Readings lately (2025)
DOGE and Yes, Minister
On the Spectator Podcast, Scott McKay and Melissa Mackenzie talk about downsizing the federal government. The conversation, along with the reading of quotes from a brilliant article on the subject reminded me of that old BBC series Yes, Minister. Which eventually became Yes, Prime Minister as the hapless politician who is the subject of the comedy fails upward to the top job. Even as a kid I loved that show. The point is that a political member of the staff has no chance of overcoming the schemes of the permanent staff.
If you are a C. S. Lewis fan, you'll also like the Screwtape-like relationship between Sir Humphrey Appleby, the permanent secretary, and his underling Bernard Woolley. Bernard is a sympathetic character because he actually wants to help his Minister. He is quite human. Appleby offers many lessons in how to appear helpful while being anything but. The current wave of leftist members of the administration sharing links with each other on "malicious compliance" runs along these lines.
Anyway, this is what we are dealing with. We have a government within a government, which exists to further leftist causes while diffusing responsibility, ideally leaving the electorate confused and exhausted. That extends to the political leaders, who can be divided between those who still myopically try to execute the will of the people, those who don't care, and those who have joined the inner game and are traitors to their people.
This is actually deeply serious. At the end of the day we are talking about treason.
Anyway, a few choice quotes from the article mentioned by Scott and Melissa:
As we’re seeing now, substantial opposition awaits anyone who challenges the bureaucracy. Unions are powerful. Intimidation from those with institutional knowledge can be overwhelming. Fear of the media has also been a deterrent to action. Every president has been at least somewhat fearful of the intelligence agencies. Industry leaders who have captured the agencies, including many campaign donors, have been too powerful to unseat or control.
Countless cabinet secretaries come and go with the intention of changing the system. They get big offices, a nice portrait and social status, but the bureaucrats know that the political appointees are temporary and easily can be ignored. Frustrated by institutional inertia, the appointees often leave outwitted, outgunned and demoralized.
Meanwhile, the American people feel increasingly oppressed, taxed, regulated, spied on, browbeaten, hectored and harassed. Voting never made a difference because the politicians no longer controlled the system. The bureaucracies rule all. We’ve come to know this in our gut, which is why voters’ trust in the system has eroded as agencies’ power has built up.
And further:
The message from today’s civic elites is that the president’s job is to pretend to be in charge while doing nothing meaningful. Shut up. Don’t disturb the administrative state. Let it keep doing its thing without oversight or disruption, and you’ll get your library and bestselling memoir.
Mr. Trump refuses this deal.
Please, Mr. President -- continue. The program Yes, Minister ran in a brief period of conservative pushback to the creeping socialist state in Britain. The story has been one of continued decline since then. I would hate for America to go down as the UK did. "There might never be another chance," as the article above concludes.
The story in Germany...
Germany shrieks and trembles in horror at the idea that they might vote center right!
The demonization of the AfD party has been shameful. And that by people who mouthe platitudes about the importance of democracy. They are content to censor, marginalize and fear-monger anyone who admits to voting for this party, which as far as I can tell, is Conservatism circa 1995. They want the country to maintain borders. That is their important position.
But Germany has voted. Although 20% of the people chose the AfD, the AfD will be frozen out by a coalition with the left which will essentially be the same status quo position as the country occupied for the previous 4 years. I mean...okay? I guess if you are happy with things, then you... simply vote for the continuation of things?
Despite inflation and economic contraction, the Germans signaled that they want more of it. Notably, young people voted for the AfD in greater number, and of course the people of the Ost did as well. They have had the experience of communism and they don't want it again. Therefore they vote for a freedom party.
Everything I just said would be vociferously disputed by the "good Germans" of modern West Germany. But I've heard their arguments, and they have no merit. It is the same fearmongering as the Democrat Party in the USA tried with Donald Trump. Refusing to deal with the issues because they have no answers. Demonizing anyone who disagrees.
It is a bullying approach and not commensurate with democracy. Here are some excerpts from a violinist and small business owner in Germany:
Near the end of your podcast, you said that Europe, and the people of Europe, need to decide where our loyalties lie. Mr. Vance, of course, said something very similar when he spoke about the need for a positive vision, to make up our minds about what it is, exactly, that we wish to defend. This cuts right to the heart of the matter. We do need to decide, but as things stand, the citizens of this country are presented with a badly skewed picture of reality.
Unlike you, we do not currently have mainstream conservative media outlets. The ones we did have – once venerable newspapers like the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung – have all been brought into line, gleichgeschaltet. These days, only a handful of courageous publications exist that dare publish opposing views; compared with the behemoth of state-sponsored media conglomerates they are tiny and inconsequential. You could almost call them an underground resistance.
We do not have a Fox News to counter the version of events touted by CNN. Just imagine your country with only the likes of CNN to rely on for information, an onslaught of media that relentlessly amplifies the government’s talking points. I believe it would be safe to say that under such conditions, Mr. Trump would not have won the election, and meaningful change, for the U.S., too, would have been a distant dream instead of the sweeping living reality that we are witnessing today.
That the American people were able to say no to the Biden administration and its politics and to vote into office its polar opposite, is also due to publications such as your own, and the fact that you are allowed to operate freely and relatively unmolested. That is simply not the case in this country.
A fantastic old movie: Friends (1971)
Recently I saw again a movie I hadn't seen since I was 12 years old. Friends. I believe I was visiting my dad, who had the HBO channel. I was alone during the day, and caught this movie one afternoon. I fell completely into it. The "little world" made by these two teenagers (Paul and Michelle) felt incredibly real to me. It was a vision of what I wanted out of life: a simple life to be shared with a loving partner. Notably, there is not a lot of community in the film. Mostly, the couple define themselves by their isolation.
My view on things is still so similar to that day 40 years ago when I saw this film. Seeing it again was a pleasure. I managed to find one very interesting article about the film online.
As it turns out, the film was a commercial success, but panned by the critics.
Apart from critics being totally at odds with the paying audience, what is most curious about the incessant critical bagging of Friends is that each new panning appears to be a rehash of someone else’s. It is if some god has decreed what the accepted wisdom must be, and all but a few dissidents happily and mindlessly repeat it.
Take, for example, this ‘review’ of Friends in Leonard Maltin’s Movie and Video Guide:
BOMB. [...] Yucky early-teen romance about French boy and girl who run off to the seashore, set up housekeeping, and have a baby … then Mommy and Daddy show up to take them home.
For one, the boy is English; two, they go to the Camargue, not the seashore; three, there is no Mommy, the boy’s mother having abandoned him (and her husband) six years earlier, and the girl’s mother having died during childbirth; and, four, at film’s end, the boy faces arrest by a police inspector, with not a parent in sight.
With four major errors in less than three lines, Maltin sets a new standard in critical (in)accuracy.
I find that passage to be one of the delicious pleasures of late middle age: you finally accept that so much of what is written is absolute garbage. You accept that the writers are not paragons of moral virtue who do their best to tell the truth in all its particulars. No. They simply mouthe their biases. They chew the cud of their second-hand opinions and spew them out. Somehow you are cast as the enemy for imagining they should do more, or better. So it is very nice to form your own opinion and see how bracingly different it is from what "the good and great" have written.
What I love most about this article on the film is the excellent description of the magical time-place where Paul and Michelle live:
The film’s greatest strength – apart from Alvina’s extraordinary performance and presence, and, to a lesser extent, Bury’s – is its evocation of Arcadia, that magic, protected place where life may be lived as the rest of us can only dream. Literature and art has for all time been obsessed with the many forms of Shangri La, but cinema has not been that successful at evoking it (the very artifice feels more like an attempt than a true experience).
This domaine perdu (as Alain-Fournier describes it in Le Grand Meaulnes) is somehow cut off from earthly time and space. Only those specially privileged may enter The Great Good Place and, once departed, it can rarely be refound. The white cottage and Camargue of Friends is a perfect embodiment of that world – a place where no stranger/adult enters and which even the police cannot track down. This is why they must wait overnight (one assumes in a local village) and return the next morning to the vineyard to await Paul.
Wow, that is just fantastic. I must follow up on the footnotes found in the original article. One of them is here:
The terms employed here are taken from Robert Gibson’s brilliant The Land Without a Name: Alain-Fournier and His World (London: Paul Elek, 1975), p. 3. Other names given are: Eden, the Earthly Paradise, the Elysian Fields, the Fortunate Isles, the Bower of Bliss, Eldorado …
This book is out of print, but maybe I can find a copy.