David Brooks’ Failed Straw God

WHY SET UP MEN OF STRAW, WHEN A GOD IS AVAILABLE?

David Brooks’, the New York Times’ house conservative, sets up, not a man, but a god made of straw. He then spends his latest effort telling Americans to cool it when this contraption fails.

Brooks proposes that those who initially warned that large government bureaucracies are by their nature, inefficient at their tasks, STFU when those same bureaucracies fail at the tasks they’ve been assigned.

His piece is titled “The God That Fails“. But the entire piece is a straw god–and it fails.

But there was a realistic sense that human institutions are necessarily flawed. History is not knowable or controllable. People should be grateful for whatever assistance that government can provide and had better do what they can to be responsible for their own fates.

That mature attitude seems to have largely vanished. Now we seem to expect perfection from government and then throw temper tantrums when it is not achieved. We seem to be in the position of young adolescents — who believe mommy and daddy can take care of everything, and then grow angry and cynical when it becomes clear they can’t.

Brooks confuses government’s proper roles and responsibilities in his piece with tasks the government has muscled its way into–much of the time with cheer-leading provided by Brooks’ employer.

One of the federal government’s legitimate tasks is collective security. When it fails, due to typical bureaucratic bumbling and inefficiencies, citizens have a right to raise their voices. Many conservatives and libertarians pointed out that when the Department of Homeland Security was created, it would probably bring the same efficiencies to homeland security and the Postal Service has brought to postal service or that Amtrak has brought to passenger trains.

In fact, “more protocols, more layers and more review systems” were exactly not what was needed. “Streamlining” in government-ese usually means more employees, turf, power, money–and inefficiency and finger-pointing when things go bad.

Resilient societies have a level-headed understanding of the risks inherent in this kind of warfare.

But, of course, this is not how the country has reacted over the past week. There have been outraged calls for Secretary Janet Napolitano of the Department of Homeland Security to resign, as if changing the leader of the bureaucracy would fix the flaws inherent in the bureaucracy. There have been demands for systemic reform — for more protocols, more layers and more review systems.

What Brooks’ doesn’t say here are two things. 1-That the ones calling for systemic reform are mostly, 2-the very persons that have spent the last year or more denying there’s any reason to have a system–failing or unreformed or not– in the first place.

One of the loudest voices the last week has been that of Charles Krauthammer, who believes that the Obama has spent the last year denying that the War on Terror exists.

Yes, the Obama administration has the same bureaucracy that its predecessor left in place. But the Bush administration’s terror bureaucracy knew fighting terrorists was its raison d’etre.

Janet Napolitano muddied the mission to cleaning up the mess left by some non-existent future calamity perpetrated by militias composed of Ron Paul supporters.

Napolitano’s bureaucracy was prepared for a “man-made contingency”, not “terror”. It responded accordingly.

Brooks knocks over his straw god of no reason to complain about large, inefficient government institutions in his piece’s last paragraph.

For better or worse, over the past 50 years we have concentrated authority in centralized agencies and reduced the role of decentralized citizen action. We’ve done this in many spheres of life. Maybe that’s wise, maybe it’s not. But we shouldn’t imagine that these centralized institutions are going to work perfectly or even well most of the time. It would be nice if we reacted to their inevitable failures not with rabid denunciation and cynicism, but with a little resiliency, an awareness that human systems fail and bad things will happen and we don’t have to lose our heads every time they do.

Memo to David Brooks: if voices were raised in protest when “these large centralized institutions” were set in motion–particularly that they would “suffer failures” specifically because of their nature–then those voices have every right to re-visit the subject of their proven-to-be-correct predictions.

by Mondo Frazier
image: http://blog.purposedriven.com

UPDATE: Perhaps if Brooks’ employer, the New York Times, would raise their voice in support of someone other the those trying to blow us up, people might take it a little more seriously.

Brooks also fails to address that much of the anger is at an administration that immediately leaps to the conclusion that terrorists–whether at Ft Hood or in the skies above Detroit–are “lone nuts and not connected to those who wish us dead.