Civics: The goal is not ‘reform’ but a government that actually controls the government

Dominic Cummings:

In Washington as in London, the golden rule of Government is — the government does not control the government and anybody who tries to change this is seen as the enemy by the bureaucracies that actually control ~99% of the government. Politicians talk as if the government controls the government and fundraise as if it does. The media reports as if it does. It does not.

Iraq, the 2008 financial crisis, covid, the Afghanistan debacle — all are impossible to understand unless you understand this rule.
Almost no ‘conservatives’ in the UK understand this rule, why ‘reform’ is so extremely hard, and what to do about it. There is almost no public discussion in conventional UK media about how power actually works in the British state and this seems to be roughly the same in the US. For example, even after >100k avoidable deaths the entire UK political media provides no analysis of the crucial bureuacratic engine, ‘the Covid Taskforce’, which actually controls covid policy (who controls it, how does it work). Instead covid policy is portrayed as the product of ‘Cabinet discussions/rows’ — but Cabinet is actually almost totally irrelevant, and usually not even consulted. Even the greatest researchers and extremely able people who have built multi-billion dollar companies often talk as if the President/PM controls the bureaucracies and can instruct them to do X or Y, and they do X or Y, just as they routinely discuss politics as if a) there must be a hidden plan that renders the visible chaos more rational and b) politicians are ‘at least’ rational about electoral/communication strategy (they usually aren’t).

America needs a government that controls the government, as it did under FDR and Lincoln, and shatters the party structure which is a plague. You don’t control the government unless you can shut down parts of the ‘permanent’ bureaucracy and you can’t legally do this in the current regime without grabbing control of a party. It’s hard to imagine sane politics over the next 50 years without somehow closing (or at very least ‘changing beyond recognition’) the GOP, Democrats, Tories, Labour.