No, asshole. I'm not.

That scares me and reminds me of Hayek's chapter in The Road to Serfdom where he talks about how nearly all of the German scientific elite lined up quite voluntarily behind the Third Reich. They didn't do it because they were Nazis. They didn't do it because they were Facists. They did it because they believed that they could be part of a government that would allow them to run society "scientifically" and would let them run with things without having to convince a bunch of poor benighted non-scientist common people (i.e. voters). Essentially, what they wanted was a combination of power and non-accountability.

You seem to be advocating the same thing. Are you?

I will never understand you. I just don’t. We are in a political landscape where our top elected officials have renounced the rule of law. Bush and Cheney between them have:

Lied to the American people to start a war against a country that didn’t attack us;
Started an unprecedented policy of using torture;
Disappeared people to foreign countries to be tortured;
Decided that the right to a trial was voluntary, including for American citizens;
Destroyed American credibility abroad;
Turned the Attorney General’s office into their hand-picked bullies, with political affiliation as the standard for whether a person should be prosecuted;
Illegally eavesdropped on American citizens;
Decided that laws circumscribing their behavior simply didn’t apply for reasons so facially ridiculous as to mock the Constitution.

They are outside any traditional definition of 'conservative' or 'ethically bound by law'. They are rogue; their guiding standard is to consolidate power and perpetuate war.

In this climate, with this cabal leading our country, you somehow look around you and decide that what scares you, the real threat to our democracy is a bunch of civil servants? WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU THINK WE DO?

I am dead serious. What do you think we DO? We sit here, thousands of us, infiltrating the entire nation. Every day we come to work and do something that is scarier than making a mockery of the Constitution, disappearing and torturing people, killing thousands of our own and theirs in a country that wasn’t an aggressor, spying on Americans, evading laws to tilt elections. What the hell could that BE?

Part of me wants to explain this one more time. I can tell you what we do. Dave, upstairs? He monitors a bunch of gaging stations in the Delta and likes to talk about telemetry. Amy? She tracks grants and reads invoices very carefully. The guy down the hall? He holds public meetings, dozens per year, to figure out what the public wants us to do with our water. Three cubes over? He surveys culverts along the 1 to see whether salmon can get through them. Also upstairs? They inspect dams and think about whether sirens or radio announcements are more effective for announcing a dam break. Those FIENDS! There are some people whose jobs I don’t know. Maybe they’re the ones doing whatever it is that terrifies you.

But what we are actually doing isn't the real point. Here is the real point. Civil service is not inherently evil. Even regulators who have faith in their professional opinions are not inherently evil. Just because an evil regime had bureaucracies DOES NOT MEAN that bureaucracies have an intrinsic inclination to do evil. It means that evil regimes also require banal logistics. Hayek attributed one set of motives to bureaucrats under the Third Reich, and for all I know, he was right. But those motives were a characteristic of the Third Reich. Contemporary American agencies are ostensibly guided by different ideals: respecting the rule of law, balancing the competing needs of the American people, serving the people of this country with our professional knowledge. What the bureaucracy is set up to do, checks and balances within the system and the ideals of its leaders determines whether it will be corrupted, not some inherent quality of bureaucrats.

It is ironic that I am defending the agencies and civil service at a time when they are the closest I’ve ever seen to being turned into single purpose agents of a rogue executive. Hearing that Cheney and Rove gave presentations to upper managers about the close elections in their districts and how that agency’s actions could be influential offends every piece of me. Knowing that they staffed their agencies with people chosen for ideological purity is fucked up. Knowing that their decisions were so blatantly political that ethical people felt they had to leave makes me scared that agencies are being hollowed of the very critical thinkers and moral leaders they need most. So I’m telling you that you are wrong about the American civil service just when I am afraid that you are right. But I think that is a function of a power-hungry administration; I keep thinking that when the Bush leaves office, the civil service will return to our usual American ideals of governance. I hope so.