The most common error, or lie, in Washington politics is that things have gone as bad as they have only because of the turpitude or ineptitude. This falsehood is peddled and believed in service of the argument: We will do what the last people couldn’t or wouldn’t do because we are more public-spirited or smarter or both.
John Kerry made this argument on the Iraq War: It was a good idea, just ineptly handled. This was Barack Obama’s argument on governing a divided country: We can all be united if good smart people are put in charge. This was Donald Trump’s argument on everything: The people in charge are stupid and corrupt. I am brilliant. I alone can fix it. Easily.
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Now, Joe Biden is taking over for Trump amid a pandemic, which basically no country has successfully contained but which Trump tried to dismiss and downplay. The risk is that Biden will think some rebranding and “being smarter” will solve things. And that he can set things right with “a plan to fix” the “huge mess” he is inheriting.
“The problems these efforts face are problems that Joe Biden will not be able to overcome simply by not being Donald Trump,” as Yuval Levin puts it. “Some are inherent to the pandemic itself, and to any massive effort to mobilize resources in our society. And some are functions of inadequacies in the federal public-health bureaucracy that did not start with Donald Trump and will not end with him.”
Levin’s piece is a good warning about the limits of “smarter leadership.” Levin was a health policy staffer in the Bush White House, and he also has this bad news, which has been obscured in the Trump-era media mania:
The CDC’s bad decision-making and bureaucracy kept us from having a reliable testing system in this country. The CDC has been poor at collecting and disseminating good data. The CDC’s convoluted and politicized priorities for vaccine distribution have caused states to have convoluted and politicized priorities, which has slowed the vaccination rates and caused more infections.
The twin roots of the CDC’s problem are ones that the Biden administration is very unlikely to strike:
1) It embodies the field of public health, which has long been, in Levin’s words, “a strange amalgam of communicable-disease science and progressive social activism.”
2) More importantly, the CDC is an entrenched technocratic bureaucracy, deliberately insulated from democracy.
This latter disorder is rampant on the center-Left these days, but it dates back to the progressive era.
Recall the media’s conceit to “fact-checking” starting a decade ago. They concluded that instead of simply writing opinion pieces to convince readers that Politician A is wrong, they should claim to become dispassionate “objective” judges who could proclaim with ontological truth whether, say, Ron DeSantis was doing a good job.
Recall Obama’s certainty that a well-meaning and powerful enough government could solve our most important problems if just we stopped debating and started doing.
“We know what works. We know what we have to do. We’ve just got to put aside the stale and outmoded debates.” —President Obama
— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) March 18, 2015
Speaking of which, consider the thirst at places like CNN for tech companies to be more heavy-handed in simply prohibiting bad and destructive speech.
The messiness of debate and democracy are increasingly unpopular, but there’s always been a strain of thought in American politics, Left and Right, that is very eager to replace messy democracy with the rule of the Best and Brightest. Elizabeth Warren had this vision of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and the CDC was created with a similar view.
Levin’s central argument is not that this violates some sacred democratic purity but that it leads to its own dysfunction.
Here’s one way in which democratic involvement with government experts improves their work:
“Political appointees in federal agencies are not ideological compliance czars but essential two-way conduits between the sources of public accountability and the sources of professional expertise in government. They represent the agency’s views and priorities to the president’s senior team at least as much as they convey the president’s views and priorities to agency staff, and in both cases they perform an essential function that strengthens the agency they work in.”
Again, Levin’s piece is worth reading, and maybe reforming the CDC is something the Biden administration could consider in a post-COVID-19 world.
