Slightly old news:

We missed this essay at the time, which appeared during the Thanksgiving weekend (but were reminded of it since it appears in this week's Washington Post Weekly edition). It's by Jim Hoagland, and it's about the decades-long attack on government (and bureaucracies). Called Dissing Government, it contains these observations: (excerpts)

The relentless and prolonged assault by politicians and the public on the competence and motives of their government bureaucracies is slowly but surely undermining democracy in the Americas and Europe.

That is the provocative thesis of an important new book, "Dismantling Democratic States," just published by Princeton University Press. Professor Ezra Suleiman shows that the phenomenon of bureaucracy-bashing perfected by recent U.S. presidents of both parties is rapidly spreading into European societies that once revered "neutral" civil servants as the guarantors of the nation-state's legitimacy.

Part of the value of Suleiman's book ... is to show that this is a culmination rather than a departure from trends that have been long building and that these trends follow the spread of mass media and marketing in all societies. The problem is not just Bush.

The Princeton professor also analyzes the demoralizing effect of the repeated descriptions of government ineffectiveness voiced by Bill Clinton and Al Gore to justify their campaign to overhaul the bureaucracy ...

posted by Quiddity at 12/11/2003 08:00:00 AM