Living in a time when the prevailing civic religion treats the past as a far away planet can be exasperating. For example, when the people who have been in charge of race relations pretend they have just stumbled upon the issue. When you point out that they have been bitching about the problem for 70 years and they have been in charge of fixing it for 50 of those years, they call you a racist. It’s as if they suffer from a Irish Alzheimer’s. They only remember the grudges. But, it is not without its fascinating strangeness. Here’s a good example.

Whatever happened to good old American know-how?

The nation that invented modern management seems to be suffering a crisis of competence.

The Secret Service can’t protect the White House. Public health authorities can’t get their arms around a one-man Ebola outbreak. The army we trained in Iraq collapsed as soon as it was attacked by Islamic extremists, and our own veterans can’t get the care they need at VA hospitals. And, lest we forget, it was only a year ago that the White House rolled out its national health insurance program, only to see its website grind to a halt.

Yes, you can argue that these problems all have different causes.

But it’s hard not to conclude that something basic is amiss in Washington.

It’s like sports fans when their team loses. “They” lost the game. Or, “they” need new management. When the team wins, then it is “we won.” Liberals  have been in charge of Washington since FDR, but now that it is coming apart, “they” have let us down, as if they are just passive observers.

“This isn’t a partisan problem,” argues Linda Bilmes, a public policy scholar at Harvard’s Kennedy School who worked in the Clinton administration — although she does fault the people at the top. “It hasn’t been a priority under this president to appoint good managers to top positions, but it wasn’t a priority under George W. Bush either.”

When things go wrong under a Democrat, it is a systemic problem. When they go wrong under a Republican, it is a failure of conservatism, capitalism, etc. The goalposts are on skates and they are moved around by the fanatics as required.

One basic problem, she said, is that the federal government’s personnel system is mired in antiquated civil service rules. “You can’t move people around; you can’t pay more to retain your best people; you can’t easily get rid of people you need to get rid of.” Additionally, she noted, “the pay at the top of the scale is inadequate to attract the best and the brightest into government, and as the old saying goes, if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys. It’s very demoralizing.”

This is a common malady of modern times. They never stop to wonder why we have all of these rules. The modern reformer never bothers to ask why things are as they are, they just assume they sprung from nothingness. Therefore, driving a bulldozer through the existing order is always acceptable. I’m not defending the civil service rules, but there’s a reason for all of it. In almost all cases, the rules exist to prevent theft.

The other problem is the rank acceptance of corporatism. Government should never be attracting the best and the brightest. Government is a necessary evil, not the end point of human civilization. The modern mandarin, however, cerebrates the custodial state with the same degree of enthusiasm as the typical corrections officer embraces the drug war. In both cases, the expansion of the state means more opportunities for the barnacles to attach themselves to society.

In her view, Obama never made management a high priority — and it shows.

Until the Veterans Affairs scandal erupted this year, for example, there wasn’t a full-time implementation officer in the White House to monitor the performance of federal agencies.

“This administration has been disconnected from the government it’s supposed to be running,” Kamarck charges (and, remember, she’s a Democrat). “They seem to view the federal workforce as hostile territory. They don’t engage with it…. They don’t have a strong system of getting info from the agencies to the president.”

 It seems like they have no trouble getting the IRS to go after their enemies. They had no trouble using the FBI and NSA to get dirt on people they wanted to leverage. This just sounds like a Clinton toady taking shots at Team Obama as Clinton gets ready for another run at the White House. But, it is a fascinating look into the minds of a cult member. As I wrote above, they are a lot like sports fans. “They” are losing, but a few years ago “we” were winning.