For policy experts, like Dan Drezner, the next four years will be a waking nightmare:
For technocrats, this is the darkest timeline. They are meritocrats to the core, and the emergent Trump administration is a meritocratic apocalypse. They have been trained to believe that things like expertise and experience matter in conducting the nation’s affairs. Trump hasn’t hired talentless hacks, but his hires possess little direct relevant experience or training to run the departments they’ve been hired to run. The conclusion to draw from this is that the country will be very badly run for the next four years.
This leads to an existential problem for experts. Wonks love their country and they love policy minutiae. They believe that experience and expertise are pretty important when it comes to governing. They are now trying to process an incoming administration that believes there are no such things as objective facts or words that matter.
This puts the technocrat in a very awkward situation. If their premise is that being wonkish is necessary for government to function, then they will predict awful governance for the next four years. That’s bad for intrinsic reasons.
But what if their premise is wrong? What if the Trump administration turns out to be pretty good at governing? Well, that’s worse.
All three loyal readers of Spoiler Alerts will scoff at the possibility of a competent Trump administration, but it’s worth mulling over. Trump has spent the past year and a half defying most political experts and winning the greatest natural experiment in American political history. What if he and his team prove to be better at governing than wonks expect him to be? What if it turns out that the country is already trending in a very positive direction and even the federal government can’t screw that up? Or what if disruption by inexperienced policy principals is just what the bureaucracy needs?
It would mean an Orwellian nightmare for wonks. Education is ignorance. Reading is harmful. Experience is fatally flawed. Debate is debilitating.
Trump is so bad, he gave some people Winning AIDS already! That’s Gavin McInnes, ty the way, who ran Vice magazine before Shane Smith.
Watch Gavin on the Joe Rogan Experience.
I “discovered” him when LaFond linked to his How To Move To Canada video.
Senator Jeff Sessions is liked by his peers and has been a U.S. attorney and state attorney general, but he never has had as much authority as he will have next year.
Isn’t that true of just about any incoming US Attorney General?
Where is all this meritocracy Dan Drezner is talking about? It sure isn’t in the bureaus I interact with. Everything around here is cronyism and minority cred.
“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” I suspect Trump’s teams will be a lot less hung up on left-wing goodthink that just ain’t so.
Bomag nails it. In theory, a technocratic meritocracy is a great way to govern a country. But the last 30 years has shown that what we have is neither technocratic nor meritocratic. The evidence for this is falling from the trees, but you can start with the Solyndra mess. Or the VA. Or the IRS.
You can make a decent argument that Obama’s biggest success in governance is in Space Policy, where he has taken the Federal Bureaucracy out of the main action and let the private sector run without interference.