Isegoria

Tracing Woodgrains recounts the full story of the FAA’s hiring scandal:

Then, on New Year’s Eve, 2013, while students and professors alike were out for winter break, the FAA abruptly sent an announcement to the presidents of the CTI [collegiate training initiative] schools. The announcement came, without warning, as an email from one Mr. Joseph Teixeira, the organization’s vice president for safety and technical training. “The FAA completed a barrier analysis of the ATC occupation pursuant to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s (EEOC) Management Directive 715,” the email read, then went on to spell out some changes:

First, every past aptitude test applicants had taken was voided. Andrew Brigida’s perfect score was meaningless.

Second, every applicant would be required to take and pass an unspecified “biographical questionnaire” to have a shot at entering the profession.

Third, existing CTI students were left with no advantage in the hiring process, which would be equally open to all off-the-street applicants—their degrees rendered useless for the one specialized job they had trained for.

[…]

As the hiring wave approached, some of Reilly’s friends in the program encouraged her to join the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees (NBCFAE), telling her it would help improve her chances of being hired. She signed up as the February wave started. Soon, though, she became uneasy with what the organization was doing, particularly after she and the rest of the group got a voice message from FAA employee Shelton Snow:

“I know each of you are eager very eager to apply for this job vacancy announcement and trust after tonight you will be able to do so….there is some valuable pieces of information that I have taken a screen shot of and I am going to send that to you via email. Trust and believe it will be something you will appreciate to the utmost. Keep in mind we are trying to maximize your opportunities…I am going to send it out to each of you and as you progress through the stages refer to those images so you will know which icons you should select…I am about 99 point 99 percent sure that it is exactly how you need to answer each question in order to get through the first phase.”2

The biographical questionnaire Snow referred to as the “first phase” was an unsupervised questionnaire candidates were expected to take at home. You can take a replica copy here. Questions were chosen and weighted bizarrely, with candidates able to answer “A” to all but one question to get through. Some of the most heavily weighted questions were “The high school subject in which I received my lowest grades was:” (correct answer: science, worth 15 points) and “The college subject in which I received my lowest grades was:” (correct answer: history, for another 15 points).

Reilly, Brigida, and thousands of others found themselves faced with the questionnaire, clicking through a bizarre sequence of questions that would determine whether they could enter the profession they’d been working towards. Faced with the opportunity to cheat, Reilly did not. It cost her a shot at becoming an air traffic controller. Like 85% of their fellow CTI students, Brigida and Reilly found themselves faced with a red exclamation point and a dismissal notice: “Based upon your responses to the Biographical Assessment, we have determined that you are NOT eligible for this position.”

[…]

Throughout the ‘90s and ‘00s, the FAA faced pressure to diversify its field of air traffic controllers, historically a profession that has been primarily white men, notably from the NBCFAE. In the early 2000s, this pressure focused on the newly developed air traffic control qualification test, the AT-SAT, which the NBCFAE hired Dr. Outtz to critique from an adverse impact standpoint. As originally scored, the test was intended to pass 60% of applicants, but predictions suggested only 3% of black applicants would pass. In response, the FAA reweighted the scoring to make the test easier to pass, reducing its correlation with job performance as they did so. In its final form, some 95% of applicants passed the test.

This was a bit of a shell game. In practice, they divided it into a “well qualified” band (with scores between 85 and 100 on the test, met by around 60% of applicants) and a “qualified” band (with scores between 70 and 84), and drew some 87% of selections from that “well qualified” band. Large racial disparities remained in the “well qualified” band. As a result, facing continued pressure, the FAA began to investigate ways to deprioritize the test.

Why not ditch it altogether? Simple: the test worked. It had “strong predictive validity,” outperforming “most other strategies in predicting mean performance,” and it was low cost and low time commitment. On average, people who performed better on the test actually did perform better as air traffic controllers, and this was never really in dispute.

[…]

The NBCFAE continued to pressure the FAA to diversify, with its members meeting with the DOT, FAA, Congressional Black Caucus, and others to push for increased diversity among ATCs. After years of fiddling with the research and years of pressure from the NBCFAE, the FAA landed on a strategy: by using a multistage process starting with non-cognitive factors, they could strike “an acceptable balance between minority hiring and expected performance”—a process they said would carry a “relatively small” performance loss. They openly discussed this tension in meetings, pointing to “a trade-off between diversity (adverse impact) and predicted job performance/outcomes,” asking, “How much of a change in job performance is acceptable to achieve what diversity goals?”

[…]

An active air traffic controller reached out to me at the end of January last year, talking about his frustration that so many qualified individuals were eliminated from entering training, contributing to a dire staffing shortage. His facility was operating at less than 75%, with controllers fatigued from working 6-day weeks. As he explained it, training can take 1.5 to 2.5 years at larger facilities, with washout rates from 30-60%, and when we spoke upper level facilities were only accepting transfers from lower level facilities, adding years to preparation time. Every issue compounds and adds to the problem over time, and the FAA’s 2013 changes set staffing back years. The FAA, he said, simply is not bringing in enough people to match the number leaving, with some air traffic controllers believing the agency is failing on purpose to find an excuse to privatize them.

A controller who worked for 25 years and retired in 2015 spoke with me last January as well. He had been offered a position at Oklahoma City to instruct new students. Per him, the ideal candidate can go from street to fully certified in about 4 years, while some trainees during his last few years had been training for 6-8 years. He alleged a pattern where some students were trained for years longer than others, rarely washed out, and were quietly checked out and promoted away from direct air traffic control positions into management.

Another retired controller and supervisor who formerly worked at the Chicago ARTCC echoed his story, claiming the FAA would regularly change the “best qualified list,” with those responsible for promotions changing requirements depending on who they wanted to promote. He was never told to certify an inadequate trainee, he said, but “the pressure was mounting.”

Richard Hanania noted almost immediately that the second Trump administration was more serious about policy across the board:

In 2016, Trump took over the GOP practically out of nowhere, nobody thought he would win the general election, and conservatives weren’t really prepared to do much of anything other than give him judges to confirm. The right has since then spent the last eight years thinking about how to make full use of the executive branch for when a Republican returns back to office.

But one thing this whole experience has taught me is that knowledge is fragmented and so much of politics, like life more generally, is about drawing attention. The Origins of Woke relies on the work of several scholars who are lesser known and have been hammering on some of the points I made in the book for decades, including Gail Heriot and Eugene Volokh, and many attorneys like Dan Morenoff and Alison Somin have done important work far from the public spotlight. And I think I probably originally learned about disparate impact from Steve Sailer. So there’s a kind of pipeline here, which in this case went Heriot et al-Hanania-Vivek-Trumpverse, from the most scholarly towards the most famous and attention grabbing. It’s been instructive to play a part in this process. One maybe can place Rufo in between Vivek and Trumpverse, or as part of an independent branch between Hanania and Trumpverse.

It’s possible no single person actually made the marginal difference here. If Trump hadn’t won the election, DeSantis certainly would’ve gone just as far. Vivek would have too, and even Nikki Haley opened her campaign with a video talking about wokeness as a threat to America, although in her case we can have doubts as to whether she would have taken decisive action on the issue. And maybe if Rufo and I didn’t exist, someone else would have filled our niches.

[…]

All of this makes me think that politicians are in a sense less important than intellectuals and activists. It’s actually difficult for me to imagine all this happening without me or Rufo, but easy to imagine it happening without Trump.

As I discuss in the introduction to The Origins of Woke, I started thinking about the relationship between wokeness and civil rights law around 2011 while I was in law school. I then spent about a decade trying to convince people how important this topic was. Finally, I just wrote about it myself, and things started to change.

[…]

Another lesson people can potentially draw from this experience is that it is possible to influence policy even if you’re starting out without much in the way of fame, connections, or money. Furthermore, my messaging hasn’t exactly been optimized to win over Republicans. Yet by making a compelling case in emphasizing the issue and bringing it to public attention, I was able to contribute towards changing the conversation on civil rights law. For anyone else who wants to influence policy, here’s a demonstration that it can be done.

[…]

Most political struggles end in failure or some kind of ambiguous outcome. But sometimes you advocate for an idea, and it just wins. I wanted conservatives to go to war against wokeness as a matter of policy, and the outcome has surpassed my most optimistic hopes. It’s a very satisfying feeling.

Shortly after the failure of the Cadoudal plot, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), Napoleon said to the Conseil:

‘They seek to destroy the Revolution by attacking my person. I will defend it, for I am the Revolution.’

[…]

He had revised his former estimation of the legitimacy of monarchs. ‘The hereditary principle could alone prevent a counter-revolution’, he added in similar vein. Afterwards, petitions started arriving from the departments begging Napoleon to take the crown. Newspapers began running articles praising monarchical institutions, and officially inspired pamphlets such as Jean Chas’s Réflexions sur l’hérédité du pouvoir souverain were published suggesting that the best way to foil the conspirators would be to found a Napoleonic dynasty.

[…]

‘No one proposed to say King!’ noted Pelet. Instead ‘consul’, ‘prince’ and ‘emperor’ were discussed. The first two sounded too modest, but Pelet believed the Conseil thought ‘that of Emperor too ambitious’.

[…]

By the time Napoleon was ready to declare himself emperor, many of the great republican generals who might have objected were gone: Hoche, Kléber and Joubert were dead; Dumouriez was in exile; Pichegru and Moreau were about to go on trial for treachery. Only Jourdan, Augereau, Bernadotte and Brune remained and they were about to be placated with marshals’ batons.

The explanation Napoleon gave Soult – ‘An end should be put to the hopes of the Bourbons’ – was of course not the whole reason; he also wanted to be able to address Francis of Austria and Alexander of Russia as equals, and perhaps also Augustus, Hadrian and Constantine.

France was de facto an empire by 1804, and it was only acknowledging that fact that Napoleon declared himself an emperor de jure, just as Queen Victoria would become for the British Empire in 1877.

Astonishingly few Frenchmen opposed the return to an hereditary monarchy only eleven years after the execution of Louis XVI, and those who did were promised the opportunity to vote against it in a plebiscite.

[…]

Eight days later Napoleon was officially proclaimed emperor in a fifteen-minute ceremony at Saint-Cloud, in which Joseph was appointed Grand Elector and Louis became Constable of France. He henceforth took the somewhat convoluted and seemingly contradictory style ‘Napoleon, through the grace of God and the Constitution of the Republic, Emperor of the French’.

[…]

Should Napoleon die without an heir it was resolved that Joseph and then Louis would inherit the crown, with Lucien and Jérôme cut out of the line of succession due to the marriages of which their brother disapproved. Napoleon was furious that while Jérôme, who was serving in the French navy, had been on shore leave in America in December 1803 and had married the beautiful Baltimore heiress Elizabeth Patterson rather than holding himself back for a European dynastic union. Napoleon did everything in his power thereafter to end the marriage, including importuning the Pope to have it annulled and ordering French officials to ‘say publicly that I do not recognize a marriage that a young man of nineteen has contracted against the laws of his country’. All of his brothers except Louis had married for love, as he himself had, which was of no use to France.

[…]

The day after he was proclaimed emperor, Napoleon appointed four honorary and fourteen active ‘Marshals of the Empire’.

[…]

Between 1807 and 1815 a further eight were created. The marshalate wasn’t a military rank but an honorific one intended to recognize and reward something that Napoleon later called ‘the sacred fire’, and of course to incentivize the rest of the high command. The title came with a silver and velvet baton studded with gold eagles in a box of red Moroccan leather and indicated that Napoleon considered these men to be the fourteen best military commanders in the French army. Not everyone was impressed: when his staff congratulated Masséna, he merely snorted, ‘There are fourteen of us!’ Masséna was lucky to get his baton at all, having voted against the Life Consulate and criticized the coming Moreau trial, but his military capacity was undeniable.

[…]

Whatever their social origin, Napoleon addressed all the marshals as ‘Mon cousin’ in correspondence, as he did Cambacérès and some of the senior imperial dignitaries.*

[…]

As well as titles and batons, Napoleon gave dotations (land presents) to his marshals, some of which were huge.

[…]

As well as founding the marshalate, on May 18, 1804 Napoleon formally constituted the Imperial Guard, an amalgamation of the Consular Guard and the unit that guarded the Legislative Body.

[…]

Reims (where coronations of French kings had traditionally taken place), the Champs de Mars (turned down because of the likelihood of inclement weather) and Aix-la-Chapelle (for its connections with Charlemagne) were briefly considered before Notre-Dame was decided upon. The date of December 2 was a compromise between Napoleon, who had wanted November 9, the fifth anniversary of the Brumaire coup, and the Pope, who had wanted Christmas Day, when Charlemagne had been crowned in AD 800. The Council then discussed heraldic insignia and the official badge of the Empire, with Crétet’s special committee unanimously recommending the cockerel, emblem of Ancient Gaul, but if that was not accepted the eagle, lion, elephant, Aegis of Minerva, oak tree and ear of corn also had their supporters. Lebrun even suggested commandeering the Bourbons’ fleur-de-lis. Miot rightly denounced the fleur-de-lis as ‘an imbecility’ and instead proposed an enthroned Napoleon as the badge.

‘The cock belongs to the farmyard,’ said Napoleon, ‘it is far too feeble a creature.’ The Comte de Ségur supported the lion as it supposedly vanquished leopards, and Jean Laumond supported the elephant, a royal beast that according to (incorrect) popular belief couldn’t bend its knee. Cambacérès came up with the bee, as they have a powerful chief (albeit a queen), and General Lacuée added that it could both sting and make honey. Denon suggested the eagle, but the problem with that was that Austria, Prussia, the United States and Poland were already represented by eagles. No vote was taken, but Napoleon chose the lion, and they moved on to the question of inscriptions on the new coinage, rather strangely agreeing to keep the words ‘French Republic’ on it, which remained the case until 1809. Shortly after the meeting broke up Napoleon changed his mind from the lion to an eagle with spread wings, on the basis that it ‘affirms imperial dignity and recalls Charlemagne’. It also recalled Ancient Rome.

Not content with having just one symbol, Napoleon also chose the bee as a personal and family emblem, which then found its way as a decorative motif onto carpets, curtains, clothes, thrones, coats of arms, batons, books and many other items of imperial paraphernalia. The symbol of immortality and regeneration, hundreds of small gold-and-garnet bees (or possibly cicada, or even mis-drawn eagles) had been found in 1653 when the tomb was opened of the fifth-century King Childeric I of France, father of Clovis, in Tournai.

[…]

On July 14, 1804 the remains of the great French marshals Vauban and Turenne were transferred to Les Invalides. Napoleon chose the occasion to make the inaugural awards of a new French order, the Légion d’Honneur, to reward meritorious service to France regardless of social origin. The first medals were five-pointed crosses in plain white enamel hanging from a red ribbon, but they had financial stipends attached according to one’s ranking in the organization. The fifteen cohorts of the order comprised grand officers, commanders, officers and legionaries, and each received 200,000 francs to distribute annually to worthy recipients.

Some on the Left complained that the reintroduction of honours fundamentally violated the revolutionary concept of social equality. Moreau had sneered at a previous attempt by Napoleon to reintroduce honours, awarding his cook ‘the order of the saucepan’. In the army, however, the Légion was an instant success. It’s impossible to say how many acts of valour were undertaken at least in part in the hope of being awarded ‘the cross’, as it was universally known. Napoleon chose ‘Honneur et Patrie’ as its motto, the words embroidered on all French standards.

[…]

The inclusion of civilians in the Légion was deliberate; the rest of society could also attain honour if it copied the military virtues, especially those of loyalty and obedience.

[…]

Out of the 38,000 people who received the rubans rouges (red ribbons) under Napoleon, 34,000 (or 89 per cent) were soldiers or sailors, but savants like Laplace, Monge, Berthollet and Chaptal got them too, as did prefects and several of the jurists who had helped write the Code. Napoleon also set up the Maison d’Éducation de la Légion d’Honneur at Saint-Denis, an excellent boarding school providing free education for the daughters of recipients of the medal who had been killed on active service, which still exists today, as does a Légion lycée in Saint-Germain-en-Laye.

At one of the Conseil meetings in May 1802, when the foundation of the Légion was under discussion, the lawyer Théophile Berlier sneered at the whole concept, to which Napoleon replied:

You tell me that class distinctions are baubles used by monarchs, I defy you to show me a republic, ancient or modern, in which distinctions have not existed. You call these medals and ribbons baubles; well, it is with such baubles that men are led. I would not say this in public, but in an assembly of wise statesmen it should be said. I don’t think that the French love liberty and equality: the French are not changed by ten years of revolution: they are what the Gauls were, fierce and fickle. They have one feeling: honour. We must nourish that feeling. The people clamour for distinction. See how the crowd is awed by the medals and orders worn by foreign diplomats. We must recreate these distinctions. There has been too much tearing down; we must rebuild. A government exists, yes and power, but the nation itself – what is it? Scattered grains of sand.

[…]

Napoleon and Josephine’s coronation at Notre-Dame on Sunday, December 2, 1804 was a magnificent spectacle, despite the somewhat last-minute organization. It was snowing when the first guests started to arrive at 6 a.m., and they entered under a wooden and stucco neo-Gothic awning designed to mask the destructive iconoclasm wrought during the Revolution.

[…]

Nothing was contemporary except the grenadiers’ uniforms lining the route, otherwise everything was part classical, part Gothic and wholly extravagant.

[…]

He wore a long satin, gold-embroidered gown that reached his ankles, over which he had an ermine-lined crimson velvet mantle with a golden bee motif bordered with olive, laurel and oak leaves, which weighed more than 80 pounds, so it took Joseph, Louis, Lebrun and Cambacérès to lift it on to him.

[…]

Although the ceremony was based on those of the Bourbons, Napoleon broke with tradition in not making confession or taking communion.

Napoleon had two crowns during the coronation: the first was a golden laurel-wreath one that he entered the cathedral wearing which was meant to evoke the Roman Empire and which he wore throughout; the second was a replica of Charlemagne’s crown, which had to be specially made because the traditional French coronation crown had been destroyed during the Revolution and the Austrians wouldn’t lend him Charlemagne’s. Although he lifted the Charlemagne replica over his own head, as previously rehearsed with the Pope, he didn’t actually place it on top because he was already wearing the laurels. He did however crown Josephine, who knelt before him.

[…]

When the Pope had blessed them both, embraced Napoleon and intoned ‘Vivat Imperator in aeternam’, and the Mass had finished, Napoleon pronounced his coronation oath:

I swear to maintain the integrity of the territory of the Republic: to respect and to cause to be respected the laws of the Concordat and of freedom of worship, of political and civil liberty, of the irreversibility of the sale of the biens nationaux; to raise no taxes except by virtue of the law; to maintain the institution of the Légion d’Honneur; to govern only in view of the interest, the wellbeing and the glory of the French people.

Napoleon’s crowning of himself was the ultimate triumph of the self-made man, and in one way a defining moment of the Enlightenment. It was also fundamentally honest: he had indeed got there through his own efforts. It is possible that he later regretted doing it, however, because of the vaulting egoism it suggested. When the great classical painter Jacques-Louis David, who was commissioned to commemorate the coronation, wrote to Napoleon’s senior courtier Pierre Daru in August 1806 about the ‘great moment’ that had ‘astonished spectators’ (his sketch of the self-crowning is reproduced as Plate 31), he was instead ordered to paint the moment when Napoleon crowned Josephine.

[…]

Although Madame Mère hadn’t attended the coronation, when she was congratulated on her son’s elevation to the imperial purple her reply was replete with her natural fatalism and great common sense. ‘Pourvu que ça dure,’ she said. ‘Let’s hope that it lasts.’