Moving fast and breaking things — the Silicon Valley motto that appears to inspire Mr. Musk and his DOGE initiative — is “potentially wreaking havoc,” as Senator Ed Markey and Representative Don Beyer recently wrote, on federal systems that ensure our physical and economic survival.
Unfortunately, Harrington isn’t finished with this hagiographic depiction of the government that existed just six weeks ago:
This promises to be a tough way for Americans to learn a critical fact too often overlooked — that one of our country’s greatest and least-appreciated assets has been public faith and trust in a variety of highly complex systems staffed by experts whose names we’ll never know. In fact, high levels of trust used to be one of our superpowers in the United States: specifically, that meant trust in our government to operate with reasonable competence and stability, and without the kind of corruption that has hobbled other societies.
The key national asset was trust in the system overall, rather than in any individual or elected official. For decades, academics and polling companies have measured this with the question “How much of the time do you think you can trust the government in Washington to do what is right?”
Though that trust declined significantly as a result of the Vietnam War, it remained high enough that our country could regain stability and prosper after crises like the Covid pandemic, from which our peer nations struggled to recover. This was driven in part by faith in the competence and integrity of our civil service and federal institutions.
She answers her rhetorical question with:
Trust in government to do what is right, at least most of the time, is a form of wealth — call it civic capital — that breeds prosperity on many fronts. Anything that threatens that trust weakens our society and economy.
In reading this fairy-tale view of the bloated behemoth known as the federal government, it is clear that a Harvard education and an academic Ivy League resume do not mean that those which have them can think critically. Instead, the reader is presented with a make-believe portrayal of government that looks like something from a Disney production.
It is hard to know where to begin when doing a critical read of this article. First, it reflects the views of a progressive True Believer who worships in the Church of the Progressive Expert in which the bureaucratic technocrat should be making decisions for everyone else. Writes Thomas Leonard, himself an “expert” in the history of progressivism:
How did this [technocratic “good society”] come to pass? In briefest summary: the rise of expertise and statism. The Progressive Era marked a new, intimate and reinforcing relationship between the state and the new sciences of society (especially economics), while progressive economic science increasing [sic] averted to statism in its answers to the leading question of the day, “what should be the relationship of the state to the economy?” The role of the political economist changed in the Progressive Era from that of scholar writing to influence public opinion (and, indirectly, policy making) from that of academic providing expert policy counsel directly to policy makers or, in fact, serving as a policy maker in government positions created to accommodate expertise.
If there is a giveaway sentence in Harrington’s hagiography, it is the one in which she claims that “trust in government” was the key to this country’s recovery from covid. Yet, if anything describes how the majority of Americans responded to the government’s response to the pandemic, it was distrust. True, progressive elites blamed the distrust on the Great Unwashed Masses that refused to get “fully vaccinated” or wear masks even in intimate moments, and they believed that had those “deplorables” just done what Blue State governors and bureaucrats told them to do, there would have been a half-million fewer deaths, which is a highly-questionable assertion.
We do know now that the mass lockdowns and school closures ordered by the so-called experts have had disastrous effects on both educational development and mental health of school children, despite the fact that school-aged children were not nearly as vulnerable to the covid virus as were older adults with other serious health conditions. However, it was not concern for students that drove school closings, but rather the politics of the public school teachers’ unions, which are a major financial contributor to the Democratic Party. In other words, raw politics drove school closings and other covid policies, not the medical wisdom of the “experts,” as Harrington imagines.
In calling Trump the “reverse” FDR, Harrington claims that President Franklin Roosevelt was simply restoring “trust” to US institutions, but in reality, he was transferring constitutional authority from Congress to the executive branch along with confiscating wealth and property from owners of private property. Apparently, Harrington confuses the accumulation of raw state power with a restoration of trust. The New Deal was not a “restoration” project but rather a series of policies that undermined the trust relationships that are necessary for an economy to thrive. Indeed, much of FDR’s anti-business rhetoric was aimed at convincing Americans to lose trust in everything else but government.
Furthermore, her claim that DOGE is undermining “trust” is contradicted by the fact that DOGE investigators have uncovered evidence that the Biden administration betrayed trust by creating multi-billion-dollar slush funds to hand taxpayer money to politically-connected people and organizations. Likewise, while Harrington wants us to believe that all USAID moneys were spent providing medical care and food to poor people overseas, much of the agency’s appropriations were spent on private non-profit organizations and paying for favorable coverage from US journalists and their organizations.
While one can disagree with the tactics of Elon Musk and Donald Trump and question DOGE’s long-term effectiveness, Harrington’s simple-minded approach ignores the fact that the Biden administration engaged in the corruption of institutions ranging from the courts and law enforcement to national security No doubt, the typical NYT reader ignores Biden’s transgressions and enthusiastically believes Harrington.
Although many of Harrington’s observations are almost amusingly naïve, it is clear that she represents an elite constituency that believes it never should be out of power—and people who are not like her should have no political influence at all. Writes Leonard:
…progressives’ views, in fact, can be seen to exemplify an illiberal tendency in American progressivism, which manifests in the tension between the progressive desire to uplift oppressed groups, and the progressive desire to socially control groups seen to be a threat to the social and economic order. Social control of inferior groups, like all eugenic thought, opposed the moral equality of human beings – indeed, it is predicated upon human hierarchy.
For now, she and her kind have little political control over the federal government. One hopes that will be the case for a long time.
