Nic Babarskis - Current Events

This Rufo take on the Department of Ed clearly states the ideological project at play.

Pulling this series of quotes from an interview between Ross Douthat and Christopher Rufo. I was listening as a means of trying to understand the justification for all the pain being wrought upon the educational bureaucracy. This is such an ideologically driven take on what a government bureaucracy is and how it functions that I don’t know where to start with common ground or compromise.

It’s the worst sort of cavalier slash and burn policymaking:

Rufo: Here’s the problem, though: It’s very easy to cut external contracts. It’s very difficult to change the culture of an institution and the permanent bureaucracy of that institution. I know for a fact that at the Department of Education, replacing the management within the building does not really replace the broader culture… I just think that there has to be a kind of binary choice, agency by agency. Can this agency be reformed or can this agency only be abolished or dismantled to the maximum extent permissible by law? I think the Department of Education is then in the latter camp. I think the F.B.I. could maybe be reformed. Other agencies can be perhaps reformed. But the Department of Education in my view is beyond reform. You have to spin off, liquidate, terminate and abolish to the furthest extent you can by law. All while maintaining your political viability and your statutory compliance for those things that are essential, required by law, and that are politically popular. You always want to maintain the popularity, but can you take those things away ——… Conservatives cannot fully compete for education grants, or university-level research programs. No, conservatives can’t do any of those things.So we have to figure out what we can do. Where can we have leverage? Where can we take over or recapture an institution? And if we can’t do those things, then what do we have to shut down? Shutting things down is actually a very effective strategy.

I don’t know what sort of objective standard you use to ascertain the level of “wokeness” for any bureaucratic agency. The general gist under the current administration seems to be how quick they are to implement structural change that favors the incumbent president–jurisprudence or constitutionality be damned…

Good policy-making is NEVER a binary choice. It is always a sequence of calculated, often provisional, frequently complicated series of balancing acts that requires an informed perspective on national history, the law, the current cultural moment, and domain expertise of the subject matter (e.g. education, law enforcement, national defense, energy, land management). You can’t summarize the bureaucracy’s value and operation in a pithy Tiktok video, podcast interview, or scintillating video essay–it takes decades of usually quite and monotonous work to see a positive social transformation. That is partially what is so gut-wrenching about what I am seeing happen to the Department of Education–and the federal bureaucracy more generally–I may not always agree with our bureaucratic leaders, but to see the centuries of institutional knowledge and domain expertise demolished with glee or a shrug fills me with dread.

18 year old Nic (a dutiful Republican voter) would be absolutely flabbergasted that an ostensibly “conservative” Federal administration would be cheering on the possibility of deep integration of bureaucratic processes and artificial intelligence. This seems like a bad idea of you are skeptical of centralized State power.

Nicholas Carr, this week pulling quotes from Norbert Weiner, has some great reflections on the phenomenon:

Building on that idea in The Human Use of Human Beings, he argues that, once set in motion, machine learning might advance to a point where — “whether for good or evil” — computers could be entrusted with the administration of the state. An artificially intelligent computer would become an all-purpose bureaucracy-in-a-box, rendering civil servants obsolete. Society would be controlled by a “colossal state machine” that would makes Hobbes’s Leviathan look like “a pleasant joke.”

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What for Wiener in 1950 was a speculative vision, and a “terrifying” one, is today a practical goal for AI-infatuated technocrats like Elon Musk. Musk and his cohort not only foresee an “AI-first” government run by artificial intelligence routines but, having managed to seize political power, are now actively working to establish it. In its current “chainsaw” phase, Musk’s DOGE initiative is attempting to rid the government of as many humans as possible while at the same time hoovering up all available government-controlled data and transferring it into large language models. The intent is to clear a space for the incubation of an actual governing machine. Musk is always on the lookout for vessels for his seeds, and here he sees an opportunity to incorporate his ambitions and intentions into the very foundations of a new kind of state.

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If the new machine can be said to have a soul, it’s the soul Turing feared: the small, callow soul of its creators.