When socialism inevitability fails, elected officials shift the population's attention to a scapegoat. There must be someone or something other than the political leadership to take the blame.
Neither of those is a given. Another option is better leadership, capable of its own accountability including recognizing its shortcomings. I'm imagining someone who could say, in forthright fashion, "I was wrong." People might listen to that and to whatever explanation came with it. Learning might occur. The leader might even find out that people identify with someone who makes mistakes (because we all do) and respect someone who told them, "I was wrong. I thought we should go east but I realize I've led you astray and now understand we should be headed west." I don't know a leader with the courage to do that, but I think it could be big. Humility might be well appreciated. It would also be a sign of wisdom to learn and apply what has been learned.
You describe what usually happens accurately. It just doesn't have to be that way.
Wise words, but I think they discount how power is truly distributed and deployed. This 'leadership', done well or badly, has little to do with either how laws are constructed or with how they are administered and adjudicated. Elected officials do not run the programs they sign off on, nor do they enforce the laws they pass, nor do they pay much attention to the inner workings and human results they set in motion with their 'yea' votes. Elected officials are also members of parties, as well as of various committees within their professional mandates and of an endless variety of organizations outside the arena of government itself such as fraternities, lodges, lobbyist fronts such as NRA or Justice Democrats, and to no small degree religious institutions.
When you hear a state legislator (as I did yesterday, from a folksy imbecile who had to have the notion of 'probable cause' explained to him and had never read the Fourth Amendment) tasked with representing the interests of one of the most genuinely conservative (in the true, apolitical sense) rural agribusiness regions in the US, using language like 'that's above my pay grade' and 'I never even heard of that program until you wrote me about it', and 'if it wasn't constitutional they (!) never would have made it a law', it isn't hard at all to see why socialism (not as political or economic theory but as an administrative strategy) is making such broad inroads into even the most anti-socialist districts.
The conservative impulse to obey the law because it is the law, as an everyday moral credo, makes those 'represented' by so-called conservative elected officials continually vulnerable to the experimental social engineering and heavy-handed use of official power even within their own local civic institutions and courts, because for all their talk about freedom and individual responsibility and whatnot, the conservative thinker will be the first one every time to line up and await whatever instructions might issue from above their pay grades, and obey them in detail not because they believe in them, but because no one is more inclined and even morally invested in doing what they are told, regardless of consequences, than a conservative elected official.
But wait: in order for socialism to inevitably fail, it must first succeed in becoming an indisputable template of official power. The primary mission of a socialist-run civil services sector is to disguise its inevitable failings as shining triumphs ('shine up shit and call it gold', as they liked to say on 'The Wire') and continually make whatever best outcome in individual careers can be extracted from a continual parade of catastrophic failures for which no one ever takes the blame.
We are so accustomed to an everyday approach to governance which defines the people as subordinate to government, rather than vice versa, and assumed that whatever government is doing at the line-worker level must be legal because they are after all The Government, that few are motivated much less qualified to stick their necks out and demand genuine and substantive alterations of the powers of government itself.
Call it whatever you like, and 'socialism' is only one name for it, but when the state is more powerful than the law, and the people both within and outside of the inner machinery of government are so ignorant of the law that they simply assume the purpose of government is to tell the people what to do, you get what you get. Even if what you get is failure, good luck finding anyone who will have even the courage to call it that, much less do anything about it.
Neither of those is a given. Another option is better leadership, capable of its own accountability including recognizing its shortcomings. I'm imagining someone who could say, in forthright fashion, "I was wrong." People might listen to that and to whatever explanation came with it. Learning might occur. The leader might even find out that people identify with someone who makes mistakes (because we all do) and respect someone who told them, "I was wrong. I thought we should go east but I realize I've led you astray and now understand we should be headed west." I don't know a leader with the courage to do that, but I think it could be big. Humility might be well appreciated. It would also be a sign of wisdom to learn and apply what has been learned.
You describe what usually happens accurately. It just doesn't have to be that way.
Wise words, but I think they discount how power is truly distributed and deployed. This 'leadership', done well or badly, has little to do with either how laws are constructed or with how they are administered and adjudicated. Elected officials do not run the programs they sign off on, nor do they enforce the laws they pass, nor do they pay much attention to the inner workings and human results they set in motion with their 'yea' votes. Elected officials are also members of parties, as well as of various committees within their professional mandates and of an endless variety of organizations outside the arena of government itself such as fraternities, lodges, lobbyist fronts such as NRA or Justice Democrats, and to no small degree religious institutions.
When you hear a state legislator (as I did yesterday, from a folksy imbecile who had to have the notion of 'probable cause' explained to him and had never read the Fourth Amendment) tasked with representing the interests of one of the most genuinely conservative (in the true, apolitical sense) rural agribusiness regions in the US, using language like 'that's above my pay grade' and 'I never even heard of that program until you wrote me about it', and 'if it wasn't constitutional they (!) never would have made it a law', it isn't hard at all to see why socialism (not as political or economic theory but as an administrative strategy) is making such broad inroads into even the most anti-socialist districts.
The conservative impulse to obey the law because it is the law, as an everyday moral credo, makes those 'represented' by so-called conservative elected officials continually vulnerable to the experimental social engineering and heavy-handed use of official power even within their own local civic institutions and courts, because for all their talk about freedom and individual responsibility and whatnot, the conservative thinker will be the first one every time to line up and await whatever instructions might issue from above their pay grades, and obey them in detail not because they believe in them, but because no one is more inclined and even morally invested in doing what they are told, regardless of consequences, than a conservative elected official.
But wait: in order for socialism to inevitably fail, it must first succeed in becoming an indisputable template of official power. The primary mission of a socialist-run civil services sector is to disguise its inevitable failings as shining triumphs ('shine up shit and call it gold', as they liked to say on 'The Wire') and continually make whatever best outcome in individual careers can be extracted from a continual parade of catastrophic failures for which no one ever takes the blame.
We are so accustomed to an everyday approach to governance which defines the people as subordinate to government, rather than vice versa, and assumed that whatever government is doing at the line-worker level must be legal because they are after all The Government, that few are motivated much less qualified to stick their necks out and demand genuine and substantive alterations of the powers of government itself.
Call it whatever you like, and 'socialism' is only one name for it, but when the state is more powerful than the law, and the people both within and outside of the inner machinery of government are so ignorant of the law that they simply assume the purpose of government is to tell the people what to do, you get what you get. Even if what you get is failure, good luck finding anyone who will have even the courage to call it that, much less do anything about it.