Dominic Cummings lays out how a project to change US politics could look.
Dominic Cummings lays out how a project to change US politics could look.
One nice thing about startups is that they mostly fail if they aren't good. When MySpace stagnated there wasn't one blessed successor, there were 100 different ones that had to fight it out. The winner is, modulo the usual capitalist alignment failure, a better company than MySpace was. Most of its competitors weren't. From society's perspective this filter is great, maybe the best thing about the whole startup ecosystem.
Cummings doesn't seem to know this. Replacing the Pentagon with a new organization ABC Inc. is not the hard part (although it is pretty hard). What's hard is to know that you should pick ABC Inc. and not DEF GmbH. Cummings thinks what makes startups good is their youth (he wants to sunset them after 15 years, for example), but that's wrong: most young startups aren't good, and fail. To make it work you need 100 successor Pentagons, and some way of making them compete.
I have extremely mixed feelings about this and similar proposals. On the one hand, the diagnosis seems to be correct to a significant extent, and it's something that very few others are willing to talk about, and it also explains many otherwise hard to explain facts about the lack of recognition of institutional failures after covid (though contrary to what Cummings says there has been some such soul-searching which I've discussed in a few previous comments).
So there's a huge amount of important, non-trivial truth to this proposal.
On the other hand, from the outside, how would you distinguish what he's proposing from an actual authoritarian power-grab?
The media portrays a ‘conservative’ government actually controlling the government as proto-fascist ... the rule of law’ is now often used as a slogan to justify judges deciding political issues
You're telling your target audience that what you are attempting will be very hard to distinguish from an authoritarian, proto-fascist, rule-of-law denying attempt to take power for yourself. I fully believe that this isn't what Cummings wants, but even assuming he's 100% sincere, this still presents a problem.
The problem is that in order to fi...
In this piece, Dominic Cummings appears to be endorsing both of the following propositions:
Since the second of these would put more power (maybe much more power) in the hands of those elected leaders, it seems like one of three things must be the case:
As is often the case in political writing, the diagnosis of the problem seemed far more plausible than the proposed solution.
There's just something weird about the humungous proportion of career bureaucrats and governmental employees vs. the few people who get elected. E.g. according to this, in the US there are ~9 million federal employees plus ~16 million people employed by local and state governments. Contrast that with <1000 (?) federally elected politicians, and you get a proportion of >9000 unelected employees per elected politician, which soun...
sort of related I wrote a really rough Practical Guide to Becoming President of The United States
Just scanned through the post. FYI, I broadly disagree with this and a few other takes I read from Dominic Cummings when it comes to enforcing ambitious political changes based on strategies he presents as the rational choice viz a viz predicted scenarios. But don't want to get into detail here.
Highlighting this point from Dominic's summary:
...The Valley is the natural place to build the best model of the electorate and some weird subculture there is more likely than DC to look at the problem with the fresh eyes it needs. It’s also the natural place to
That's not a good example, since the North already functioned without slavery.