The Competence Question

It’s always nice to see smart people say something I’ve been saying for years.

First, Jacob Levy. A solid lifelong tried-and-true libertarian (something I’ve always wondered how he might square with his decidedly undogmatic views on multiculturalism and the possibility of group rights, which are far closer to Will Kymlicka than your simplistic hard-core abstract universalist liberal like Brian Barry or most libertarians–indeed, his quietly scathing review of Barry’s recent anti-multiculturalism screed in a recent issue of Ethics is a glorious thing) who votes for libertarian candidates regularly announces he’s supporting Kerry. Not a big deal–he’s in Illinois, and he’s hardly representative of the typical swing voter. And some of his reasons are idiosyncratic: he’s troubled by the quality of the libertarian candidate, including his insufficient hawkishness (and his lack of experience, which really has to make one chuckle–what kind of experience is a libertarian likely to have that would prepare them to be president?).

But the main reason is the point–here it is as distilled into a pithy slogan (thanks to Neil at Kevin Drum’s blog):

It’s better to have a big competent government that admits it’s big, than a big incompetent government that pretends it’s small.

Yes yes yes yes yes. This is the main point, people. left, right, center, libertarian, and points beyond, all people serious about politics really need to value basic competence a bit more (yes, I just excluded Grover Norquist from the realm of people serious about politics–he’s serious about tax cuts, not politics). Not political competence, necessarily, but basic policy/governing competence. I don’t like Republicans in power, and politically, I want them to fail. But there are certainly some important tasks they, like all politicians, must do, and hopefully will do well. Even many policy initiatives I don’t approve of are better off done well than done poorly.

I have long list of complaints with the Bush administration. Most items on this list would be familiar to most people on the left–corporate cronyism, imperial ambitions, cynical indifference toward human suffering at home and abroad, and so on. What surprises some is the item that tops my list: the incompetence. Profound incompetence. Why is this the worst trait? All the other bad traits lead team W to pursue ill-conceived policy initiatives. The incompetence leads them to fail. Now, some ill-conceived policy initiatives failing is a good thing, but for the most part, that’s not true. Anyone paying attention and not blinded by ideology could figure out the Iraq war was going to be a fiasco. But that’s not a good thing. Many of the stated goals of the Iraq war would have been very, very good things if they succeeded. The same is true with, say, No Child Left Behind–parts of this policy initiative were bad ideas, but other parts were OK ideas, executed with hopeless incompetence. A president has to govern–and in between fighting stupid wars, arranging for corporate giveaways, and going on vacation, Bush has occasionally tried to do that. He and his colleagues are so cynical about the power of government that they don’t try too hard, and they don’t seem bothered by the fact that they routinely fail.

When the Iraq war broke out, I was teaching at a pretty liberal campus, surrounded by a goodish number of lefty students who generally assumed (more or less correctly) that I was one of them. I talked to more than a few of them about the war. They were surprised when I told them I didn’t think much of their anti-war arguments. This wasn’t a war for oil, I told them, and even if the evidence wasn’t entirely solid, it seemed likely enough to me (at the time) that Hussein had some small ancient stores of WMDs somewhere (happy to be wrong about the last one). My students responded to this by challenging me to offer a better explanation for this insane war. I tried to explain how it might make sense within Bushes worldview, but in the end, the best answer I could offer up is perhaps the simplest, and without question the most terrifying: He’s very, very bad at his job.

It’s a rather widely known fact that trust and faith in government has declined considerably in this country in the last several decades. With Bush, political reality has finally caught up with these views.

Update: edited slightly to be clearer, and even longer.