The Meaning of “Public Service” in Times Like These
We need to reimagine what it means to serve the common good.
now all heroes don’t wear capes
And all villains don't get away
But all limits eventually fade
—Joey Badass, “For My People” (2017)
You might’ve heard that Trump’s FBI just raided the home of John Bolton, the mustachio’d avatar of warmongering Washington. At the same time, DC remains under military occupation. The National Guard remains deployed in Los Angeles. Trump is now threatening to deploy the military to Chicago and New York (the other deep blue cities). A public servant was fired from the State Department this week for the crime of…arguing internally that the US government should publicly oppose ethnic cleansing in Gaza. And Tulsi Gabbard, the Director of National Intelligence, is targeting enemies of the administration by revoking security clearances and referring people to the Department of Justice for prosecution.
I talk about all of this in the most recent episode of the pod if you want to put it in context. The upshot, though, is this: If you make a living inside or adjacent to the US national security state, for your own sake you should urgently rethink what it means to serve the common good…which is why I’m sharing the post below.
Six months ago, I wrote a version of what appears below, and its key message could not be more urgent:
there’s a strong case to be made that the best way to serve the public in times like these is to deny the system your labor, your legitimacy.
If you’re a principled person who retains your humanity, you’re not long for Trump’s Washington. I grew up in a world where national security elites wielded the violence of the state with impunity…but as Bolton’s situation proves, the imperial boomerang circles back even to elites. Read on to work through it with me. ✌️
When I was coming up, popular culture led us to believe that working in government was the ideal way—maybe the only way—to do “public service.”
Aaron Sorkin’s West Wing played an outsized role in this phenomenon.1 But even before Jed Bartlett and Sam Seaborn birthed a generation of Obamians, you had the action-dad thriller movies like Air Force One that dominated the box office, priming us for reflexive patriotism. The message I got from this then-aspirational culture blending hyper-nationalism with cosmopolitanism: To serve the public was to enmesh your existence with the federal bureaucracy in some way.
Not only was that untrue all along—there were many ways to work for your fellows, then and now. The real problem, in hindsight, was that Washington’s political class was able to do horrible things around the world by exploiting our willingness to serve. And we can’t put all the blame on self-interested politicians, unfortunately.
We who served also never questioned whether or how often the state actually worked in the public interest, the common good. “Trust the process” was very much a belief system—one that made Washington uniquely unprepared for Trump. Clinging to process as if it were rosary beads in The Exorcist alleviated the need to think critically about who benefited and who was harmed by the choices we were helping the state make.
The Iraq War? A one-off mistake. The Global War on Terror, extraordinary rendition, black sites, torture programs, and drone strikes? Good intentions. Barreling toward a nuclear war with North Korea? Trump did it.
Insane. Insane. But such is the power of American exceptionalism—an almost impressive inability to see the world in a way that would implicate Washington’s exercise of state power in the global worsening of extreme inequality, racism, and militarism.
More Than Vibes Have Shifted
These days, everything has changed and (almost) everybody knows it.
Shortly after Trump got re-elected, I wrote about the #resistance vibes that prevailed in the national security establishment during Trump 1.0, and I predicted/lamented that Trump 2.0 would not face nearly such resistance from the bureaucracy and think tanks as he did before.
I would love to be wrong about that.
I mourn the national security #resistance a bit, but also advise against mourning it. The world was worse off in many ways by the time Trump’s first term had ended, and most claims that “It could’ve been much worse!” if not for dutiful liberals resisting Trump from within the Blob are based on speculation, third-hand anonymous quotes, and counterfactuals that you either vibe with or you don’t based on nothing but your priors.
A Solidarity of Position, Not a Solidarity of Strategy
I also question whether #resistance history is even worth litigating.
MAGA’s firehose of terror actually brings to mind Machiavelli, which I read and re-read during 2016 and 2017:
when taking hold of a state, you must assess how much violence and cruelty will be necessary and get it over with at once, so as not to have to be cruel on a regular basis. When you’ve stopped using violence, your subjects will be reassured and you can then win them over with generosity. If you don’t do all it takes at the beginning, because you were badly advised or didn’t have the nerve, then you’ll always have to be wielding the knife; and you’ll never be able to count on your subjects…get the violence over with as soon as possible; that way there’ll be less time for people to taste its bitterness and they’ll be less hostile.
By “flooding the zone” with tyrannical bullshit, Trump is creating a solidarity of position between the immiserated working class and the technocratic class that manages state functions. As sometimes happens with revolutionary forces, the MAGA Leninists (they refer to themselves that way) surrounding Trump are overreaching. Attacking everything, everywhere, all at once invites a balancing coalition at home and abroad.
But balancing—fight back—is difficult. The technocratic class has limited ability to defend itself, to say nothing of defending the public generally. Protests and lawsuits are no doubt worthwhile challenges to Trump’s power (this is an all-hands-on-deck moment), but we shouldn’t kid ourselves about the effects of such tactics against the sheer overwhelm of the MAGA revolution.
There is also a lack of unified consciousness bridging class divides. The good liberals I see charging hard at Trump’s attacks on USAID and other agencies of the federal government do not seem to be connecting their struggle to either the struggle against a very serious counter-revolutionary project that various brands of leftist have been fighting for some time, or to that of the American worker generally. And for every ten things Trump breaks, maybe two have a shot at reversal.
The weakness of the working class, meanwhile, is literally and directly why we find ourselves in this situation. The absurd imbalance between capital and labor favoring the former at the latter’s expense is what fueled the grievance-politik that Trump exploits.
We should remind ourselves that the reason why Trump’s attacks on the administrative state matter should be because of what that state itself does for workers generally. But where people feel a lack of solidarity with the technocratic class’s defense of agencies and technocrats under assault, it’s because they don’t see the value. Nobody I know is gonna shed a tear over Trump’s purge of the intelligence community, for example, even though he’s likely to stock it with monsters before he departs. And the righteous reaction to news of John Bolton being raided by the FBI is schadenfreude.
Service Takes Many Forms
Gen Z—and all the generations that come after—are facing a radically different, and more daunting, situation than their elders. For the most part, they didn’t grow up on Jack Ryan movies. Professionally, they have no incentive to believe in a theory of saving democracy that relies on deep-state heroes.
At any rate, there’s a certain intellectual and moral poverty in depending on cliques of well-educated, unelected elites to save our way of life, and I say that as someone who both very much thought that way circa 2017 and does not want to demobilize anyone who is doing the resistance thing inside the machine. If you’re a well-educated, unelected elite quietly working to save democracy, by all means you do you.
But the thing is, if you’ve ever worked in government, you know 1) how extraordinarily difficult it is to change anything, and 2) that the intellectual and political pressures to conform to the going concerns of those around you are immense.
The system needs good people in it…even if the system no longer lets good people in it. So if working for the national security state is your fate because of decisions you made earlier in life, when the government wasn’t run by an idiot mob boss and billionaires, then be a speed bump to Trump. Throw a wrench in the policy works. Advocate for sanity on the margins. Unless you truly believe in whatever the state is doing, being an internal disruptor is really the only justification for continuing to serve the state and collect that GS-paycheck. Only you know whether the specific function you’re serving genuinely, concretely serves the common good.
Increasingly, though, the civil service is not even an option. Imagine being a newly minted Georgetown School of Foreign Service grad who attended ceasefire protests the past 12 months. It’s one thing to nudge such a student toward government life, all else being equal; it’s another thing to think they even have a chance of getting into the system without swearing a loyalty oath to a king and spying on their co-workers’ use of gender pronouns. If there’s any digital evidence in this world that you have sympathy for the victims of American power or believe in equality in any way, I’d say there’s an 80% chance you’re going to be blocked or purged from government—not unlike progressives and socialists purged from government during the first and second red scares.
The urgency of this moment, therefore, requires us to reconsider what it means to serve, and to not fetishize government service in the way that I had taken for granted.
Like many of the people I’ve worked with in a past life, and like many new college grads, I’ve always been driven by some intense but vague need to serve the common good. Some of us are just built that way. Yet, my thinking about what that means and how to do it has evolved.
I no longer believe you can do good in this world simply by committing yourself with blind faith to serve those who rule your society. The state is not inherently good or bad. It depends on us—not only those who do the serving, but those on the outside who demand the state be better than it is. Democracy cannot exist if people lack the capacity to think critically about power, politics, and what actually is in the common good.
And there’s a strong case to be made that the best way to serve the public in times like these is to deny the system your labor, your legitimacy. To actually resist—to engage in civil disobedience, direct action, community mutual aid, and working-class power-building—might be the greatest service anyone can render the public.
Other Ways to Help Your Fellows
Here is a spreadsheet documenting immigration advocacy, protection, and sanctuary orgs state by state. Helping them is one way of helping our brothers and sisters confronting the ICE and DHS end of the national security state. (thanks to Lester Spence for sharing)
Trans Rescue is an international org that helps LGBTQI+ folks shelter and escape to safety in general, including when faced with criminalization of their sexuality.
The Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee is a fantastic resource for organizing your workplace.
A Practical Guide to Unionizing Your Workplace, which includes a list of major unions in the US.
An essential antidote to West Wing-brain is the The West Wing Thing podcast by Dave Anthony and Josh Olson.
At one level of abstraction, the state is indeed not inherently good or bad. At another, the structural level, it most certainly is, in the sense of upholding the good and/or mostly bad laws enacted by decidedly partisan, servants of the ‘national interest.’ This is arguably the single most consequential flaw in any representative democracy.
In other words, absent an institutionalised mechanism for allowing the grassroots participation of men and women in lawmaking, and not just law-taking, the people will never govern themselves in their own interests.
Put concretely, in any class divided society - be it slavery, feudalism or capitalism - where a minority lives off the labour of the majority, with the backing of the state, then the latter is inherently bad, and cannot be otherwise.
In short, the notion of public service only has meaning if people at grassroots level collectively decide among themselves what the public interest should be and act collectively to allocate money and resources to those designated to provide those services.
As an aside, I often wonder what contemporary Chile would look like had Allende had not disarmed factory workers. Oh well.