It was 200 years ago today....

[rory_20_uk]

Nice thread on Peterloo from labor historian Erik Loomis:






It's odd that you would finger the "civil service" as stymieing the popular will. Hint: The Cossacks work for the czar.

The Cossacks did. They were a minority that could (and were) got rid of when they were no longer useful. The Civil Service mainly reports to itself and trying to reform it is extremely difficult - since who but they who have the information.

And I am not saying that stymieing the popular will is of itself a bad thing - most people are idiots.

[Montmorency]

The Cossacks did. They were a minority that could (and were) got rid of when they were no longer useful. The Civil Service mainly reports to itself and trying to reform it is extremely difficult - since who but they who have the information.

And I am not saying that stymieing the popular will is of itself a bad thing - most people are idiots.

Civil services are not single institutions with defined interests like a trade union or a farmers' association or a retirees' association, they are sets of institutions and communication networks (e.g. a national security establishment). Everyone who's not a Trump-tier idiot in politics knows this and understand the need to establish or make use of parallel communication and information networks to learn what is "really" going on. Every layer of bureaucracy distorts information, less from active agenda than from passive bias, or even perceptions of the chief's own bias. Moreover there is the natural attenuating effect of communication across any large impersonal organization, which has never been fully overcome. Anyone of experience or competence is aware of these problems and moves to work around them as soon as they take office. Those who have well-formed desires find ways to lead civil services in the direction they wish. A Trump type is both easy and difficult for a civil service, easy because easy to manipulate and misinform in the mold of cretinous hereditary rulers, hard because he's actively and systematically working to dismantle it as he and his incompetent lackeys* try to make off with as much government largess as they can before the ship sinks. The latter shows how fragile civil services can be in the face of hostile forces of various provenance and objective, exactly why developed countries have strived over time to professionalize them and safeguard them from subversion.

People are not idiots for wanting economic security and political participation per se. But it's not the civil service that generally presents an obstacle to such reform. Think about what reforms are proposed, who proposes them, what implications these proposals have for stakeholders, at what point in the process they stumble, and what reforms ultimately succeed. I haven't seen that many episodes, but a show like Yes Minister is ultimately naive in presenting decision-making on the parameters of politics as a product of rooms filled with bureaucrats and elected officials. The elephant is not in the room, but its shadow certainly is.


*With the exception of individuals like Stephen Miller and Bill Barr, who are not incompetent and thus all the more dangerous for their ideological (as opposed to merely corrupt) stakes