By Robert Tracinski
Friday, December 08, 2017
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau employees, in an act
of rebellion against their newly appointed acting director, have formed a group
they call Dumbledore’s Army, named after a group of protagonists in the Harry
Potter series.
We might be tempted to tell them to read another
book. In this case, though, I’m not sure they’ve read this one, because
their rebellion of mid-level bureaucrats seems a lot less like Dumbledore’s
Army and a lot more like Dolores Umbridge.
For those who are too old to have grown up with Harry
Potter, or who have not had children in the right age range to become obsessed
with the series, let me explain the reference. Please do bear with me. It will
be relevant, I promise.
In the fifth novel of the series, “Harry Potter and the
Order of the Phoenix,” an increasingly paranoid Ministry of Magic sends a
mid-level bureaucrat, Dolores Umbridge, to exert control over Hogwarts School
of Witchcraft and Wizardry, the setting for most of the novels. Umbridge is
overbearing, officious, and obsessed with exerting her petty authority. When
the beloved head of the school, Albus Dumbledore, is ousted on trumped-up
charges, she is appointed as its new headmistress, causing our heroes to form
their own secret organization, Dumbledore’s Army, to resist her control.
I’ve written before about the problem with applying
examples from children’s stories to real-life politics. Because they are
written for children, they are necessarily simplified, vague, and allegorical.
They aren’t meant to convey the historical knowledge, ideological clarity, and
journalistic detail required for an adult understanding of politics. But hardly
anybody has an adult understanding of politics these days.
Beyond that, it strikes me that the political left keeps
getting these children’s allegories wrong. They borrow elements from Harry
Potter or from the Star Wars series and remake them as the whole basis of their
political identity—no, seriously, this is why the Left calls its opposition to
the Trump administration “the Resistance,” which is taken from the most recent
Star Wars movie. But they’re borrowing symbols of rebellion against overbearing
authority—and using them in defense of overbearing authority.
Take the case of the CFPB. Its resistance to Mick
Mulvaney began when he was appointed as their acting director in place of the
successor outgoing director Richard Cordray had chosen. Since when did an
executive agency head get to pick his own successor? Since Congress created the
CFPB with legislation that tried to give the bureau its own little island of
authority with no accountability either to Congress or to the chief executive.
President Trump had to assert the overriding law—and the constitutional
structure of government—in order to insist on his own appointment for the
agency’s head. But bureaucrats don’t
like that, so they’re trying to undermine the policies of the elected head of
the executive branch.
This has been something of a pattern since the last
election, with mid-level bureaucrats doing things like starting rogue Twitter
feeds for various government agencies, or setting up networks where they
discuss policy by way of encrypted messaging apps to avoid the scrutiny of
their superiors, as well as congressional oversight and Freedom of Information
Act requests. That’s the symbol of the Resistance: the rogue federal bureaucrat
fighting to reassert policies the permanent administrative state favors over
those voters have chosen. It is rule by and for mid-level bureaucrats, by and
for Umbridge and her equivalent.
The fact that these symbols—the rebels from Star Wars,
the Harry Potter heroes—were created by people who would describe themselves as
modern “liberals” just adds to the contradiction. It’s like all the people who
flocked to the Hunger Games novels and movies, then complained that the
Electoral College gives the Districts too much power to resist the edicts of
the Capitol. They like to play around with symbols of the heroic fight for
freedom and of individualistic resistance against authority, then turn around and impose rigid codes of
conformity and demand a big, intrusive government staffed by exactly the kind
of power-hungry bureaucrats they just told us they were against.
Maybe it’s a form of overcompensation. The more they
advocate tyranny, the more they have to cosplay as freedom fighters. They play
at being the Resistance to keep from having to recognize that they are
loyalists of the Empire. Or they play at being Dumbledore’s Army to avoid
looking in the mirror and seeing Dolores Umbridge.
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