public service

service is operational phrase

The ringleader who intended to kidnap (and worse) Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer received a sixteen year prison sentence today. Adam Fox, convicted of this repugnant crime in August organised a plot with five other men to undermine the stability and continuity of the country by kidnapping Govenor Whitmer, destroying state infrastructure by blowing up a bridge, and fostering overall instability in hopes of inciting more general violence in a county on edge in advance of the 2020 presidential election.

I wish it had been a life sentence because I see these actions as utterly inexplicable by rational citizens. I reject these actions as have any form of legitimacy at all. Public policy results from debate and citizen participation, through their elected representatives at any level of government, in a legal manner. This met none of those criteria. Sixteen years is a serious sentence, however.

This attack further discouraged public service. Yes, Governor Whitmer not only is safe but she won a fierce reelection bid this past fall. That is the best outcome on this particular heinous act.

The country, however, has been for decades seen eroding the respect for public service that is at the core of a democratic society, of a civilised society. John Kennedy’s 1961 call to ask not what the country could give each of us but what we could give to the country seems today like a speech never given. Kennedy’s urging led to the creation of the Peace Corps and other national service projects illustrating commitment to national outcomes.

By the 1980s, however, condemnations and accusations proliferated that public servants are a part of some entity or organism apart from society. Public servants became ridiculed, viewed as lazy, overpaid, and merely self-interested. Government was the enemy and seen as the root of the problem. This was absurd and remains such.

Public servants…serve…the…public. The Government of Maricopa County, the State of Michigan, or the United States of America is not some creation that works on its own in a vaccuum. Each of these is the most complex set of interrelationships in any country in the world as we are a rather complicated 340,000,000 of us. The Constitution, we should all recall, and the Bill of Rights put pretty firm limits on what the federal government (and by extension the same things in localities) can do to and for the citizenry.

I utterly reject that description of the hard working individuals who for the most part put the interests of fellow citizens over their personal desires. Yes, you read that correctly. Most public servants take the oath to the Constitution quite seriously, believing they are carrying out something bigger than themselves.

Government often disappoints us that it does not meet our individual desires. Government is hard pressed to make everyone happy. In particular, civil servants often try to meet conflicting objectives foisted upon them by the public through their legislative representatives. Public servants don’t merrily go along without supervision. Au contraire, the supervision is often hard to follow because it’s so contradictory on objectives.

I acknowledge there are cases where people do the wrong thing that does not serve the interest of the public but that really is not nearly as common as critics seem to think. I served in government on and off for more than three decades, some at a pretty high level. I saw no evidence of a ‘deep state’. It took me months to figure out what the term meant. Government provides continuity and structure. Without those facets of public servants’ work, we would have chaos and self-interested struggle.

It is hard to shift policies on a dime but it was intended to work that way. The U.S. public service is intended to carry out policies given to them rather than to change policies overnight. Part of public service includes developing expertise on policy questions but that does not mean public servants generally (yes, there are occasional exceptions as I noted) wake up intending to thwart elected officials. That is just fantasy.

Bad apples exist in our society. Bernie Madoff stole billions but was he a public servant? Oh, no, that was the private sector. Enron in Houston? Oh, right, private sector again. That list goes on as people across our society have become self-absorbed rather than societally focused. People, public servants or private sector employees, do not always choose the right option but overwhelmingly they do. We have confused how they do their work with society negotiating what it wants outcomes to be. Compromise, the utter basis to how democracy works, is generally disdained today.

Crossing a line to attack public servants discourages precisely those we hope will want to serve. That means more mediocrity rather than less. Does that seem likely to solve our problem?

I am glad the court made a strong statement with the Fox sentence. I hope it will encourage others to stop before haranguing public servants, much less threatening them or their families. It only makes things much worse and we have enough bad stuff as it is.

Public servants should abide by law and should do what their job descriptions entail. They get no passes and they should be held to high standards. But we cannot continue to demean them without real deterioration in our society. FIN