God Save Us from Fools Who Think They Are Savvy. Or David Axelrod And Musk are The Same Person
Yeah, yeah, politics. But this time, there is tech involved, I promise.
The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing Democratic political operatives that savvy was the same as smart. I blame, like many other people, Aaron Sorkin for the fantasy view of politics he promulgated in the West Wing. That show, as most of you know, was well written, witty, well-acted and about as realistic with respect to how American politics worked as the Lord of the Rings. Bluntly, the Lord of the Rings might have had a better grasp of Congressional procedures that the West Wing did. (The Silmarillion has an entire chapter of filibuster reform. It’s true. And I know you won’t check because no one has actually read that book in its entirety.) An entire generation of politically active Democrats learned that you could get what you wanted by being savvy, that your enemies would respect a clever point or turn of phrase, that politics, the art of persuasion and power, was not necessary and might even be icky. (Does this make Arron Sorkin the devil? Not going to rule it out, to be honest.) Hence, people like Axelrod and Emmanuel, two democratic strategists, cautioning the Democrats to ignore what Trump is doing to USAID.
To be absolutely clear, what Trump is doing to USAID is unconstitutional, illegal, stupid, and immoral. It is unconstitutional because he is claiming the power to close an organization that was established and funded by Congress. It is illegal because the law has no provision for the dismantling of the organization by the executive. It is stupid because USAID, for less than half a percent of the nation’s budget, projects American interests and power in a myriad of ways and by removing it, you leave the field of persuasion entirely to China and other countries. It is immoral because one of the ways that USAID helps spread American power and interests is by doing things like help feed starving children, educate poor kids, and giving out vaccines and medical care to those who need it. You know, being the good guys. Any sane Democratic would be fighting this change on any or all of those fronts, but Axelrod doesn’t think that’s savvy.
To Axelrod, the fight should not happen because Americans don’t like foreign aid and so therefore the Democrats should avoid fighting over USAID and let Trump do what he wants to it. That would be savvy. It would also be incredibly stupid. First, it establishes the precedent that the President can just ignore the laws and Congressional action and decide for himself what programs to continue or not. That, in turn, ties you into a war that Axelrod himself is incapable of winning. Because then you are not fighting about the law, you are fighting about programs that Fox news consumers do or do not like. Axelrod’s premise starts with the idea that you can never change the public’s mind. Defending USAID is easy, really — they make people like Americans and America by doing good things like feeding starving kids and they do it for peanuts. But since Axelrod wants to be savvy, he cannot admit that things like public opinion can be changed.
That leaves him and the people who follow his advice trapped. If Trump can unilaterally close USAID, why can he not do the same to the Department of Education? If you conceded the point in one place, then there is no reason for you to complain about it in another. You have already, in your infinite savviness, conceded the field. You are then left with arguing about whether or not a distinct program is popular enough to save, and why would a second term president care about popularity? And the congresspeople won’t care since their fingerprints won’t be on the murder weapon. The GOP could never kill the ACA because people liked it and would vote out anyone who killed it. But if a president does it, the member of congress can furrow their brow and talk about corruption and the prerogatives of the executive branch and what are you going to do and pay not a single price for their acquiescence to the destruction of popular programs. And of course, we now no longer live in a democracy but at best an elected dictatorship.
Savvy is just another word for cowardly stupidity.
Savvy is also another word for massively incompetent.
Turns out that one of Elon Musk’s child coders has been given access to the code base of a system in the Treasury responsible for about twenty-five percent of the nation’s payments. What he is doing with that access is bad enough — he is writing code that will allow people to shut off payments and then make it hard to determine what payments had been shut off by whom. He is writing a backdoor, essentially, into the country’s payment system. That is terrible, but it somehow gets worse. You see, Musk’s little protégé is writing code to production without proper testing or vetting. The treasure department engineers, the ones that know the system are “freaking out”. As well they should.
I would fire anyone who did this on one of my teams absent a lifesaving emergency. And even then, I would probably still consider firing them. I have been in situations where production is down, and the business cannot function. We still never pushed code to prod without testing it the stage environment, at least. Even for the simplest of fixes. Why? Because systems are complicated and the impacts of a change on other parts of the system are not always, or even often, obvious. You can easily create more problems in the rush to fix the one you can see.
The savvy tech bros will tell me I am being a ninny. That hard core programmers do this all the time (no they don’t. At least, not for the same company more than once or twice they don’t). And hey, it worked for Twitter so you should just shut up and let the real men — and its always men with these insecure dweebs — do the programming. Except that it didn’t work for twitter.
Twitter (I am not calling it X. If Musk can deadname his daughter, I can deadname his crappy social media site) may not have completely fallen over, but it did wobble quite a lot. And for all of Musk’s grandiose promises, there have been almost zero new features rolled out. It is as far from being the vaunted everything app as I am from being the starting center for the Blackhawks. And that is because the combination of Elon’s politics and the terrible work environment he has created has driven anyway pretty much anyone who can leave. Being hardcore might be savvy, but it is also a recipe for failure.
Savviness is a disease. It convinces otherwise intelligent people that they can ignore reality, that they can find the One Neat Trick to getting out of doing the hard work necessary to advance their policies or build a sustainable product. It is not a mark of intelligence. Rather the opposite — it is the mark of someone who thinks they are intelligent but who does not actually have the wisdom to see the situation as it really is. They substitute a fantasy, a magical land where they know more than everyone else and can see the one thing that will get them what they want without effort or risk.
Savvy is just another word for dumb. And we have quite enough dumb in the world as it stands.