Wednesday, November 19, 2014

Jordan Michael Smith — Vote all you want. The secret government won’t change.

The people we elect aren’t the ones calling the shots, says Tufts University’s Michael Glennon.
More on the deep state.
Glennon’s critique sounds like an outsider’s take, even a radical one. In fact, he is the quintessential insider: He was legal counsel to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a consultant to various congressional committees, as well as to the State Department. “National Security and Double Government” comes favorably blurbed by former members of the Defense Department, State Department, White House, and even the CIA. And he’s not a conspiracy theorist: Rather, he sees the problem as one of “smart, hard-working, public-spirited people acting in good faith who are responding to systemic incentives”—without any meaningful oversight to rein them in. 
How exactly has double government taken hold? And what can be done about it? Glennon spoke with Ideas from his office at Tufts’ Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. This interview has been condensed and edited.
The conclusion.
IDEAS: Do we have any hope of fixing the problem? 
GLENNON: The ultimate problem is the pervasive political ignorance on the part of the American people. And indifference to the threat that is emerging from these concealed institutions. That is where the energy for reform has to come from: the American people. Not from government. Government is very much the problem here. The people have to take the bull by the horns. And that’s a very difficult thing to do, because the ignorance is in many ways rational. There is very little profit to be had in learning about, and being active about, problems that you can’t affect, policies that you can’t change.
The Boston Globe
Vote all you want. The secret government won’t change.
Jordan Michael Smith

3 comments:

mike norman said...

This is exactly why I stopped voting.

Ryan Harris said...


The worst kept secret government ever. :) Feel free to join, you just get a degree, then a job as a regulator, then you cycle in and out of the institutions you regulate. When you get too old for all that, you become a professor and teach a new crop of kids how to regulate. Crow about those old regulatory victories.

Peter Pan said...

Become politically active. Contribute to a grassroots political movement. That entails a lot more time and effort than voting.

Cheetohs anyone?