Directions to a journalistic goldmine
The federal government had set aside a big pot of money for the candidates of both parties to staff their presidential transition teams. Trump and Hillary Clinton had both built massive teams of people ready to enter the 15 big federal departments and hundreds of smaller federal agencies to learn whatever was happening inside. A thousand or so Obama officials were waiting for them, along with briefings that had taken them six months to prepare. But then, days after the election, Trump simply fired the 500 or so people on his transition team. “Chris, you and I are so smart that we can leave the victory party two hours early and do the transition ourselves,” he told a perplexed Chris Christie, who’d assembled the team.Then he appointed Rick Perry as his secretary of energy. In his own presidential campaign, Perry had called for the Energy Department’s elimination — and was forced, at his Senate confirmation hearings, to acknowledge that he’d had no real idea of what went on inside the Energy Department, but now that he’d spent a few days looking into it, he really did not want to eliminate it. At that moment, it became clear that none of these people, newly in charge of the United States government, had the faintest idea what it did. .... People capable of ruining panel discussions and dinner parties with their steady stream of opinions about American politics were totally flummoxed by the simplest questions about American government. Questions like: What do all those civil servants do all day inside the Agriculture Department? (They preserve rural America from extinction, among other things.)This situation, though sad for the country, struck me as a happy journalistic opportunity. The outgoing Obama people had created what amounted to the most timely and relevant civics class ever, and no one had bothered to enroll. And so I signed up to audit it. .... At some point, I realized that several dozen humans could spend their lifetimes getting the briefings ignored by the incoming Trump administration, and so I stopped and wrote a series of magazine pieces about what I’d seen and heard. I then stapled the pieces together and published them as a book called “The Fifth Risk.” The pieces attracted more attention than just about any magazine articles I’ve ever written, and the book sold roughly 10 times more copies than I or anyone else imagined it would.But even that wasn’t what was strange about the experience. What was strange was what happened next: nothing. .... I further assumed that after a book in which the central character is the Agriculture Department sold more than half a million copies, the market would correct. Clearly there was a readership that hungered to know more about whatever Donald Trump was neglecting. The supply would expand to fill the demand, the curiosity of the American public would be slaked, and I’d need to find something else to write about.
I was wrong. The recent series published in this newspaper [by Lewis and six other writers] — titled “Who is government?” — proves it. .... All six writers now have enjoyed the same experience that I had the first time around. Each has been surprised by how well it pays to write about federal bureaucrats. None required more than about five minutes to find a subject that made their socks go up and down. Each has more or less said to me: I cannot believe how good this material is — and how overlooked.
My original investment thesis — that the journalistic marketplace was just a bit slow to pick up on reader interest in this new existential threat to an institution everyone has long taken for granted — no longer really suffices. Everyone can now see the threat. [I wish that was true, but it is not] And so some other forces must be at work here. One possibility: Our media is less and less able to fund long-form storytelling, and these stories require time, money and space. Another: Our government — as opposed to our elected officials — has no talent for telling its own story. On top of every federal agency sit political operatives whose job is not to reveal and explain the good work happening beneath them but to prevent any of their employees from embarrassing the president. The PR wing of the federal government isn’t really allowed to play offense, just a grinding prevent defense. And the sort of people who become civil servants — the characters profiled in our “Who is government?” series — tend not to want or seek attention.
You never know what effect any piece of writing will have. Writers write the words, but readers decide their meaning. My vague sense is that most readers have come away from this series with feelings both of hope (these civic-minded people are still among us) and dread (we’re letting something precious slip away). My own ambition for the series was that it would subvert the stereotype of the civil servant. The typecasting has always been lazy and stupid, but increasingly, it’s deadly. Even as writers grow rich proving it wrong. (emphases added)
I want to try to make and plead for at least some understanding of two points:
- The elites who drive America's radical right authoritarian, anti-government wealth and power movement are either mostly stunningly ignorant about the false claims they routinely make about government functions, they are mostly cynical liars, or they are a roughly even mix of the two. Rick Perry was obviously in the first category -- his ignorance was stunning. So was Trump. Sadly, Trump probably still is just about as ignorant as he was in 2016. I suspect most of the rest of the radical right authoritarian elites are not nearly so ignorant as Trump and Perry, but that could be wrong. Lewis makes a great point about the deep ignorance that drives the authoritarian MAGA movement.
- A central target of the radical right authoritarian narrative is the alleged tyrannical, socialist/Marxist "deep state" full of corrupt shady bureaucrats working to oppress all of us. The dark free speech tactic amounts to harsh attacks on mostly honest professionals who know what they are doing and are trying their best to serve the public interest. The attacks include lies, slanders, insults, and loads of BS backed mostly by flawed reasoning or just cynical crackpottery.
