By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, June 12, 2024
I’ve always wanted to visit Morocco, and not just to
thank it for being the first country to recognize the United States of America.
I like fez hats and old cities. ‘Nuff said.
But Morocco has problems, starting with corruption. Among
the 180 countries scored
by Transparency International, it’s squarely in the meaty part of the bell
curve—at 97.
It’s just slightly more corrupt than India, Lesotho, and the Maldives and
slightly less than Argentina, Albania, and Belarus. Such rankings are more art
than science and these distinctions are pretty fine. I mean, anyone looking to
do business in Morocco who is concerned about corruption won’t have their fears
allayed with the assurance, “Hey, we’re marginally less corrupt than Belarus
and Albania.” But we’ll be coming back to that in a moment.
The country is in a bit of a pickle of late because
Morocco’s economy is largely run out of the royal court, and since 2018, King
Mohammed VI has all but vanished thanks to a bromance he’s
struck up with Abu Azaitar, a German MMA fighter, who did a three-year stint in
prison for brutally beating up
a businessman. Azaitar, along with his brothers, monopolize the king’s time and
benefit handsomely from his largesse. “They use military jets, they have carte
blanche to function in the palace as they want, they can go to the garage and
pick up the cars they want,” a royal insider told The Economist.
This isn’t super-relevant, it’s just interesting, like
the fact that the symbol of love in Morocco isn’t the heart, but the liver.
Given the role that the liver plays in drinking, there’s a certain logic to
this. Alcohol is notoriously unreliable in the quest for Miss Right, but it is
a storied matchmaker in the quest for Miss Right Now. Still, I
find the idea of liver-shaped boxes of chocolate to be hard to get my head
around. In fairness though, some claim that the familiar “valentine” heart
symbol is derived from the netherly shape of a woman bending over. So it’s
possible that the symbol of love—outside of Morocco, that is—is really an ass.
So, who are we to judge? The liver wants what the liver wants.
Anyway, I bring up Morocco because around the time the
king started dotting the eyes in “Azaitar” with little livers, Morocco debuted
its high-speed rail system, the al Boraq. Morocco announced that construction
would begin in 2008, but delays in financing pushed back construction until
2011, when the French rail company SNCF was brought in to expedite the
project.
SNCF made the decision to work in Morocco after years of
frustration in an even more opaque and confusing realm: California (the “C” is
pronounced with a “K” sound). It wanted the contract to build California’s
bullet train, but it found that dealing with California’s politicians and
bureaucrats was maddening. “There were so many things that went wrong,” a
veteran project manager told The
New York Times in 2022. “SNCF was very angry. They told the state they were
leaving for North Africa, which was less politically dysfunctional.”
Seven years later, Morocco has a bullet train. California
still has bupkis.
Now, I am not known for celebrating the wisdom of French
retreats, but in this case the French were right.
Rails to nowhere.
In 2008, voters in California approved the high-speed
rail project. It was perfectly timed with the incoming Obama administration’s
agenda of transforming America. It started pouring shmundo into what would
become the administration’s “signature
transportation project”—13 high-speed rail corridors across the country.
“That investment is how we can break ground across the country, putting people
to work building high-speed rail lines,” Obama explained,
“because there’s no reason why Europe or China should have the fastest trains
when we can build them right here in America.” This was back in the days when
the Obama-Biden administration was insisting the country was strewn with
“shovel-ready jobs.”
If you define high speed as exceeding 150 mph, America
has exactly one such corridor, the Acela. But this designation would be
generous since—in the entire corridor from Washington, D.C., to Boston—it can
only reach these speeds on one 50-mile stretch. The initial price tag for
California’s high-speed rail system, for the 500 miles between San Francisco
and Los Angeles was supposed to be $35 billion. The project is now estimated to
be $128 billion, and the state is $100
billion short. Estimates for the 171-mile “starter segment” in Central
California alone are now about $35
billion.
Now, I like the idea of America having high-speed trains.
You could even say, in Berber-accented Arabic, “I Liver High Speed Trains.” I
also think it’d be cool to have moving sidewalks, flying cars, and giant
playpens of basset hound puppies in the waiting areas of airports. I even think
bullet trains make some sense in some places. The Houston to Dallas corridor is
one such place, because it’s very flat (every foot of elevation costs
kazillions when constructing high speed tracks) and sparsely populated. Population
density matters because NIMBYism is the most expensive factor for such
projects. Florida is very flat, but good luck getting all those densely
populated counties to greenlight a bullet train barreling through them. My main
objection to high-speed rail in the U.S. isn’t that I love trains so much—I
want to savor the experience by riding them slowly. It’s that America already
has a fantastic rail system for moving stuff. Our freight system is
“universally recognized in the industry as the best in the world,” according to
The
Economist. In America, which is very big and demographically
sprawling, we move stuff by rail and people by vehicles. In Europe, they tend
to do it the other way around.
Administrative entropy.
But I didn’t start this “news”letter with the aim of
writing about trains, transportation, or even infrastructure. I want to write
about government, or really, governing. Corrupt political systems have an
upside. The king of Morocco really wanted a bullet train. Once he figured out
how to pay for it, there really wasn’t much standing in his way. Think of it
this way, red tape in Morocco is probably a big problem for most people. But if
you’re a German MMA fighter and the king likes your musk, red tape isn’t much
of a problem. Just walk onto a military base and borrow a plane. You might not
even need to fill out a form or leave a deposit.
In political philosophy this is the appeal of the
philosopher-king. Frederick the Great was the poster boy of “enlightened
absolutism.” Of course, the idea would be that the “enlightened” part would
guide the “absolutism” part. Frederick the Great worked like a dog for his
people, waking every morning predawn to go over the books. King Mohammed, on
the other hand, spends 200 days a year at his beach pad in Gabon or in places
like Paris sparring with his MMA pals.
In the West, the dream of enlightened monarchical
absolutism gave way to technocratic absolutism. Hence all the man-crushes
Western intellectuals of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries had for everyone
from Otto von Bismarck to Mussolini, Stalin, Lee Kuan Yew, and the Chinese
Communist Party. In America, the progressives—who envied the “efficiency” of
autocracy and authoritarianism—set up a system of administrative law which they
believed would empower cadres and castes of “disinterested” experts to pursue optimal
policies without much heed to traditional concepts of the rule of law,
separation of powers, or democratic accountability. They were hugely successful
in setting up the system they wanted, but that system is what Public Choice
Theorists would describe as a “hot mess.”
The way I see it, the vast system of bureaucratic
agencies and the government workers who populate them, along with the countless
special interests including unions, environmental groups, trial lawyers, and
people named Todd, have become a class. This is not a new idea. I am a bit
obsessed with the intellectual history of what used to be called the “new
class.” I won’t get in the weeds here, but the basic idea is that the modern
state and the modern economy created, well, a new class of workers, intellectuals,
bureaucrats, etc. Different thinkers had different groups in mind for who made
up the new class, depending on the societies they were writing about and the
time they were writing in. The easiest place to grasp the idea is the Soviet
Union. The Communist Party, as designed by Lenin, was above and separate from
the government, the military, the church, the media, and the economy generally.
It was, to use terms considered archaic by these scientific socialists, a
priesthood and an aristocracy all at once. As political theorist Max Shactman put
it, the Communist Party “is unique, in that it does not own the national
property which it rules but does ‘own’ the state. It derives its vast economic
power and privilege exclusively from the political power it exercises through
its chosen instrument, the Communist Party.”
James Burnham had a wider lens. The philosopher wouldn’t
have disagreed with that description of the Soviet Union, but he believed there
was a worldwide revolution in political economy in which the “managerial elite”
was becoming a recognizable class everywhere. The ruling classes in the Soviet
Union and Nazi Germany ruled by bureaucratic fiat, but so did the new
administrative state in New Deal America. “‘Laws’ today in the United States,
in fact most laws, are not being made any longer by Congress,” Burnham wrote in
his book The Managerial Revolution, “but by the NLRB, SEC, ICC,
AAA, TVA, FTC, FCC, the Office of Production Management (what a revealing
title!), and the other leading ‘executive agencies.’” Burnham’s book had been
influenced by fellow theorist Bruno Rizzi’s book The Bureaucratization of
the World (though it’s more accurate to say he was influenced by Trotsky’s
outraged response to the book). George Orwell’s 1984 was
directly inspired by The Managerial Revolution.
Okay, enough of all that. The relevance of this
eggheadery is that we now have a system of government that is not government
per se. The best you can say about public sector unions is that they have a
dual mission: the stuff we think of as their jobs—teaching, policing,
road-building, paper-pushing, safety inspections, whatever—and protecting their
fiefdoms and privileges. This was put on stark display during the pandemic when
teachers’ unions had a choice between their two missions and decisively chose
the latter. One of the reasons the D.C. economy is such a mess is that the
Biden administration is terrified of
telling government agencies that the era of telecommuting needs to end now that
the pandemic is over.
Then there’s the fact that government workers have in
effect lifelong tenure (a point often left out of
calculations about their total compensation). I haven’t been able to find
recent numbers, but in 2011, the top driver of job turnover at many government
agencies wasn’t firing or lay-offs, but death by
natural causes. In 2013, the firing rate of
government employees was .47—not surprising given that it takes between six months
and a little over a year to fire a federal employee. I’m not trying to put
undue blame on the workers. The point is that these rules speak to the fact
that the mission of their bosses—union bosses and government bosses alike—isn’t
necessarily the work. Red tape is a problem, but red tape isn’t just a function
of petty-mindedness. If your job is to grant permits, the incentives to make
permitting complicated and expensive are enormous. If getting a permit is
simple and easy, why have the permitting process in the first place? The
complexity of the process is what justifies the existence of the process—and
the processors—in the first place.
The Biden administration’s biggest stumbling block in
getting electric vehicle charging stations built is that it cannot get permits
quickly. It’s amazing how if you oppose funding for electric car
infrastructure you hear a lot of shrieks about an “existential crisis” and how
there’s no time to waste. You don’t hear nearly as much shrieking about the
sometimes years-long permitting process.
These are just some of the facets of what writer Jonathan
Rauch, drawing on Mancur Olson’s work, dubbed “demosclerosis,”
the artery-hardening of the body politic. It took 410 days to build the
Empire State Building beginning in 1930; four years to erect the Golden Gate
Bridge a few years later. The Pentagon took 16 months in the early ‘40s; the
Alaska Highway just nine months in 1942. Meanwhile, Boston’s Big Dig, from
planning to completion, took more than 24 years. California’s
high-speed rail, if it’s ever completed, might take twice as long. Deny it all
you want somewhere in the system, those delays aren’t considered bugs, but
features.
I am a huge fan of Rauch and Olson’s work, and I think it
has massive explanatory value. But I think there’s another part of the
explanation. This system, defended by the new class and given legalistic
legitimacy by the administrative state, is a kind of second government. I’d
call it the “deep state” but I don’t want to encourage the jabroneys who love
to talk about the deep state like it’s Hydra or an extension of the Biden Crime
Family.
The first problem with this second government is that it
doesn’t govern well. And the reason for that is ancient. As I wrote in Suicide
of the West, it’s really an ancient form of government more similar to
feudal aristocratic and guild systems than we moderns want to acknowledge or
even see.
But the primary problem with the second government is
that it is unaccountable.
Yuval Levin’s wonderful new book American
Covenant gets to the heart of a lot of this. The system set up by the
Founders is about governing, administration, and getting things done that
voters want done. It has mechanisms for holding elected officials accountable
in no small part because it puts elected officials in charge of
getting things done. In a world of competitive elections, leaders have to keep
on their toes like Robert Reich at a urinal. Congress and state legislatures
are supposed to be the places where elected representatives hash out what is to
be done and at what cost. They do very little of that now because over the last
century they have handed the keys to the actual government to largely
unfireable and invisible administrators with conflicting missions. The
administrators’ constituencies aren’t primarily the public, the voters, or the
taxpayers, but their own workers and the special interests most concerned with
maintaining the status quo. This hybrid system elects people merely to nudge
the managerial class in one direction or another—and poorly at that. To the
extent we elect people to govern, we elect them to push for more funding for
this bureaucracy or that one. We don’t elect anybody to actually run the
bureaucracies, which thanks to old growth jungles of administrative law, are
essentially on auto-pilot anyway.
One of Yuval’s core points is that our political system
was set up to be competitive. Competition, between candidates,
parties, branches of government, and even litigants in a court of law, is how
we discover best practices and satisfy the desires of voters. But in Washington
and in places like California, the actual people running the government have
protected themselves from the competitive system established by the
Founders.
This was by design. It was what Woodrow Wilson and his
crowd wanted. They thought they were inventing a new, better, form of
government that took politics out of governing. But go back to Aristotle: How
to govern is politics. We still have politics, of course.
Politics is a permanent feature of any community larger than a hermit. But the
politics we have aren’t new, or even newer than
the “science of politics” envisioned by the Founders. They’re older. They’re
the politics of guilds, priesthoods, aristocrats, mandarins, Roman equestrians,
and other unelected “stakeholders” in static, sclerotic, systems.
The frustrating thing for me is that the ambitions of our
politicians have become ever more grandiose—Fundamental Transformation of
America! Make America Great Again!—even as their ability to do the basics of
governing has atrophied. You want high-speed rail? Fine, let’s have high-speed
rail. But don’t lie about the cost or the returns for the environment or
the economy when you do so. But more importantly don’t promise high-speed
rail—never mind the fundamental transformation of America or the restoration of
America’s soul, or world historic greatness—when you can’t even manage to do
the things we all agree government is for. If the political class was just
killing it delivering excellent schools, fighting crime, maintaining roads,
balancing the books, etc. I’d be much more open to saying, “Well done! Let’s
see what else you can do.” But when you can’t do that stuff well, don’t come to
me with promises of a Green New Deal or socialized medicine.
Demosclerosis is a form of authentic corruption. Not the
corruption of bribery and graft, or kings flattered by MMA bros. It’s the
atrophy, decay, and retreat into the self-dealing of unaccountable elites that,
from time immemorial, sees the people as resources to be exploited, not
citizens to be served. And the cure for it isn’t to move past the
constitutional vision of the Founders. It’s to restore it.
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