A Bureaucrat's Guide to the Durham Report - Part 3
Lessons learned, key takeaways, key performance indicators
Part 1 can be found here
Part 2.01 can be found here
Part 2.02 can be found here
In my article series on Barack Obama and Curtis Yarvin (part 1 here), I concluded that Yarvin’s effort to develop a metalanguage of ordinary politics is probably valuable. Life long ago found a way around our legacy institutional controls on authoritarianism and self-dealing, such as the Constitution, requiring American citizens to develop a metalanguage to the describe the laws governing the way life circumvents those legacy controls.
In this series I tried to develop a bureaucrat mindset for looking at the persecution of Trump and his campaign by the Machine. Taken in isolation, the bureaucrat mindset is hardly a novel perspective, being a mixture of political realism, microeconomic reductionism, and plain folk-office wisdom. However, the bureaucrat mindset provides a pragmatic contrasting perspective when juxtaposed to the dominant approach to Russiagate and related public-private assassination campaigns, which approach is characterized by conspiracy theory reasoning.
Humans tend to ascribe order where complex natural phenomena create intense, focused effects upon groups and individuals. Historically we did this by ascribing the folk psychological force of intentionality or “soul” to complex natural phenomena that affected us, as when the Persian king Xerxes ordered that the angry seas be whipped as punishment. We tend to fall into a similar form of lazy inference when talking about politics, causing us to reverse the order of inference in search of explanations that fit our conviction that there is a conspiratorial soul directing all political events.
In this series, I tried to suggest that while there was a sort of conspiracy behind the Operation against Trump, the Operation itself functioned without continuous direction from an omniscient conspiratorial cabal. Instead, we saw social networks of people occupying public and private institutions intentionally and unintentionally exploiting their network connections to redirect the operations of those institutions in a manner hostile to Trump and friendly to Clinton. In effect, it seemed reasonable to me to posit the existence of something analogous to the old Chicago Machine operating behind the scenes according to a variety of motives, resulting in the exploitation of the legitimacy of public and private institutions for ends favorable to the Machine and its members.
For anyone who has worked in government adjacent to politically sensitive issues, the Durham Report will feel familiar. Like the Douglas Mackey indictment, the Operation felt like an instance of the Clinton campaign using the FBI to do its work for it. This kind of behavior emerges when there is a lasting corrupt interpenetration of private and public institutions by a social network.
In this final part, I’ll offer a few high-level bureaucrat mindset takeaways, critically assess some of Durham’s recommendations for preventing the failures he documented from occurring in the future, and conclude by looking at the issues of institutional infiltration and reform.