Peter Navarro, Anthony Fauci And Public Service

White House trade adviser Peter Navarro penned an attack op-ed against Dr. Anthony Fauci. The attack was full of the usual Trumpian falsehoods (mainly about the Chinese travel ban, which was weakly enforced and irrelevant since the virus that hit the NYC area came from Europe).

It strikes me though about the current administration's attacks on Fauci and other public servants that there are two main motivators for the attacks. The first is obviously that all Trump knows how to do is attack. He can't defend his record, so he lies about it. He then pivots to attack, attack, attack. The virus does not care about your campaign goals, so when public servants come out with facts, the Trumpists think it's an attack. They respond the only way they know how by flinging poo around their gilded cages.

The second thing is that they simply have no idea what a public servant is.

The idea of public service is an old one, but it was largely confined to elites in the old Anglo-American hierarchy. The purpose of Eton (and its American imitators) was to educate the sons of elite for public service.  Being "of means" meant that they could be trusted not to steal the government blind (though some did anyway). For most of the 19th century, the Jacksonian Spoils System staffed the government with incompetents whose goal was to enrich themselves and re-elect their patron so they could continue to enrich themselves.

At some point, the idea of public service entered middle class society, probably around the New Deal/Second World War. The premise was that if you paid well-educated people a decent salary with good benefits to do expert work, the government could do things like manage Social Security, split the atom and build the Interstate system. In most countries, governmental positions are respected, but in America that was never really a thing, especially among the anti-statists of the Right.

Which brings is back to Dr. Fauci. He's in his late 70s, he's worked his whole life in public health and now he's getting shit on in the press by a trade adviser who's wrong about trade, much less public health. He has not gotten it entirely right - there was some confusion about masks in March - but he's a human being dealing with a novel disease. He's not working to get himself rich; he's doing public service.

That last idea is simply foreign to the Trumpists and the bulk of the GOP. They are so wedded to some absolutist vision of self-interest that they can't imagine someone working on behalf of the public good. They are so conniving in their vision of what government should do for them, they can't grok the idea that someone would work on behalf of other people. It reflects back to the central tenet of Trumpistan: Every accusation is a confession.

George Will and others correctly note that we are in a moment of precipitous national decline, because of Trump and the GOP.  One of our two parties has rejected the idea of competent governance, and the country is paying for it.