What If You Ran a Country, and the Civil Service Was Against You?
Seriously, If the Ship Is Full of Rats, What Do You Do?
I, like everyone else with even a jot of curiosity regarding the political world, have been amused at the edge of my seat with the ridiculous backlash against Donald Trump. Seriously, as a pretty hard-core libertarian and Objectivist, I’m not exactly naturally inclined to support Trump’s policies beyond the rhetoric regarding reducing governmental overhead for business.
Frankly, I think he’s insane. But entertaining! And his particular brand of insanity is considerably less toxic than that of the Clinton Monarchy, so in the end I cast a baleful eye at them both and ended up being comfortable that I would be amused for the next four years.
Well, that’s paid off extremely well.
As someone without a dog in this hunt and an unlimited amount of schadenfreude, the degree to which the mainstream media and generally Left-leaning people have absolutely lost their shit is amazing. Beyond amazing, because it is pursued without a single iota of self reflection or self-awareness. It’s as if someone said, “dance as if no one is watching — except do it in the middle of the street, while screaming at the people you’re trying to convince, and setting pictures of them on fire, while throwing rocks through the windows of businesses that support you. But keep dancing!”
All that is fine but I do have a stake in the continuing functioning of a government which provides for a few things that I actually like. Like roads. Bridges. Business infrastructure. Frameworks for resolving disputes within the law and with fewer duels. That sort of thing. That’s the sort of thing I’m in favor of, but at the moment all those things have one significant drawback:
They require people. People are the problem.
You see, people can act in ways which are unconsciously coordinated toward ends which are not in anyone’s best interest. For instance, the vast, vast majority of journalists and journalistic organizations donate aggressively to the Democratic Party. That’s a terrible state of affairs, even if you are in favor of the platform of the Democratic Party because your guaranteed not to be well-informed, well positioned, or even aware of ideas outside of that bubble — not because journalists are consciously keeping you from them but because they simply are not aware of them. A lack of ideological diversity has acted as a memetic toxin, killing their ability to think.
What they can’t think about, they can’t imagine.
What they can’t imagine, they can’t talk about.
What they can’t talk about, they can’t tell you about.
This led me to think about a couple of other stories that have recently been big in the news. In particular about “Trump’s travel ban.”
I’m not going to get into a lot of logical deconstruction or even discussion of that bit of policy. The National Review and other people have done a much better job than I ever will in breaking down the facts about this Executive Order.
No, what’s interesting to me is the parallel story of the way the currently standing civil service has reacted to this Executive Order.
For instance, Sally Yates:
And then there’s the psychotic breakdown going on within the DHS and State Department:
In the one instance you have a member of the Executive Branch deliberately instructing her subordinates not to follow a legal order by her boss. Not offering legal counsel to her boss which was considered and discarded, but actively informing her subordinates not to do their duly delegated jobs in support of a policy they don’t get to set.
That she was fired immediately after is the actual shocking part of this because we’ve become completely accustomed to civil servants doing whatever they please without repercussions or impact — just as long as it goes along in the general trough of what the Democratic Party of the United States wants.
Ignore federal law as regards illegal immigrants and the reporting thereof when they engage in criminal enterprise? “Sanctuary cities” are awesome; leave them alone.
Using the IRS as a weapon against conservative organizations which oppose administration objectives? Perfectly okay. They had it coming.
Run a private email server and use it to evade both FOIA requests and signed documentation that says all correspondence executed while running the State Department is government property? Only “negligent.”
The idea that Sally Yates will actually no longer have a job for directly opposing an EO is shocking because, as the American public, we are simply not used to seeing civil servants suffer repercussions.
And as for the DHS and State Department…
In practice, the senior immigration official told The Intercept, the directive means that if individuals fleeing wars or persecution in the countries targeted by Trump file for asylum, “We can’t issue a final decision.” Immigration authorities also can’t grant what is called “adjustment of status” to people already in the U.S. With respect to the oath ceremonies referenced in the directive, the official said the language indicates those could be placed on hold. When they would be resolved is unclear.
Now, if you can’t issue a final decision. It’s called “a hold.” That’s where you don’t do things for a while, giving other people time to figure out if you’re doing the right thing.
“Permission to work, adjust status to a citizen or a permanent resident, any immigration form they have will stay in limbo,” the official explained. “We know what is coming. These cases will all likely be denied after significant waits.”
“You know what is coming,” do you? So you’re saying that you are aware that you are processing applications and resident status paperwork which is guaranteed not to pass a more rigorous vetting process? Do you know that this is what’s going to happen because you were in DHS or State during the Obama holds on Middle Eastern immigration in 2011 and 2015? Or are you just making shit up?
Spicer’s comments further infuriated State Department officials who in the dissent memo clearly expressed their belief that the president’s ban “will not achieve its stated aim of to [sic] protect the American people from terrorist attacks” but that instead it would “immediately sour relations with these six countries, as well as much of the Muslim world” as well as “increase anti-American sentiment.”
I would like to suggest to the intelligent reader that they consider what countries are on this list.
Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen.
Of these seven, Iran is a coherent, avowed opponent of the Western world and Western civilization. Of the rest, which currently have governments or quasi-government organizations which can be reliably counted on to vet potential immigrants through? Which have governments or quasi-government organizations which are actually not engaged with US military forces or their proxies or have been in the last 10 years?
The answer is none of them. So what we have here is a State Department statement that suggests that if we don’t take in a few thousand refugees that have no way of being investigated or looked into via organizations or governments which are at least notionally friendly to US it will sour their relations with us. It might even increase anti-American sentiment in a region which isn’t particularly well known for having any at all.
This isn’t a portion of the civil service which is looking to support and protect the American people. These are civil service members who are the staunch opposition.
When asked what the mood was like on the inside, the State Department official responded, “In a word — chaos. And silence.”
“Today has been astonishingly silent. No NSC taskers, no communication. We’re all in suspense and on hold, and obviously fuming. This is a new era of American foreign policy that nobody I know ever really thought we’d usher in.”
And this is where things really go off the rails.
This is the State Department talking about, after all.
Silence.
On a planet with almost 400 nation-states, roiling with turmoil of various scales both domestic and foreign, internal and external. With Russia making new overtures in the Ukraine with aggressive military action. Live, active fire. With South America showing massive economic strains due to long-term socialist policies eroding the social order. With Africa being Africa. With China are beginning to flex its muscles in the South China Sea, in relation to Taiwan, and in extremely aggressive economic terms with the West.
“We are all in suspense and on hold, and obviously fuming.”
For the State Department, there’s nothing else to do. At the DHS, there are outright tears because people hired on with the full expectation that they would rubberstamp immigrant visas all day.
This led me to the question that started to bounce back and forth in my head:
What if the very underlying architecture of the US government in the form of those who provide its labor are obsessively partisan? What if there wasn’t a tacit agreement that democracy came before personal policy preference but instead an increasingly activist civil service?
What would I do if I ended up in charge of a massive organization which I knew to be politically aligned against me and increasingly willing to refuse to do the job that they signed on for if it supports policies which I believe should be in place?
But that couldn’t possibly describe the US government. Certainly not. I mean, they would have to actually be comfortable donating publicly to political parties with a serious and obvious bias, right? If anything, we should see political interest from our civil servants but a rough parallel between the public in general and of those who serve the State.
Let’s look at the numbers.
Well, that’s reassuring.
At least in 2010, two years into the Obama administration, federal and state government employees were pretty aggressively Democrat-leaning, somewhat less so for nonunion federal level employees — but given the very definite civil service union pressure in federal government, we are talking about a very small percentage of civil service at the federal level which identifies as more likely to be Republican and Democrat.
By “reassuring” I mean “kind of disgusting.”
But all right, in the years since 2010 we’ve learned that polling is an inexact science, to put it gently. Especially on issues which the speaker believes their position is socially importune, they’ll simply lie about it. This is how you get the wide disparity between what the polls showed about the lead up to the 2016 presidential election and what actually happened.
Maybe we shouldn’t look at percentages that are self-reported.
Maybe we should look at where the money is going. “Follow the money” has always been an incredibly useful guide to investigation.
That brings us back to the graphs which opened up this article.
Holy shit.
I would like there to be a more polite thing that I could say here, but frankly sometimes the scatological and obscene is exactly the right phrase.
Holy shit.
It’s one thing to have suspicions about a group of people who are supposed to be the eyes and hands of the organization which in theory is looking out for your livelihood. This is quite another thing. This is taking publicly accessible financial data, putting it on a graph, and having a good, hard look at it — and realizing what you’re seeing is an effective subversion of civil service.
Since 1992 the Democratic Party has received the bulk of publicly documented contributions coming from civil servants and public officials. As long as the numbers are roughly close to one another, that’s not a problem. There’s a lot of noise in the system, there are political winds that blow, and numbers can be expected to shift around.
The 2004 general election which put George W. Bush against John Kerry was a year which saw almost balanced donations from both sides and which was kind of a humdrum election year if we’re perfectly honest. Two old white guys, one of which was an incumbent and the other of which was less than exciting even to his supporters turned out donations which were equally as exciting. 2006, being a nonpresidential election year, had even less contribution activity.
But then 2008 happened.
I think everyone remembers the presidential election of 2008. The thing to note here is the immense spike in civil servant’s public official contributions to the Democratic Party. You see a almost doubling from the civil service sector — and a stable donation amount to the Republican Party compared to the previous presidential election cycle.
Does anyone here think that civil servants in 2008 suddenly had twice the amount of disposable income that they had to throw at presidential election contribution funds for the Democratic Party? Raise your hands. Yes, even you people in the back. Does anyone seriously think that civil servants suddenly had twice the amount of free money floating around in their pockets to be thrown at the Democratic Party?
Maybe you do. I suppose it’s possible. The last term of George W. Bush could have been a complete boon for US civil servants who were members of a union or otherwise inclined to donate to the Democratic Party while simultaneously not affecting nonunion/Republican-leaning civil servants. It’s theoretically possible. It could happen.
It didn’t, and you can probably determine if someone is sane or not by whether they believe that it did, but it could’ve.
Again in 2012, we see the same pattern. Democratic Party donations are still over $18 million while Republican Party donations hover around $8 million. Good old Barry takes the White House again, but as we know beyond the scope of the presidential election, the Democratic Party lost seats in Congress, state governors, and state legislatures across the nation. It appears they could buy a presidency but holding onto a government with sheer fiscal force was another matter.
And that brings us to 2016.
Civil service donations to the Democratic Party struck a new high, over $24 million. Again, unless you believe that the last few years of the Bush presidency were an absolute windfall for the civil service, what we see here has to be people deciding to invest more of their limited income in activist support for a given outcome.
The Democratic Party lost, and they lost big. Not only did the Imperial Presidency slip through their fingers but they lost even more seats in Congress, even more state governorships, and even more seats in state legislatures. Overall since 2008 the Democratic Party lost in excess of 1000 elected seats across the nation.
But what they didn’t lose was civil service seats. Governmental civil service is a remarkably hard to job to get fired from. Incompetence does not suffice. I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to go research what happens to civil servants who bumble and fumble their way through their jobs for decades.
Hint: there’s a reason that the useless civil servant is the core around which thousands of jokes are built.
Most of those civil servants are in union positions. As we saw even in 2010, most of the union civil servants are relatively public about their preference for the Democratic Party. At the state level, the numbers showed that there was even more support for the Democratic Party, according to that Gallup poll.
That brings us back to Sally Yates, the DHS, and the State Department.
Sally Yates was an Obama appointee. The DHS and State Department have long been known to be aggressively and publicly supportive of some of the most radical parts of the Democratic Party platform, and again — many of the senior officials in both organizations are either longtime government union members or political appointees by the newly replaced presidential administration.
What do you do when you inherit a ship full of rats that you would prefer didn’t sink and find that an extremely large number of them are actively gnawing on the hull?
That’s the position that Donald Trump finds himself in as president of the United States.
I have the sneaking suspicion that part of the “travel ban” exists not because of real concerns about immigration, but because it’s enough of a hot button issue that it acts as a sort of poison rat bait. It’s too shiny and juicy not to take a bite of, not to make a public stand regarding, not to be activist in public about — especially if you have a civil servant’s long-term belief that they are essentially untouchable from a hire and fire point of view. Spend a couple of weeks winding up the media (who have been the declared enemy of Republicans and conservatism for much longer than they should have been allowed to be by a populace which cares about being well-informed), show absolutely no concern about how you’re being portrayed in the public eye and in fact play to the negatives, and you create a situation where the folks who are most likely to defy orders do so in the most showy, public way possible instead of a quiet, work-slowing-and-throwing subversion.
And that’s when you get to start saying, “you’re fired!”
I have been referring to Donald Trump as President Trollface and President Honey Badger a lot. The man is an exquisite troll, bringing us certain subtlety to poking hornet’s nests left and right with just the right stick and just the right amount of force. The kids on 4chan could stand to take notes. He also simply does not give a fuck, which is a trait which I didn’t realize that I actually wanted in an elected official.
That’s not actually true. I was absolutely supporting John McAfee for Libertarian candidate for president, and that man is also a professional Trollface and Honey Badger.
Donald Trump appears to have inherited an entire government which, over the last couple decades, has declared itself — almost as one — to be members of the administration’s opposition party.
That should concern people. That should have been concerning people a lot earlier than today.
The main difference is that right now it is almost impossible to ignore that the civil service subculture that exists in the United States right now is largely monocultural.
Before today, it was just parading naked back and forth in front of its bay window. Now it’s burst into your front door and rubbing its naughty bits directly against your nose.
I’m not sure what I would do about it, but I am having a good time watching President Trollface deal with it.
