We are all responsible for this mess; It is everyone’s fault

Never attribute to malevolence what is merely due to incompetence

― Arthur C. Clarke

A year ago, I sat in one of my manager’s office seething in anger. After Trump’s election victory, my emotions shifted from despair to anger seamlessly. At that particular moment, it was anger that I felt. How could the United States possibly have elected this awful man President? Was the United States so completely broken that Donald Trump was a remotely plausible candidate, much less victor.

Is ours a government of the people, by the people, for the people, or a kakistocracy rather, for the benefit of knaves at the cost of fools?

― Thomas Love Peacock

Apparently, the answer is yes, the United States is that broken. I said something to the effect that we too are to blame for this horrible moment in history. I knew that both of us voted for Clinton, but felt that we played our own role in the election of our reigning moron-in-chief. Today a year into this national nightmare, the nature of our actions leading to this unfolding national and global tragedy is taking shape. We have grown to accept outright incompetence in many things, and now we have a genuinely incompetent manager as President. Lots of incompetence is accepted daily without even blinking, I see it every single day. We have a system that increasingly renders, the competent, incompetent by brutish compliance with directives born of broad-based societal dysfunction.

In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.

― Laurence J. Peter

What does the “Peter Principle” say about the United States? The President is incompetent. Not just a little bit, he is utterly and completely unfit for the job he has. He is the living caricature of a leader, not actually one. His whole shtick is loudly and brashly sounding like what a large segment of the population thinks a leader should be. Under his leadership, our government has descended into the theatre of the absurd. He doesn’t remotely understand our system of government, economics, foreign policy, science, or really anything other than marketing himself. His is an utterly self-absorbed anti-intellectual completely lacking empathy and the basic knowledge we should expect him to have. The societal destruction wrought by this buffoon-in-chief is profound. Our most important institutions are being savaged. Divisions in society are being magnified and we stand on the brink of disaster. The worst thing is that this disaster is virtually everyone’s fault whether you stand on the right or the left, you are to blame. The United States was in a weakened state and the Trump virus was poised to infect us. Our immune system was seriously compromised and failed to reject this harmful organism.

I love the poorly educated.

– Donald Trump

Sorry losers and haters, but my I.Q. is one of the highest -and you all know it! Please don’t feel so stupid or insecure, it’s not your fault.

– Donald Trump

Trump is making everything worse. One of the keys to understanding the damage being done to the United States is seeing the poor condition of Democracy prior to the election. A country doesn’t just lurch toward such a catastrophic decision overnight, we were already damaged. In a sense, the body politic was already weakened and ripe for infection. We have gone through a period of more than 20 years of massive dysfunction led by the dismantling of government as a force for good in society. The Republican party is committed to small government, and part of their approach is to attack it. Government is viewed as an absolute evil. Part of the impact of this is the loss of competence in governing. Any governmental incompetence supports their argument about the need to diminish it. The result has been a steady march toward dysfunction and poor performance along with deep seated mistrust, if not outright distain.

All of this stems from deeper wounds left in our history. The deepest wound is the Civil War and the original national sin of slavery. The perpetuation of institutional racism is one of the clearest forces driving our politics. We failed to heal the wounds of this war, and continue to wage a war against blacks. First through the scourge of Jim Crow laws, and now with the war on drugs with its mass incarceration. Our massive prison population is driven by our absurd and ineffective efforts to combat drug abuse. We actively avoid taking actions that would be effective in battling drug addiction. While it is a complete failure as a public health effort, it is a massively effective tool of racial oppression. More recent wounds were left by the combination of the Vietnam war and Civil rights movement in the 1960’s along with Watergate and Nixon’s corruption. The Reagan revolution and the GOP attacks on the Clinton’s were their revenge for progress. In a very real way the country has been simmering in action and reaction for the last 50 years. Trump’s election was the culmination of this legacy and our inability to keep the past as history.

Government exists to protect us from each other. Where government has gone beyond its limits is in deciding to protect us from ourselves.

― Ronald Reagan

Part of the hardest aspect of accepting what is going on comes in understanding how Trump’s opposition led to his victory. The entire body politic is ailing. The Republican party is completely inept at leading, unable to govern. This shouldn’t come as any surprise; the entire philosophy of the right is that government is bad. When your a priori assumption is that government is inherently bad, the nature of your governance is half-hearted. A natural outgrowth of this philosophy is rampant incompetence in governance. Couple this to a natural tendency toward greed as a core value, and you have the seeds of corruption. Corruption and incompetence is an apt description of the Republican party. The second part of this toxic stew is hate and fear. The party has spent decades stoking racial and religious hatred, and using fear of crime and terrorism to build their base. The result is a governing coalition that cannot govern at all. They are utterly incompetent, and no one more embodies their incompetence than the current President.

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.

― Isaac Asimov

The Democrats are no better other than some basic human capacity for empathy. For example, the Clintons were quite competent, but competence is something we as a nation don’t need any more, or even believe in. Americans chose the incompetent candidate for President over the competent one. At the same time the Democrats feed into the greedy and corrupt nature of modern governance with a fervor only exceeded by the Republicans. They are what my dad called “limousine liberals” and really cater to the rich and powerful first and foremost while appealing to some elements of compassion (it is still better than “limousine douchebags” on the right). As a result the Democratic party ends up being only slightly less corrupt than the Republican while offering none of the cultural red meat that drives the conservative culture warriors to the polls.

In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.

― Friedrich Nietzsche

The thing that sets the Democratic party back is a complete lack unity or discipline. They are fractious union of special interests that can barely tolerate one another. They cannot unify to help each other, and each faction is single issue group that can’t be bothered to form an effective coalition. The result is a party that is losing despite holding a majority of the votes. Many of the Democratic voters can’t be bothered to even vote. This losing coalition has let GOP driven fear and hate win along with a systematic attack on our core values as a democratic republic (vast sums of money in politics, voter rights, voter suppression, and gerrymandering). They are countered by a Republican party that is unified and supporting of their factions. The different factions work together to form a winning coalition in large part through accepting each other’s extreme views as part of their rubric of beliefs.\

While both parties cater to the greedy needs of the rich and powerful, the differences in the approach is completely seen in the approach to social issues. The Republicans appeal to traditional values along with enough fear and hate to bring the voters out. They stand in the way of scary progress and the future as the guardians of the past. They are the force that defends American values, which means white people and Christian values. With the Republicans, you can be sure that the Nation will treat those we fear and hate with violence and righteous anger without regard to effectiveness. We will have a criminal justice system that exacts vengeance on the guilty, but does nothing to reform or treat criminals. The same forces provide just enough racially biased policy to make the racists in the Republican ranks happy.

The Democrats stand for a progressive and empathic future that is represented by many different groups each with their own specific grievances. One of the biggest problems on both sides is intolerance. This might be expected on the right, after all white supremacy is hardly a tolerant world view. The left helps the right out by being even less tolerant. The left’s factions cannot tolerate any dissent, on any topic. We hear endless whining about micro-aggressions, and cultural appropriation along with demands for political correctness. They are indeed “snowflakes” who are incapable of debate and standing up for their beliefs. When they don’t like what someone has to say, they attack them and completely oppose the right to speak. The lack of tolerance on the left is one of the forces that powered Trump to the White House. It did this through a loss of any moral high ground, and the production of a divided and ineffective liberal movement. The left has science, progress, empathy and basic human decency on their side yet continue to lose. A big part of their losing strategy is the failure to support each other, and engage in an active dialog on the issues they care so much about.

A dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than is a riot.

― Robert A. Heinlein

The biggest element in Trump’s ascension to the Presidency is our acceptance of incompetence in our leaders. We accept incompetence too easily; incompetence is promoted across society. We have lost the ability to value and reward expertise and competence. Part of this can be blamed on the current culture where marketing is more important than substance. Trump is pure marketing. His entire brand is himself, sold to people who have lost the ability to smell the con. A big part of the appeal of Trump was the incompetence of governing that permeates the Republican view.

This is where the incompetence and blame comes to work. Success at work depends little on technical success because technical success can be faked. What has become essential at work is compliance with rules and control of our actions. Work is not managed, our compliance with rules is managed.  Increasingly the incompetence of the government is breeding incompetence at my work. The government agency that primarily runs my Lab is a complete disaster. We have no leadership either management or science. Both are wrought by the destructive tendency of the Republican party that makes governing impossible. They are a party of destruction, not creation. When Republicans are put in power they can’t do anything, their entire being is devoted to taking things apart. The Democrats are no better because of their devotion to compliance, regulation and compulsive rule following without thought. This tendency is paired with the liberal’s inability to tolerate any discussion or debate over a litany of politically correct talking points.

The management incompetence has been brewing for years. Our entire management construct is based lack of trust. The Lab itself is not to be trusted. The employees are not to be trusted. We are not trusted by the left or the right albeit for different reasons. The net result of all of this lack of trust is competence being subservient to lack-of-trust-based compliance with oversight. We are made to comply and heel to the will of the government. This is the will of a government that is increasingly completely incompetent and unfit to run anything, much less a nuclear weapons enterprise! The management of the Lab is mostly there to launder money and drive the workforce into a state of compliance with all directives. The actual accomplishment of high quality technical work is the least important thing we do. Compliance is the main thing. We want to be managed to never ever fuck up, ever. If you are doing anything of real substance and performing at a high level, fuck ups are inevitable. The real key to the operation is the ability of technical competence to be faked. Our false confidence in the competent execution of our work is a localized harbinger of “fake news”.

Fox treats me well, it’s that Fox is the most accurate.

– Donald Trump

We have non-existent peer review and this leads to slack standards. Our agency tells us that we cannot fail (really, we effectively have to succeed 100% of the time). The way to not fail is lower our standards, which we have done in response. We aid our lower standards by castrating the peer review we ought to depend on. We now have Labs that cannot stand to have an honest critical peer review because of the consequences. In addition, we have adopted foolish financial incentives for executive management to compound problems. Since the executive bonuses are predicated on successful review, reviews have become laughable. Reviewers don’t dare raise difficult issues unless they never want to be invited back. We are now graded on a scale where everyone gets an “A” without regard to actual performance. Our excellence has become a local version of “fake news”.

At the very time that we need to raise our standards, we are allowing them to plummet lower and lower. Our reviews have become focused on spin and marketing of the work. Rather than show good work, provide challenges, and receive honest feedback, we form a message focused on “everything is great, and there is nothing to worry about”. Let’s be clear, the task of caring for nuclear weapons without testing them is incredibly challenging. To do this task correctly we need to be focused on raising our level of excellence across the board in science and engineering. Our technical standards should be higher than ever because of the difficulty and importance of this enterprise. Requiring 100% success might seem to be a way to do this, but it isn’t.

If you are succeeding 100% of the time, you are not applying yourself. When one is working at a place where you are mostly succeeding, but occasionally failing (and learning/growing), the outcomes are optimal. This is true in sports, business, science and engineering. Organizations are no different to do the best work possible, you need to fail and be working on the edge of failure. Ideally, we should be doing our work in a mode where we succeed 70-80% of the time. Our incompetent governance and leadership does not understand how badly they are undermining the performance of this vital enterprise. So, the opposite has happened, and the people leading us in the government are too fucking stupid to realize it. Our national leadership has become more obsessed with appearances than substance. All they see is the 100% scores and they conclude everything is awesome while our technical superiority is crumbling. Greatness in America today is defined by declaring greatness and refusing to accept evidence to the contrary.

Look at the F-35 as an example of our current ability to execute a big program. This aircraft is a completely corrupt massive shit storm. It is a giant, hyper-expensive fuckup. Rather than a working aircraft the F-35 was a delivery vehicle for pork barrel spending. God knows how much bullshitting went into the greenlighting of the program over the years. The bottom line is that the F-35 costs a huge amount of money, while being a complete failure as a weapon’s system. My concern that the F-35 is an excellent representative of our current technical capability. If it is, we are in deep trouble. We are expensive, corrupt and incompetent (sounds like a description of the President!). I’m very glad that we never ask our weapon’s lab to fly. Given our actual ability, we can guess the result.

This is the place where we get to the core of the accent of Trump. When we lower our standards on leadership we get someone like Trump. The lowering of standards has taken place across the breadth of society. This is not simply National leadership, but corporate and social leadership. Greedy, corrupt and incompetent leaders are increasingly tolerated at all levels of society. At the Labs where I work, the leadership has to say yes to the government, no matter how moronic the direction is. If you don’t say yes, you are removed and punished. We now have leadership that is incapable of engaging in active discussion about how to succeed in our enterprise. The result are labs that simply take the money and execute whatever work they are given without regard for the wisdom of the direction. We now have the blind leading the spineless, and the blind are walking us right over the cliff. Our dysfunctional political system has finally shit the bed and put a moron in the White House. Everyone knows it, and yet a large portion of the population is completely fooled (or simply to foolish or naïve to understand how bad the situations is).

We are a paper tiger; a real opponent may simply destroy us. Our national superiority militarily and technically may already be gone. We are vastly confident of our outright superiority. This superiority requires our nation to continually bring their best to the table. We have almost systematically undermined our ability to apply our best to anything. We’ve already been attacked and defeated in the cyber-realm by Russia. Our society and democracy was assaulted by the Russians, and we were routed. Our incompetent governance has done virtually nothing. The seeds of our defeat have been sown for years all across our society. We are too incompetent to even realize how vulnerable we are.

I will admit that this whole line of thought might be wrong. The Labs where I work might be local hotbeds of incompetent management. What we see locally is not indicative of broader national trends. This seems very unlikely. What is more terrifying is the prospect that the places where I work are well managed comparatively. If this is true then it is completely plausible for us to have an incompetent President. So, the reality we have is stark incompetence across society that has set the stage for national tragedy. Our institutions and broad societal norms are under siege. Every single day of the Trump administration lessens the United States’ prestige. The World had counted on the United States for decades, but cannot any longer. We have made a decision as a nation that disqualifies us from a position of leadership. The Republican party has the greatest responsibility for this, but the Democrats are not blameless. Our institutional leadership shares the blame too. Places like the Labs where I work are being destroyed one incompetent step at a time. All of us need to fix this.

We have a walking, talking, tweeting example of our incompetence leading us, and it is everyone’s fault. We all let this happen. We are all responsible. We own this.

Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.

― John F. Kennedy