Although it takes a long time to reach the men at the top, it takes very little to explain to them how to escape from the difficulties of the present. This is something they are glad to hear when the critical moment comes. Then, when ideas are lacking, they accept yours with gratitude—provided they can present them as their own. These men, after all, take the risks; they need the kudos.
This sounds very similar to what I learned from reading an interview with a senior White House official, which I wrote about in my post A Key Power of the President is to Coordinate the Execution of Existing Concrete Plans. From Kalil’s description, it sounded like the people in charge had a fair amount of power to make things happen, but they were terribly bottlenecked on figuring out who to trust (I assume because everything is so adversarial around them). But once they have someone with a plan and that they trust, they‘re more than happy to put their resources behind the plan and set it going.
It overall increased my sense of the tractability of causing political action — provided you had a very clear and simple plan for what to do. And it sounded like Monnet often did.
I wonder how this interacts with our crisis mode of governance. I can’t speak for the British or French examples, but in the United States at least in the 1800s our concept of crisis was radically more relaxed. For example, in the period leading up to the Civil War, there were a lot of fraudulent elections as a result of things like people from the Missouri Territory coming down as a militia and stuffing ballots in Kansas; for a while Pennsylvania had two legislatures with their own militias who were skirmishing constantly. All of this fell beneath the threshold of something the Federal government saw fit to take a hand in.
At least rhetorically we are prone to treat almost everything as some kind of crisis. I wonder about the degree to which governments operating in the modern media environment are hampered in their ability to recognize a crisis when it is upon them. If crisis recognition is hampered, I expect it to weaken this avenue, which seems to bode strictly ill.
This sounds very similar to what I learned from reading an interview with a senior White House official, which I wrote about in my post A Key Power of the President is to Coordinate the Execution of Existing Concrete Plans. From Kalil’s description, it sounded like the people in charge had a fair amount of power to make things happen, but they were terribly bottlenecked on figuring out who to trust (I assume because everything is so adversarial around them). But once they have someone with a plan and that they trust, they‘re more than happy to put their resources behind the plan and set it going.
It overall increased my sense of the tractability of causing political action — provided you had a very clear and simple plan for what to do. And it sounded like Monnet often did.
I wonder how this interacts with our crisis mode of governance. I can’t speak for the British or French examples, but in the United States at least in the 1800s our concept of crisis was radically more relaxed. For example, in the period leading up to the Civil War, there were a lot of fraudulent elections as a result of things like people from the Missouri Territory coming down as a militia and stuffing ballots in Kansas; for a while Pennsylvania had two legislatures with their own militias who were skirmishing constantly. All of this fell beneath the threshold of something the Federal government saw fit to take a hand in.
At least rhetorically we are prone to treat almost everything as some kind of crisis. I wonder about the degree to which governments operating in the modern media environment are hampered in their ability to recognize a crisis when it is upon them. If crisis recognition is hampered, I expect it to weaken this avenue, which seems to bode strictly ill.