A few propositions for the present moment …
Someday, we’ll look back on this period as we do 1950 or thereabouts, with some demagogue saying, “I have in my hand a list of 57 genders and pronouns” (with the due caveat that the first guy was more right than wrong).
The current structure of the administrative state is the partisan instrument of the Democratic Party, and the majority of career civil servants are Democrats. Ergo …
What prompted this thought was an amazing self-own by Bruce Bartlett, a once-sound supply-side economist who succumbed somehow to the precursor of Trump derangement syndrome — in his case, Bush derangement syndrome back in the aughts:
Answer: It isn’t different at all. They’re communists in both cases. (Though, in fact, a lot of the communists in the federal government by 1950 had been quietly purged by the Truman administration before Joe McCarthy got on to the issue. Truman had to cover up the extent of communist penetration of the federal government because it would have been damaging to the Democratic Party in the 1948 election.)
So what’s the problem?
I expect that we’ll also look back on the current transgender explosion, especially “transwomen,” in much the same way we look back on the hippies of the late 1960s, with their ridiculous hair, wardrobe, communal ethic that always crashed and burned, lack of hygiene, and, above all, cocksureness that they had all the answers to everything and demanded to stand up to the Man.
One part of their disposition was partly right: Today, many of them have become the Man and deserve toppling. The point is: No one wants to be a ’60s hippie today.
I was rereading Lord Charnwood’s 1916 biography of Lincoln the other day (still the finest biography of Lincoln ever written, in my opinion) for something I am working on, and I was arrested by this passage: Lincoln “was the most surprising nomination ever made in America. … At this critical moment the fit man was chosen on the very ground of his supposed unfitness.”
Hmmm.
Have any of the progressive critics of the Constitution stopped to reflect that all those features they want to junk because they frustrate their progressive desires for “Action now!” are the very features that will prevent an actual Trump “dictatorship”? I’ll wait.
We’ll see how far Trump gets with being able to fire federal employees with civil service status. But let’s remember: The current civil service system was set up to avoid partisan patronage and have a professional class of neutral civil servants. The current structure of the administrative state is the partisan instrument of the Democratic Party, and the majority of career civil servants are Democrats. Ergo …
This is genius (and likely true):
Editor’s note: A version of this article appeared originally at Power Line.
Read the full article here
