Comment by zoobaloo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zoobaloo | Hacker News Reader

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My wife had a brief career in state-level politics and this article resonated with me. Rather than national politics or media narratives, I thought of specific state level senators, representatives, and administrators she had to interact with.

It was common to run into not just politicians, but people working for state agencies or influential community members who were shockingly incompetent. While we did not know him, Leon Finney is a great example of the kind of wheeling and dealing I'm thinking of.

At the level we were familiar with, this wasn't a right/left paradigm (state bureaucrats are at least nominally non-partisan). It had more to do with which party had comfortable majorities, and thus offered safe career options. Our state senator is not an intelligent person. He votes along with whatever he's told to by party leadership, and struggles to articulate what's even at stake in the bills he discusses. All he knows is that if he toes the line, the party won't fund a primary challenger and he'll still have a job after the next election cycle.

> He votes along with whatever he's told to by party leadership, and struggles to articulate what's even at stake in the bills he discusses.

I think this is true of a lot of representatives at both the state and federal level in both the senate and house, in both parties. And it's a huge problem, because it means that the unelected party leadership wields a tremendous amount of power.

Absolutely. A state senator in my state was a strategy consultant for a cutthroat consulting firm whose major client was a hedge fund and happily did that for a while. Then she decided to get into politics. She is the right gender, but had to become a progressive to fit in. So she did that, and career has advanced accordingly.

My republican operative acquaintances report the same deal on the other side of the isle of course, though usually with more idiots as the right tends to disdain politics and smart people go into business, whereas many more smart people on the left go to politics.

Cultures of patronage are fertile ground for mediocrity.. very much a running theme in the history of human organization.

> Cultures of patronage are fertile ground for mediocrity.

While judging that at such a remote is hard, the Roman Republic was such a culture, with strong patronage networks. And while we may or may not agree with Rome's goal, that culture didn't seem to produce mediocrity.

Politics is an art and science in of itself.

It's a representation of power, and reality is that some people are leaders, and some are loyal vassals or subjects. Most legislative people are idiots and are really supposed to be idiots. Typically an executive cares about a set of issues or objectives, and puts the A-Team there.

At a state level, you may have 3-5,000 appointments to make in a big state, so there's a hierarchy of need. The A-players go to the priorities, the more professional "players" go to the operationally critical entities (Think your DMV and Tax Collections) and loyal idiots get scattered around the various places where the staff keep the plane flying.

The cult of personality around MAGA brings more different people. They'll absorb into the system or go away eventually.

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