What We're About

...Mao Tse-tung went .to his deathbed worrying not about spfeading the wealth, but about curbing the government bureaucracy...

...Even with industrialism firmly in place, America still sought out industrial heroes, or heroes representing the idea of progress: if not the industrialists, then certainly inventors like Edison and Burbank and explorers like Byrd and Lindbergh...

...A Poor White about the 1970s would not be the story of an innovator...

...The meritocratic upper class is so oriented toward life in its own culture that it’s widely separated from everyone who is not part of that culturemost of America, that is...

...instead, it might follow its hero’s rise from obscurity to membership on the Council on Foreign Relations, or perhaps a regular table at Elaine’s...

...Russian officials worry not about how to stop the profit motive, but about why nothing works...

...It means filling some already existing role, being somebody important, living the life a successful person would lead...

...The students, opposed to the war, escaped fighting in it for what seemed to them to be ideological reasons, while letting the less-smart and less-rich go off to die and keep the war going...

...It means, obviously, that the doing that needs to be done in Americasolving the problems of health care or pollution or poverty-is not uppermost in the minds of most of the people who are running the country...

...Thus congressmen will devote great energy to getting their constituents’ social security checks delivered because that will help them get reelected and continue to live the life, but they won’t worry about why social security checks get screwed up in the first place, because that won’t...

...It was a novel called Poor White, set in the Midwest in the late 1800s and concerned with the rise of the appropriate American heroic figure of the time, an inventor...

...calling people war criminals and leaving it at that doesn’t shed any light on the motivation behind their crimes or how that motivation might be altered...

...it’s clear that the real enemy isn’t capitalism or communism...

...Thus lobbyists achieve their greatest success by bringing to life legislators’ fantasies of the good, upper-class life that is slightly out of their grasp...

...America today is no longer a nation where success means doing something new...

...Appropriate, because no one better embodied the vague .but nearunanimous national striving of the time, a striving that took hold of the novel’s small Ohio tqwn like this: “The youth and optimistic spirit of the country led it to take hold of the hand of the giant, industrialism, and lead him laughing into‘the land...

...The result is that despite the fairness with which access to it is granted, the American upper class behaves a good deal like upper classes anywhere, at any time: like aristocrats...

...The pull of rewards, rather than doing, affects everybody who helps control our society, from the GS-13 in the Department of Agriculture who won’t speak out against a bad policy to the senator who trims his opinions so they won’t take away the warm hellos he gets in the Senate dining room...

...The cry, ‘Get on in the world,’ that ran all over America at that period and that still echoes in the pages of American newspapers and magazines, rang in the streets of Bidwell...

...A new world was being created and to be a part of its creation, to do something nobody else has ever done, was the noblest sort of success...

...Today we’re still living in that new world, only it’s grown old and sluggish...

...But if the desire to be rather than to do manifests itself in the growth of bureaucracy, it also spreads wider...

...The set of motivations bureaucracy spawnssurvival, expansion, caution-are the prime shapers of what organizations do...

...The sins of the age of being aren’t all so egregious, but they’re worth looking at, and this collection tries in various ways to do that, by way of celebrating our eighth anniversaiy, a bitthday important in the political world (where the years come in fours) to which we belong...

...Anderson’s perspicacity is not particularly astounding, since he had had 25 years to digest and sum up the time he was writing about, but he was writing too about the national mood in his own time...

...The most obvious manifestation of the decline of doing, and the one The Washington Monthly has written about most often, is the growth of bureaucracies in government and elsewhere that are primarily concerned with self-perpetuation and not with performing whatever function they are supposed to perform...

...There’s no better example of this than the first article in the collection that follows, James Fallows’ description of the college-student elite’s behavior during the Vietnam war draft...

...They revel in the privileges and associations that go along with success, since these after all have been their goals, and if they think about the wise exercise of their power, they tend to do so mostly as it affects the attainment of those rewards...

...The case for the importance of bureaucracy in the 20th century can best be made by looking at how it has become the dominant problem in countries that have undergone huge ideological shifts...

...The Editors...

...All these articles seek not to condemn, but to understand how the dynamics of meritocracy and rewardseeking work...

...For eight years it’s been our conviction that without that kind of understanding, nothing can change...

...Even the most talented and imaginative people often devote their energies to achieving a string of accolades and titles, the accoutrements of success, rather than to doing something in particular...

...Thus many of our best writers are so concerned about staying in their own volatile, putdown-prone setting that they can’t think much about the rest of Americaand the values of that setting are such that they wouldn’t have a very high opinion of the rest of America even if they did...

...It’s not that everything that needs doing has been done, but that because of the domination of the huge organizations that sprang up in the early 1900s and the end of hereditary privilege, everyone’s energies are exhausted in the arduous process of finding an institutional place in America...

...The impulses that drive bureaucrats are closely akin to those driving successful non-bureaucrats, too, which is to say that the culture in which people live, their‘ setting, is a greater determinant of how they behave than are their stated beliefs or their supposed functions...

...America is, after much praiseworthy effort, largely a meritocracy now, but the meritocrats are chiefly oriented toward gathering a series of well-defined rewards that have little to do with what America needs...

...The end point of this comes when all the A students.&d National Merit Scholars finally arrive at the positions of power for which they’ve been groomed for so long, and concern themselves with living the life that powerful people in America are supposed to live...