So, As It Turns Out, Brain-Dead, Morally Bankrupt, Rampant Incompetence Matters
How do
we know? Look around you.
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Pickett charged. France built the
Maginot line. The Empire left a big honking hole in the side of the Death Star,
which allowed it to be destroyed.
The history of military stupidity could fill volumes. But never,
never has anyone seen a combination of ignorance, incoherence, and incompetence
as we have seen from Donald Trump, Pete Hegseth, and their Capitol Hill chorus
of wingnut oompa loompas.
I have long felt that one of the many
flaws of the culture of Washington, DC—which, candidly, I see as responsible
for many of this country’s ills—is that the least admired or discussed quality
we seek in our leaders is management skill.
Naturally, that critique has changed
dramatically in the Age of Trump.
Other fundamental systemic flaws have
come to the fore. Most notable among these is corruption. It may be a cliché
that money is the root of all evil. But that does not mean it is not true in
certain settings. Our nation’s capital is one of them.
Money is the toxin that has put the
interests of the few ahead of the interests of all the rest of us, turned
control of our politics over to an ever-more powerful oligarchy and perverted
our national priorities in myriad profoundly dangerous ways both at home and
abroad. But it has not just undermined democracy in America. It has also
produced a class of professional politicians and their supporting cast in the
policy community who dance to the tune of those who are enriching them today or
who will do so tomorrow.
The promise of future of employment
hinted at over breakfast at the Four Seasons restaurant in Georgetown and a
pattern of senior government officials becoming millionaires many times over
upon their departure from the government has led many an influential
Washingtonian to put their thumb on the scales of national legislative or
public policy outcomes. No cash is exchanged—for now. No brown paper bags full
of money are handed over (except in the case of the crassly clueless like DHS
thug Tom Homan). Instead, there is a you-scratch-my-back,
I’ll-make-you-richer-than-you’ve-ever-dreamed subtext to thousands of
conversations a day in the city that has pushed our government further and
further from the ideal of serving the “will of the people.”
Some people are served to be sure.
Just not most of us.
Another fundamental and deeply
ingrained pathology in the way Washington works is that the incentives that
exist within the city for those who have aspirations to more power through
winning appointment to top jobs are all wrong. To get confirmed by the Senate
for a senior job or even to be considered for one by the White House Office of
Personnel Management, now requires that candidates have a paper trails that is
largely scrubbed of controversy.
(While this is not true for some at
the top of a lawless administration like the current one, it is consistently
true even among our more traditional and even “high-minded” leadership teams.)
The result is that people who want top
jobs refrain from every saying or writing anything publicly that might be a
source of controversy. In turn, this leads to people being seen as “promising”
or “hirable” not because of the quality of their thinking but for the absence
of it.
The result is a risk-averse community
in which non-entities are often seen as the most acceptable candidates.
Call it the bland-leading-the-bland.
This in turn has produced another
twist in an already deeply twisted leadership culture in the United States—the
elevation of people to top jobs with little or no experience handling tough
decisions or, in some cases, with little to no experience at all.
When being confirmable in an
atmosphere of hyper media (and especially social media) scrutiny leads to
hiring folks who just don’t know what they’re doing, that leads to not just
something less than the best and the brightest (a term of derision when it was
first floated by David Halberstam back in the day when there was at least a
pretense of seeking officials with strong credentials), it leads to ineptitude.
Combine it with a president who is an
authoritarian ego-maniac who does not think he needs advice at all—and who
therefore appoints people to top jobs who are either nullities, agents of his
own corruption (see above), or who possess other traits that he does value
(like blind, German Shepherd-like, loyalty to him) and you have the birth of
another disease within our nation’s leadership culture: profound, almost
unfathomable incompetence.
Like a focus on management skills,
incompetence is not super sexy to write about and after all, reporters also end
up serving twisted incentive structures (in which drama or chaos or criminality
or lunacy produce the kind of headlines that keep them employed), too. So,
writing that people just aren’t up to the job is not done as often as it ought
to be. (As it happens, another problem with DC and the way U.S. democracy has
evolved is that the oxygen of our political ecosystem is media coverage of
leaders who recognize that the access they provide reporters is yet another way
to make a pay off, buy loyalty, gain influence…just the same as dangling a job
at Goldman Sachs or handing Homan a bag full of cash.
It is hard to overstate how broken DC
has become from the venal careerism from its hyper-ambitious residents…and the
wink, wink, nod, nod “this is how the game is played” dimensions of life in
this literal and figurative swamp.
That’s not to say there are not many
people in Washington who have come here out of a desire to serve their country.
There are. It’s just that fewer and fewer of them are found where they should
be, in top jobs, as the system of rewards and what is valued becomes more and
more bent.
When we have people without values
atop the system, it quickly therefore becomes the worst possible version of
itself.
Doubt me? Read a newspaper.
(Americans shift to forms of following
the news that are more superficial, sensational and short-sighted are just one
of the ways this country’s citizens help feed what is broken in DC. That’s not
news. But, neither is most of what they prefer to read. Suffice it to say the
rampant decline in our national culture and standards (Kardashianism) has
exacerbated just what is wrong with Washington—which has been, let’s be honest,
pretty fucked up since the days that Jefferson and Hamilton hired pamphleteers to
traffic in the scandals of one another or when robber barons had special access
to presidents and were hands-on co-managers of the national economy.)
Anyway, back to the worst possible
version of a deeply fucked-up leadership culture in our nation’s capital…which
would be the one we have got now. All the above maladies are serious and not
only deserve to be scrutinized more carefully but must be corrected if we are
ever to pull this country out of the tailspin it is in. And make no mistake
about it. We’re in a tailspin. It’s not just that the news has left your head
spinning.
But the point I want to make is that
lost in this dysfunction gumbo upon which America’s government floats, that
we’re seeing unprecedented levels of fuckery across the board and that in the
midst of all that, it may be hard to appreciate just how off-the-scale we are
on the sheer incompetence part of the equation.
Trump, to begin with, is both
intellectually lazy and intellectually defective. He is a megalomaniac and a
narcissist who thinks he’s the world’s expert on everything and who also fears
being exposed by anyone who actually understands what is going on. So, the
president in most need of good advice from good advisors is getting less of it
than any in our modern history. Indeed, to paraphrase John F. Kennedy, even
when Thomas Jefferson dined alone he was getting more better guidance from the
voices in his head than Trump is getting from his entire government of
imbeciles and yes-men and yes-women.
And he doesn’t know it. So he forges
ahead with idiotic impulse-driven directive after moronic brain fart-driven
command. And no one challenges him. Not in the White House. Not in his family.
Not in the right-wing media bubble. Not on Capitol Hill. Not even from the
voices in his own head which are probably resulting from diseased flashbacks to
the sex crimes of his youth and thereafter.
Compounding the problem(s) described
above, the people called upon to carry out his orders are toadies who are the
most incompetent cluster of humans ever assembled in a single government and
possibly in a single group. I was pretty sure that evolution had eliminated all
such groups in the past as you would have assumed their impulses to eat rocks
and fuck knotholes in trees would have led to their dying out.
But apparently no.
So we have the least able, most
defective Secretary of Defense in U.S. history presiding over illegal war after
war crime after misguided military adventure after
Christian-nationalist-inspired new crusade. We have a Secretary of the Treasury
who looks like a cartoon rich person and proves like Trump and so many in his
orbit that being rich does not imply being smart. We have a Secretary of State
who is so blinded by ambition that he surgically removed his own spine just as
he slithered into a pair of clown-shoe-sized Florsheims. And that is to say
nothing of evil lizard-person Stephen Miller, worm-brained crank RFK, Jr., the
anti-education former wrestling exec who is dismantling our Department of
Education, our energy and transportation secretaries who simply take dictation
from big campaign donors without a clue as to what they are doing, the posse of
corrupt racists who are running our Department of Homeland Security and all the
rest. There is more cage-fighting experience in this government leadership team
than there are people who actually know how to run-government agencies and when
it comes to sex-abuse charges or hosting Fox television shows there is a
superabundance whereas when it comes to qualified administrators with even an
understanding of good governance, we have none.
Which is how you get a war like the
one in Iran which was unnecessary, misguided and is producing virtually ever
unintended but predictable consequence imaginable. It is also how you have in
virtually every cabinet department people not just making bad choices but
people making the worst possible choices—on healthcare, environment, finance,
retirement, social services, agriculture or every other government function.
Not just bad choices.
The worst possible choices. The
opposite of what we need. More endless wars. Much bigger budget deficits. More
for those who need it least and less for those who need it most. Destroying our
environment. Empowering our enemies. Empowering our economic rivals.
Not just bad choices. But the worst
possible choices.
Executed in the worst possible way by
the worst possible people.
And stop and think. You know this is
not an overheated partisan rant. You know it is the truth. The world knows it
is the truth.
Every day the evidence we see proves
it is so. A war that shouldn’t have been started. That has produced zero net
benefits for the American people. At an incredibly high cost after only three
weeks. The entire Middle East is aflame. There is no near-term prospect of a
return to pre-war stability. Iran’s nuclear program is not only not destroyed
but the incentives for it to restart the program or use its enriched uranium
stockpiles have gone up. So too has the government gone from hardline to very
likely even more extreme. We have seen the biggest global disruption in energy
supplies ever. Global gas and food prices and shortages are likely to continue
for months after the war ends…whenever that is, whatever “ending” the war
means. Our allies are angrier than ever at us. Israel is waging simultaneous
and inhumane wars and fighting in Gaza, the West Bank and in Lebanon. Our
military is distracted from its other priorities. Our stockpiles of key weapons
are depleted and will take years to replenish. Ukraine, where our investment of
money and materiel produced the greatest return on investment in U.S. defense
spending history, is now being squeezed and will find it harder to get crucial
U.S. air defense systems. At the same time, Ukraine’s enemy, Russia…the enemy
of all U.S. interests in Europe…is both assisting Iran with targeting Americans
and, at the same time, being enriched by crazy U.S. policies of lifting
sanctions on the trade in Russian energy. Even more crazy, we’re allowing the
sale of Iranian oil which will help refill Iran’s coffers…a bigger bonanza by
far for Iran than the one Trump so criticized when the U.S. under Obama
returned some Iranian assets in partial exchange for a much-needed nuclear
deal…which Trump broke. China, our number one rival, gains status as a force
for stability when we are seen as erratic and dangerous. Chinese focuses on
growth…we continue not just to focus on war as we foolishly have done for a
quarter century but other Trump policies are destroying our other competitive
advantages one by one.
It’s a fiasco driven entirely by
Guinness Book of World Records-level incompetence.
It’s not the sexiest story about this
particularly fucked up moment in U.S. history. But it is one that we, as
voters, need to note.
It matters if our leaders know how to
do their jobs, if the people around them know how to do their jobs, if what
they seek are good outcomes, if they know the difference between good and bad
outcomes, if they are capable morally and intellectually of serving the people.
And, right now, we’re zero for
everything on that list.
