By Kevin D. Williamson
Thursday, February 09, 2017
Because they are so rare — and I mean unicorn rare —
positive bureaucratic experiences stand out in my mind. In 2001, I went into a
driver’s-license office in Montgomery County, Pa., and was greeted by a
middle-aged man wearing about 40 pieces of Masonic swag (I later learned he was
a Catholic!) who asked me what brought me in. I said I needed to trade in a
Texas driver’s license for a Pennsylvania license. He gave me a form to fill
out, asked me a couple of questions, took my money, and that was that.
Perhaps it was a Masonic plot. But if the Illuminati can
get me through the DMV in less than 15 minutes, then bring on the Illuminati,
the Bilderbergers, and the reptilian shape-shifters, too. I’ve got places to
be.
I had a similarly pleasant surprise in Europe last
summer. I am that guy who shows up at the airport a minimum of two hours before
boarding time, because the only thing I hate more than waiting is being late.
The French were threatening to go on strike, as they do weekly, and my hopes
for the efficiency of the Italian public sector were not very high. But
compared with entering or leaving the United States via JFK, it was a snap. It
did not quite make sense — I was asked for my passport about two more times
than seemed necessary — but it didn’t take a minute. I had similar experiences
in the Netherlands, where one expects such efficiency, and in Spain, where one
does not.
Maybe there is something of the old royalist or
Napoleonic attitude that survives in Europe, which approaches the matter of
bureaucracy with a certain dignity. Whereas their American counterparts
alternate between acting like they’re hustling $6 appletinis at TGI Friday’s
(“Hello, my name is Caitlyn, and I’ll be taking care of you today. Are we ready
for our rectal probe?”) and acting like they’re going to shoot you in the face
(Hello, TSA!) the front-line agents of European bureaucracy are aloof and maybe
just a little bit contemptuous, but efficient. There is a sense of pride in
position, something that we just don’t have in the United States, where being
an assistant vice principal is socially one step down from being a rodeo clown.
(And, no, I didn’t tell Ma I was a newspaper editor; she
thought I was a piano-player in a whorehouse.)
There are weird ideological fault lines in American
public life: People such as Barack Obama, whose own children would never be
expected to forsake Sidwell Friends and darken the doorway of a public school,
care much more deeply about the “public” part of “public education” than they
do about the “education” part, hence their hysterical reaction to the
nomination of school-reformer Betsy DeVos as secretary of education. No one
seriously doubts that many students, especially poor children from poor
families in poor neighborhoods, would be better served if their parents had
some real choice about where they were educated — including the choice to
attend the private schools that Democratic elected officials so often choose
for their own children — but there is some reason to believe that school-choice
programs would erode what they call the “public” nature of education, by which
they mean the monopolistic nature of our schools. A variation on that (familiar
to any libertarian) is the fact that our progressive friends get so worked up
about purported abuses in privately run prisons; the same kinds of abuses (and
worse) exist in the publicly run institutions — consider the many horrors of
Rikers Island, where not long ago a homeless veteran was roasted to death by
unionized government employees — but private prisons present the Left with a
special horror, because progressives recognize the need to lock people in cages
from time to time (for, say, the crime of holding nonconformist views on global
warming) but object deeply to the profit motive.
From kindergarten to solitary confinement: Fine, so long
as you don’t interact with the private sector at some point during the course
of that life sentence.
Though conservatives are sometimes tempted to simply
reverse that attitude, their high regard for some parts of the public sector
(military, police, etc.) generally keeps them from going absurdly far down that
road. But conservative respect for the gun-toting and uniform-wearing parts of
the public sector has its drawbacks, too: Are we so sure that the unhappy
people of Ferguson, Mo. or Baltimore or Los Angeles are entirely wrong about
the character and efficacy of their police agencies? Are we quite sure that the
Pentagon’s procurement agents are all as pious as St. Francis?
If we are to have a political exchange that amounts to
something more than an imaginary exchange between two polar positions held by
almost no one in the 21st century United States (Bismarckian étatism vs. Rothbardian
anarcho-capitalism, or Thomas Hobbes vs. Ayn Rand) then we have to pay some
attention not only to the size and the scope of the state’s agencies but also
to whether they are any good at what we ask them to do. Moralistic egalitarian
arguments for a uniform system of public education will never be persuasive to
people who know about Atlanta, or to people who are familiar with the stark
differences in school quality that can be seen by walking a mile, or to people
who know about the “rubber rooms” of New York. Our progressive friends who
demand a Scandinavian scope of
government have very little to say about achieving a Scandinavian standard of government, or even a
Canadian one, as though competence could simply be assumed in spite of all the
evidence to the contrary. They talk about the postwar years as though the only
thing that has changed since the Eisenhower administration is the top marginal
income-tax rate.
Americans do not much trust their government, for good
reason. And this has immediate, important real-world consequences. For example:
It can be difficult to distinguish between hysteria about Islam and
well-founded concern about Muslim immigration into the United States, but who
seriously thinks that our public institutions are up to the job of properly
investigating tens of thousands (or more) refugees, asylum-seekers, and
ordinary immigrants every year? If Donald Trump’s temporary order seems to you
unreasonable, ask yourself what the next-best option is and how much confidence
we should have in it. The U.S. government has been flubbing the problem of
radicals crossing our borders since Lee Harvey Oswald was simmering in Minsk.
How many terrorists and school shooters were already on the authorities’ radar,
and had been for years, before they committed spectacular atrocities? A
half-dozen examples come to mind.
That is not confidence-inspiring, and Americans do not
lack faith in their public institutions because they listen to too much talk
radio or read the editorial page of the Wall
Street Journal. They lack confidence in their public institutions because
they go to the driver’s-license office from time to time, because they see
disability fraud and Medicaid fraud all around them, because they know crooked
cops and incompetent teachers, because their memories may be short but are not
so short that they have forgotten the Clintons exist.
Generally speaking, I walk into a government office a
Bill Buckley conservative and walk out ready to join a militia in Idaho. My
temperament, fortunately for the republic, is not everyone’s. But we should not
underestimate how effective competence is as an antidote to political
radicalism and angry populism of either the left-wing or right-wing variety. No
one ever will be elected president for asking why it takes two hours for an
American to get back into his own country through JFK but six minutes to pass
through Barajas in Madrid, or why a law-abiding regular guy has to provide a
birth certificate, Social Security card, and additional photo ID to go about
his ordinary business as a citizen while we cannot enforce the law against
illegal aliens.
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