Now With 50% More Cronyness!

This piece by Noam Scheiber on Bush's extended cronyism makes a very good point:

It's the second kind of cronyism--call it "outer-circle cronyism"--that's truly destructive. The focus here isn't so much on handing out jobs to dubiously qualified friends and associates--that is, to one's own cronies. It's on handing out jobs to cronies of cronies, which increases the scale of the cronyism exponentially.

He goes on to list examples, which you should go on to read. But rather than recondemning Bush for Michael Brown, fun as that may be, the point to be made here is different. Brown's appointment and Bush's cronyism shouldn't surprise, they should be expected, and the fact that so many are gaping in open-mouthed awe at Bush's cavalier attitude towards appointments just shows that America has some serious dissonance between what they elect and who they think they're voting for.

Assume you have a hostile relationship with a corporation. You've long railed against their inefficiency, their waste, their very legitimacy as an institution dedicated to doing whatever it is they may do. And then, one day, they hire you as CEO.

Huh.

How're you going to staff the place? You're entering an enemy nest, a lion's den you've long derided. You going to begin filling spots with career professionals from this institution you don't respect and have spent much of your career antagonizing? Or are you going to first install your guys, and then, when you run out of them, let them start installing their guys?

It'll be the latter, because you need to make this company your company, and you can't do that with the same folks you've spent the last few years inveighing against. So it may not even have anything to do with cronyism, but rather a fear, a discomfort with the federal bureaucracy, which many Republicans assume to be liberal, and a desire to make sure the (mostly) guys heading up your agencies are their to institute your vision for government, not the agency's vision for itself. And since your vision of government is almost certain to be destructive towards their agency, you're probably right.

This is, again, what happens when you ask folks who don't like government to head up government. And there's a point where it stops being their fault and starts being ours. To quote the aphorism Bush famously mangled, fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.