In Praise of Red Tape

In Praise of Red Tape

Is there any figure in American political discourse more reviled than the bureaucrat? Say the word and a potent caricature leaps to mind: the petty and shiftless paper pusher who wields his small amount of power with malice and caprice. Whatever the issue--from school reform to overhauling the nation's intelligence apparatus--the bureaucrat is on the wrong side of it.

It's slander with a long pedigree--Cicero called the bureaucrat 'the most despicable' of men, 'petty, dull, almost witless...a holder of little authority in which he delights, as a boy delights in possessing a vicious dog'--but in the last forty years, conservatives have converted this casual contempt into an ideological fixture. Since as far back as the Goldwater campaign, the American right has generally found that 'the government' is too abstract an entity for most people to actively loathe. It's far more effective to demonize the people who execute its daily functions. Bureaucrats are to conservatives what the bourgeoisie was to Marx: an oppressive class of joyless knaves.