3 ms·
Bureaucrats certainly can be a problem (and make great scapegoats), but I'd put the real blame on America's ruling classes. Once the existential-seeming threat
by bell-cot 2y ago
Bureaucrats certainly can be a problem (and make great scapegoats), but I'd put the real blame on America's ruling classes. Once the existential-seeming threats of Axis victory and Communist-block victory had faded - 1970's-ish - they went from caring quite a bit about America's long-term health & welfare (needed, to prevent enemy victories) to chasing each other down a "Greed is our One-and-Only God, and the purpose of political power is self-enrichment" rabbit hole.
If you look at history, that's a very old pattern. Ancient China, Rome, pre-Revolutionary France - you name it.
- marginalia_nu 2y agoYeah, I don't think it can be overstated how important the competition with the communists was in terms of aligning the interests of the political classes with society at large during the cold war. The population needed to feel that western society was superior to the communist alternative hypothesis in order to keep communism from getting a serious foothold in the west. Things didn't need to be perfect, but they needed to be much better than on the other side of the wall. That tension was very much load-bearing to the western democracy and with the gradual breakdown of the Soviet union in the late '80s, something just snapped.