Last week, a group of federal employees organized a protest of the Biden administration’s support of Israel in its war with Hamas. Although a snowstorm in Washington complicated their plans, some federal employees from a range of agencies declined to work for a day. Meanwhile at the Capitol, Republican members of the House of Representatives were once again threatening to throw their institution into chaos to prevent their leader from negotiating a spending package with Democrats.
These seemingly unconnected dramas, on opposite sides of the partisan divide, offered examples of a characteristic disorder of this moment in our politics — the confusion of roles that leaves insiders behaving like outsiders and makes effective public action awfully difficult.
Federal employees have every right to participate in protests in their personal capacities. And they have every right to resign their positions to express strong disagreement with the policies of the administration they serve — as a number of Biden administration officials have done over the Israel-Hamas war. This latest group of federal workers, however, organized a protest in their capacities as government officials yet did so anonymously to avoid being held responsible.
They were not the first. Late last year, about a hundred Democratic congressional staff members — many wearing masks to hide their identities — staged a walkout to, as some put it, “demand” that their bosses’ “speak up” for a “cease-fire, a release of all hostages and an immediate de-escalation now.” Hundreds of Biden administration officials sent a letter to the president in November opposing his Israel policy without signing their names to it, out of what they called “concern for our personal safety and risk of potentially losing our jobs.” There was even a vigil in which White House staff members protested outside the White House wearing masks and sunglasses.
They didn’t resign, and (inexplicably) they weren’t fired. They just used their positions as federal officials to raise the visibility of their protests against federal policy. And they didn’t seem to see a contradiction between the two. On the contrary, as reported by the news site Al-Monitor, which broke the news of plans for the most recent walkout, the organizers believed they were acting out of an obligation “to influence change from inside.”
But were they acting as insiders or outsiders? Were they engaged in making public policy or expressing private views? They were intentionally muddling that boundary. Their actions violated the basic norms of federal employment and (to the extent they constitute a labor action) perhaps even the law. But they evince a confusion that is now all too common.
In fact, a version of the same confusion of roles is at play in the persistent dysfunction of Congress, where too many members treat the institution like a platform for expressing dissent rather than a space for legislative negotiation. Anyone who has attended a high-profile congressional hearing in recent years can attest that hearings have become production sessions for YouTube clips and other social media posts rather than opportunities for collective deliberation or debate. The travails of House Republicans in this Congress have had much to do with the tendency of members to treat the House as a platform for commentary or performance art.
These performances often use Congress not only as a stage but also as a foil, treating the bargaining and deal making that is the essence of legislative work as a form of corruption. Members who view their roles this way are less interested in winning substantive policy concessions than in positioning themselves as outside observers narrating a morality play in which their own ineffectiveness stands as proof of their purity.
Some younger members can be quite open about this. When Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida, was asked by a reporter a few years ago if he was concerned that he was gaining notoriety outside Congress rather than influence in it, he answered: “What’s the difference? People have to know who you are and what you’re doing if your opinions are to matter.”
Neither Republican nor Democratic insiders who pitch themselves as outsiders seem to see how this damages their ability to solve problems that concern them.
The outsider yelling at the system can speak some truth to power, but at the cost of having no power. Such people play an essential role, especially in the face of dangerously disconnected elites. The insider acting in the system can exercise real authority, but at the cost of being restrained by institutional responsibility and public accountability. That person is crucial, too, because someone has to enter the arena and facilitate effective and legitimate public action.
The twisted hybrids that we now live with present themselves as simultaneously truth tellers and power players but, in fact, are just exercising power without responsibility. By seeking the government job and the activist megaphone at the same time, they render public officials into passive observers and critics, or else they deploy power outside its legitimate channels.
The difference between the insider and the outsider is crucial in the politics of a free society. The loss of public trust in core American institutions in our time has had everything to do with the sense that the elites who run those institutions are unrestrained by formal responsibility and use their positions merely as platforms for their own priorities.
There is no easy fix for these problems. The Biden administration should be willing to fire employees who can’t handle the constraints of government work. Voters need to punish politicians who aren’t interested in doing their jobs. The incentives officials confront need to stop encouraging their worst habits.
But before such habits can change, they have to be seen as a problem. Constituents, voters and public officials themselves need to grasp that blurring the lines between insider work and outsider expression renders government less trustworthy and less able to do its vital work.
The federal employees acting as protesters on the job and the members of Congress acting as commentators on the floor of the House may genuinely believe they are speaking on behalf of outraged Americans let down by these institutions. But they are actually exacerbating the causes of those Americans’ cynicism.
Yuval Levin is the director of social, cultural and constitutional studies at the American Enterprise Institute. He is the author of “A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream” and of the forthcoming “American Covenant.”
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