The difference in two parts.
Part one.
John Hayward
@Doc_0
The driving force behind lethally incompetent blue-state government is that no Democrat politician today thinks duty to their constituents is their top priority. All of them have higher concerns: global warming, diversity agenda, Party-building, and lining their own pockets.
Not enough Repubs see duty as their top concern, but at least some do, and at least most of them would SAY it’s their highest priority if asked. The GOP has a zillion problems, but at least it retains some tenuous grasp of the ideal of politicians as public servants.
That’s all completely gone from the arrogant leftist Democrat Party, and it has been for a long time. Dems don’t see America as a great and noble nation they are called to serve. At best, they think it might become a decent nation if they can wield power to beat it into shape.
This is baked deeply into the ideological foundation laid within the minds of every Democrat. They’re told all their lives that America was born in sin, the common folk are racists, private capital is exploitation, and their sacred calling is to deliver “social justice.”
Well, justice is inherently coercive – it’s why the police have guns. Almost everything in Democrat ideology is coercive, compulsive, and punitive. They view government as a vehicle for punishing unworthy citizens who deviate from their vision of fairness and equity.
Redistribution is coercive. You can tell Lefties are well aware of this because they scoff at the notion of people voluntarily funding charitable endeavors or community services. They laugh bitterly when reminded they could pay more taxes voluntarily instead of hiking tax rates.
For a Democrat, nothing is real, nothing truly counts, unless coercive government force is behind it. They believe in a wise and powerful elite imposing justice and equity on all those beneath them. They don’t make polite requests of the public, or take “no” for an answer.
And of course, as the tawdry Biden scandals remind us, Dem politicians are absolutely obsessed with money and devoted to making themselves richer. They believe they DESERVE riches and luxuries, because they’re the elite. They seethe at capitalists who live better than they do.
With those attitudes in mind, there’s no way a Democrat politician will ever feel like a humble servant of the deplorable public, with a sacred duty to put the needs of their racist, sexist, transphobic, greedy citizens first. You don’t feel humble before people you coerce.
Add the effects of media bias. Even the worst Dem politicians are constantly showered with puff pieces. Even the most obviously stupid and venal of them are lauded as moral and intellectual titans. They get unlimited credit for good intentions and zero accountability for failure.
The results are easy to see in every blue state and city disaster: an arrogant, corrupt elite with zero accountability and a long list of priorities that rank much, much higher than “duty to my country, state, or city and all my constituents.”
The fact that Dems are never held accountable for the disastrous outcome of their policies means they endlessly double down on failure. They view every agency under their control as a piggy bank to be looted for ideological crusades, Party-building slush funds, and personal gain.
That’s why the unfortunate constituents of ancient Dem regimes keep discovering their emergency systems don’t work, their crisis managers have no idea how to manage a crisis, and their law enforcement bureaucracies are more interested in pursuing the law-abiding than criminals.
Dems hire swarms of government employees and turn them into ideological footsoldiers. Competence and efficiency are EXPLICITLY less important than ideological conformity – that’s what all those mandatory DEI political exercises are about.
Ideological conformity automatically rules out policies and solutions that might be effective – and remember, socialists never solve problems, they “manage” them. Managerial liberalism is great at spending money and holding meetings, but not so good at dealing with a crisis.
These are problems that plague Big Government in general, and Lord knows Republicans aren’t immune, especially the ones that attempt to ingratiate themselves with the Dem power structure as controlled opposition. They naturally inherit a lot of Dem attitudes.
But at least you can find Repubs that still take their duties seriously. Not to belittle their accomplishments, but some of those red-state miracle governors are simply displaying the baseline level of competence and responsibility that was more widely expected 50 years ago.
Our whole system is deeply sick and corrupt. Dems are accountable for setting that tone because they have decades of unbroken power in the most troubled cities, they control the media, and they absolutely rule the permanent federal bureaucracy. They institutionalized arrogance.
The monstrous portrait rotting in D.C.’s attic is a study of the Democrat Party and its ideology of coercion in pursuit of “social justice.” States and cities are stacking up corpses because Dems love government, but have little interest in the responsibilities of governing. /end
Part Two.
A Poor Substitute by Joe Mannix
As the details about the disastrous Maui fire continue to unfold, many people are left wondering how the hell a foul-up this spectacular is possible. How did everything go so wrong at every level of the response? Why did Maui have to wait for water authorization? Why were the emergency sirens not activated? Why was traffic allegedly blocked from leaving on the only good road out? Assuming that all of what we’ve heard is true, how did so much go wrong?
I think that the sad conclusion is that, in reality, nothing went wrong. Not officially. Everyone likely followed every guideline, rule, regulation and requirement. Procedural compliance was probably quite good. What apparently nobody did, however, was the single most important thing: think. The environment in which they operate has been designed to eliminate the need to think and ensure compliance instead.
The purpose of the rules laid down in such great volume for so long a time is to obviate thinking. You don’t need to think if there’s a rule to cover whatever it is you need to do. Follow the rules, comply with the procedures, adhere to the regulations and you will achieve your goal or at least be shielded from any poor consequences. Nobody is to blame, because the rules were followed. The rules are there to act as a substitute for thinking. Robotic adherence to the rules – and striving to have a rule for all things – is awfully bad in situations that even slightly deviate from the context envisioned by the rulemakers.
The water situation in the Maui fire response is, I think, an unfortunately spot-on example. Why did the local authority on Maui call Honolulu for permission? Because the rules said it needed to. Why did Honolulu allegedly keep Maui waiting for five hours? They were busy, I’m sure. And the rules permitted it. Why didn’t the local incident commander or similar grab the water guy by the lapels and tell him to get the damned water flowing or else, and pick up the pieces later? That would be against the rules. Why didn’t they use the emergency sirens? No rule for that, not for a fire. The rules are for tsunami warnings. No rule, no action. Everyone apparently followed the rules. If the rumors that kids were sent home from school into the path of the blaze because of high winds or that firefighters left the scene before the fire was fully quelled are true, there were probably rules for that, too.
Maui isn’t the only example. The Flint, MI municipal water disaster is another. Flint wanted to change the water source to reduce costs. Both water sources were safe. The chemistry was a bit different between the two sources, but both were fine and complied with safety and quality standards. All of the regulations were satisfied. All the rules were met. But nobody thought about it. They were ticking boxes, not thinking about whether the difference in acidity would cause built-up scale in the pipes to release and expose the water supply to lead. There was no rule for that, and disaster followed.
The world is a complicated place and it is impossible to have a rule – or set of rules, or set of sets of rules ad infinitum – that will cover all conditions. But bureaucracy runs on rules and metes out reprisals for breaking them – even if breaking a rule or deciding not to proceed despite the rules saying you can would be the single best thing to do. Rule-following is in the organizational DNA at all levels, and it has made thought redundant.
And box-ticking is a poor substitute for thinking.
On the North River 