The Heroic Bureaucrat

Joel Achenbach on The Wonk That Roared:

However that high-stakes political battle turns out, Clarke’s book has given America a vivid glimpse of culture clash at the highest level of government. The protagonist is a career civil servant with an ability to amass unusual amounts of power and make himself indispensable in a crisis. The antagonists are politicians and political operatives and other bureaucrats, people who fail to schedule the high-level briefings they need, who don’t heed the civil servant’s warnings, who drop the ball time and time again.

Clarke’s book provides an archetypal figure that has been relatively rare in popular culture or political discourse: the Heroic Bureaucrat. As a general rule, Americans have viewed bureaucrats as irritating figures. In common speech, to be “bureaucratic” is to be obsessed with procedure and prone to inertia.

Bureaucrats are seen as the kind of people who follow rules that make no sense and have nightmares about someone using a No. 1 pencil instead of a No. 2 pencil. A bureaucrat is someone who attends a long-delayed meeting on the topic of whether a task force should examine the chronic shortage of available meeting rooms.

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