Mokita
21st February 2025
ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.
In every human organization there are things that are true but for one reason or another, everyone agrees to ignore them. It may be that these things are just annoying, like the personal ticks of the boss. In other cases, they are things that would put the organization at risk if people tried to address them. Human systems often must ignore things that contradict the logic of the system.
The American political order as established by the Constitution has holes that the Framers chose to ignore because they had no choice. The final results were a compromise between thirteen states that often had serious conflicts on things, conflicts that could not be reconciled, so they were ignored. The most obvious one is the issue of slavery that was resolved at a later date.
The managerial system that is under assault by Trump was made possible by ignoring things that were essential to its existence. The creation of executive agencies and who controls them is a good example. For fifty years everyone in Washington pretended that these agencies were a fourth branch of government. Trump has stopped pretending and is challenging a core assumption of managerialism.