Good Governance Requires Accountability

Washington is in chaos. USAID has been shut down; fourteen million people will likely die as a result. The military has been illegally deployed to American cities to stroke the president's ego and assert his authoritarian rule. ICE is running wild, disappearing people off the street for exercising their First Amendment rights.

A natural liberal reaction to these executive excesses is that we need more rules. We need more rules about how the military can be deployed. We need more rules about how civil servants can be fired. We need more rules about who can be deported. 

Ask yourself: did the rules work the first time?

If the rule you followed brought you here, what use was the rule?

I want to pose a radically different way of thinking about government—about how it operates, how it fails, and how we can design one that does better. To do this I want to look to an arena of governance where the stakes are as high as can be—where success and failure are literally matters of life and death. The history of military catastrophe has much to teach us about how we can rebuild a government that is both vigorous and progressive after Trump.

A history of military failure

On June 22nd, 1893, off the coast of Lebanon, Vice-Admiral of His Majesty's Navy Sir George Tryon ran a signal up on his flagship Victoria. His subordinate Rear-Admiral Albert Hastings Markham hesitated to follow the order—at which point Tryon signaled "What are you waiting for?"

At that moment, Markham was leading a column of five British battleships; Tryon was leading another column of six off his starboard bow. Tryon's order was for both columns to turn towards each other, complete a 180 degree turn, and begin steaming in the opposite direction. Unfortunately, Tryon had made a grave navigational error: the two columns of battleships were within each other's turning radius.

Markham complied with the order. His column of battleships turned and, predictably, his flagship Camperdown crashed directly into Tryon's Victoria, sinking the battleship and killing not just 358 British sailors and officers but Admiral Tryon himself.

A court martial was convened on the island of Malta. The court concluded that the disaster had been Tryon's fault entirely. No culpability could attach to Markham. He had, after all, just been following orders.

Modern readers are sometimes inclined to call Markham a coward. But the collision did in fact kill Tryon and might easily have killed Markham. Markham steered into it in full knowledge of what might happen. The man did not lack for physical courage—as demonstrated by his prior career in the Navy, which involved numerous boarding actions against pirates and slavers. What he lacked was moral courage. He was more willing to risk his life than to risk the blame for showing initiative and questioning his commander—questioning the rules.

In the Victoria-Camperdown disaster, we see the outlines of a systemic failure mode militaries are prone to. It begins with, of all things, the fear of failure. Failure is a natural thing to fear. But as Norman Dixon describes in The Psychology of Military Incompetence, this fear can become pathological. The fear of failure leads militaries to attempt to program out the possibility of failure through ever-more-exacting systems of rules. The Signal Book of Markham's age was a monstrosity of more than ten thousand signals, all intended to give the admiral in command perfect control over every ship in his fleet.

The fear of failure leads commanders in such militaries to perverse actions. They follow the rules even when they know the rules will lead to disaster, because they know that as long as they follow the rules they cannot be blamed. They seek out challenges that are either trivial or impossible. In trivial challenges there is no chance of failure. In impossible ones, failure is guaranteed—so, of course, no one can blame you when it arrives. The suicidal behavior of Rear-Admiral Sir Christopher Cradock at the Battle of Coronel in 1914 is one such example.

These perverse behaviors are maintained, first and foremost, by the personnel policies of such militaries—in plain terms, by hiring and firing. As Andrew Gordon documents in The Rules of the Game, in the Royal Navy of the nineteenth century, you might be cashiered for disobeying orders, but never for following them. Even if such court martials happened rarely, the captains and admirals of the Navy took notice—as they did of the court martial at Malta.

This excessive micromanagement—this punishment of initiative—this lack of punishment for objective failure—over time utterly saps the vigor of command. This problem would be on full display at the Battle of Jutland, where despite Admiral Jellicoe's plain mastery of signals and seamanship, not one of his subordinates thought to radio his flagship to let him know that the German High Seas Fleet was escaping to the safety of port a scant few miles behind him. After all, no one had told them to do so. So instead of a crushing British victory, Jellicoe was left with an inconclusive scuffle that would dog his reputation the rest of his life.

The structure of military success

I mentioned earlier the proliferation of rules and orders in fear-consumed militaries. The trouble with rules is Clausewitz's friction: the endless unexpected, the unforeseen or unforeseeable, the messy details of the world invisible to high command, the fact that the enemy gets a say in war. Your commander says "take that hill" and you do only to discover that it is not, in fact, the actual peak of the terrain, and the enemy machine guns are looking down on you from a yet higher hill.

The alternative to rules is "the independence of the lower commander," or in American terms: mission command. In the system of mission command, instead of high command attempting to program out every action in the minutest detail, high command simply tells commanders "This is what needs doing and why. Here are some resources to get it done with. Use your own initiative to accomplish it." If you get to the top of the hill and discover it's not actually the top of the hill, then call up the artillery, redirect their fire, and keep on going.

Of course, just yelling at people "Take the initiative!" and then not giving them any tools to do so is a recipe for disaster—as Admiral Tryon experienced, to his own fatal detriment. Individual initiative must be supported by the right kind of doctrine. The doctrine of Tryon and Markham's Royal Navy was the Signal Book—two volumes and five hundred pages containing more than ten thousand unique signals for giving any conceivable order by means of colored pennants. Modern doctrine is not a list of rules but a playbook: here is what you should be trying to do. Here are some ways you can do it. Look through the playbook and pull out the play that seems best to you in your situation—or change it a little, if necessary. Adapt and overcome.

But there's the thing: sometimes people don't adapt and don't overcome. Sometimes they screw up. General Lloyd Fredendall, as the Allied troops were storming across North Africa during Operation Torch, spent all his time and energy digging himself a bomb-proof bunker complex in the hills of Algeria. Meanwhile his men were getting run over by Rommel's panzers at the Kasserine Pass.

This is where the relief of command comes in. Fredendall was removed by Eisenhower and replaced with Patton. As Thomas Ricks documents in The Generals, this process was a constant in World War II: American commanders, from colonel to major general, were continually relieved of command if their results weren't up to snuff. And the rest knew it. Perform, or be relieved. Accountability is fundamental. But this is not accountability to the micromanagement of rules and process: this was accountability to material results.

Notably, relief during World War Two did not mean the end of your career. It was not a court martial or a juridical proceeding. It just meant transfer to somewhere else in the vast machine—Fredendall, for instance, was simply transferred to a training command stateside—and indeed did not even mean the end of career or advancement. It was just that—relief.

The Allied Expeditionary Force is not the only example we may look to. Fernando González de León has documented how the Spanish Army of Flanders won a series of crushing victories under the School of Alba, in which battlefield success led to promotion and failure to relief, but stumbled from loss to loss in the later period of the Eighty Years War, after the criterion for promotion became noble wealth and noble blood. 

As Robert Citino argues in From Blitzkrieg to Desert Storm, the IDF has historically been entirely willing to cashier generals who follow orders but fail to pursue the enemy aggressively, while rewarding commanders who ignore orders but get the job done. The net effect is that the IDF remains a highly capable fighting force. Whatever one might say about the ends that force is set to, no one wants to be on the wrong end of an Israeli armored battalion.

I dwell on this point about personnel because it is fundamental to understanding why our government and our politics has become as dysfunctional as it is. Hiring and firing, more than education, more than policy, more than orders, will shape an institution over the long run.

Governance

So what can these martial reflections teach us about progressive governance?  I will start with a simple truth: we liberals are today consumed by the fear of government power exercised badly. Yet. Like Dixon's military incompetents, our fear has paradoxically guaranteed its own fulfillment. Our response to our fear has been an insane proliferation of rules meant to restrict the exercise of power. We attempt to program out the operations of government in the smallest detail. And to ensure that these rules are all working properly, we add in endless systems of accountability to micromanage our government—lawsuits and public meetings, thousand-page addenda to thousand-page documents outlining every conceivable impact of every single choice.

But in all these systems of rules and micromanagement, no one is ever held accountable. If you cross every t and dot every i and the project comes in ten million dollars over budget and delivers nothing, you get promoted. If the reverse, you get fired.

The net result is billions of public dollars wasted. The net result is cities without public transit, where bridges crumble under the weight of repairs unfinished, a housing crisis spiraling out of control with no end in sight, a green transition forever promised and forever just out of reach. This is government power, badly exercised. The housing crisis is artificial. It is not the result of natural whim or free market forces. It is government power exercised to bad ends.

What is to be done? Some scholars suggest that the problem is that the civil service is overly beholden to public oversight. Joseph Heath argues that effective government institutions are independent government institutions. In this he is drawing on a long Weberian tradition that suggests that effective institutions are ones which have control over their own personnel. They can then promote people and execute policy based on their own professional standards of excellence.

In the time of DOGE, I could stop here for some applause lines about the value of an independent civil service. But I’m skeptical. Heath trades in the fantasy that the alignment of government institutions with the popular will can simply be assumed. "Just let the institution control its own personnel and set its own priorities" is not a recipe for good governance. Just look at the cops. 

As the events of the George Floyd protests demonstrated, American police departments are accountable primarily to themselves; elected officials have little control over personnel or policy. So of course America suffers from a simultaneous plague of unaccountable police brutality and unaccountable police incompetence. 

We spend far more on our police than our peers, and we get less out of them. Our murder clearance rate is below sixty percent. In Germany it is over ninety. I want you to stop and dwell on that fact for a moment. American police, by and large, do not really perform their core function of catching violent criminals. Clearance rates for murder, assault, rape, and robbery are all shockingly low compared to our peer nations.

Of course, this is precisely what we should expect from a government institution that is, in large, not accountable to civilian control. And military history is likewise rife with militaries that delivered tactical excellence yet, divorced from political control, led their nations to strategic catastrophe—as the Prussian General Staff did during World War I. War, as Clausewitz teaches, is simply policy by other means. Tactical choices must be subordinate to strategic vision. In the realm of governance, this means that the civil service must be subordinate to politicians, not vice-versa.

The lessons of military history suggest a different model. Instead of being accountable to rules and procedures, managers of public projects should be held accountable to results. If they fail to deliver, they should be relieved.

In the age of mindless, lawless mass firings of the federal civil service this might seem like a vile claim. But the truth is that the civil service is, in the end, accountable to organs of democratic politics. If our elected officials think they are not delivering, they should be relieved. This does not need to mean the end of their career; this does not need to mean prosecution for fraud or malfeasance. They simply need to not be rewarded for failure.

Yes, civilians should respect professional expertise, and create systems to effectively transmit such information upwards. The civil service must not simply regress to the spoils system, in which promotion was a matter of corruption and graft. But ultimately it is in the political arena that the professional expertise in one domain must be measured against expertise in all the others, and weighed in the balance of the people's interests.

One can steer between the Scylla of unaccountable governance and the Charybdis of wanton political interference here, and argue that civil service unions should have strong but not absolute protections from firing—say, managers having discretion to fire one percent of their department per year without cause. Alternatively, one might consider a system closer to World War II's relief, in which removal simply means transferral to some other place in the great bureaucracies of state.

I suggested this once to a colleague. He stroked his chin and said "Yes... but you would have to make sure there were rules for firing people for good reasons. A board, perhaps—" And here, of course, is the fear expressing itself—the fear of power used wrongly as a reason to shackle power generally. And this returns us to what is perhaps the most fundamental problem before us: not policy or program but culture and mindset. We want to program out the possibility of power used badly. But this cannot be done.

So what ensures that elected officials use this discretionary power wisely? This question is especially pressing, given that they do not today seem to be doing so. Let me propose exactly the same diagnosis and solution as I did before. The problem is that, by and large, our politicians are not accountable to the public at large. 

We have general elections, and they are largely free and fair. But in most districts in the country, the general election does not decide who takes office. The general election is a foregone conclusion: if you're in a blue district, whoever won the Democratic primary wins. If a red, the Republican. Politicians are not accountable to the general public: they are accountable to a sliver of highly engaged partisans in elections that aren't held on "election day."

Restoring accountability to the civil service, in other words, must be paired with restoring competition to politics. The "jungle primary" is one attempt to make this happen, but is subject to obvious vote-splitting problems. The correct answer—thanks political scientists—is multimember proportional districts. "Smashing the two party duopoly" cannot be achieved by voting Green. It is a result of structural features of the American system. This means that it can be changed by changing those structures. This does not require any deep Constitutional amendment. Multimember proportional districts can be formed via regular legislation. Such districts would restore competitiveness—and accountability—to our electoral system.

We can debate the particular details of the necessary reforms. But the lessons of military history are clear: civil servants must be accountable to elected politicians for their results. Politicians must be accountable to the public. This must be the accountability of relief based on objective success or failure—not micromanagement and no relief. We need a mindset that is willing to risk failure to achieve results—not one that retreats into the "safety" of process-obsession.

Here is a goal.  Here are some resources.  Get it done, or be relieved.

The virtue of ambition

Reforming governance will take moral courage. We are not at war; the bullets do not hiss past us as we march towards the front. But we are assailed by phantasmal fears all the same: visions of past abuses, rivers on fire and neighborhoods ploughed under, ribbons of concrete and smog-belching cars—or, more recently, the chaos of DOGE, the mad king wilfully firing public servants and illegally shuttering public agencies—the conservative vision of a unitary executive where the paramount leader may fire anyone at will.

Surely, we must put in place rules and procedures to prevent this from ever happening again.

Surely.

Ask yourself: did the rules and procedures stop it the first time?  Ask yourself: have the rules and procedures we have actually achieved the ends for which they were enacted?  Have they made government better?  Look around your city, your school, your state, and ask yourself if the rules and procedures are actually delivering the outcomes the American people want.

You know the answer.

Our pathological fear has delivered us precisely the outcome we feared. Doing better requires mastering that fear. Not discarding it—after all, power can be abused. But it can also be used for good. 

Because here's the truth: our governance is sclerotic. Our politics are sclerotic. This is especially true in blue states and blue cities. This is an anchor around our necks in the fight against fascism. If we want to sell the American people on liberal politics, we need to show them that liberal governance works. As Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist #1, "The vigor of government is essential to the security of liberty."  Bad governance gives Americans reason to distrust government. The failure to deliver public goods undermines the public trust.

We must rediscover the virtue of ambition: the ambition to get out there and make some real changes—and the courage to face the music after.

Appendix: Jutland

Some readers will have taken issue with my characterization of the Battle of Jutland in the text above. To all you military history obsessives, I say: eat your heart out.

Jellicoe was much criticized by his subordinate and later replacement, David Beatty, for several actions during the battle. At Jutland Beatty was in command of the Battlecruiser Force, operating independently from the Grand Fleet. In Beatty's telling he had delivered the High Seas Fleet directly to Jellicoe's jaws, only for Jellicoe to waste the triumph. In particular, he criticizes Jellicoe for a turn together maneuver, in which the battleships of the Grand Fleet simultaneously turned to port, away from the High Seas Fleet, in expectation of a destroyer flotilla attack launching torpedoes. As it happened, the High Seas Fleet was at that moment also performing a battle turn away maneuver, in which the entire line of German battleships individually turned 180 degrees and ran in the other direction. The result was that contact was broken between the fleets, and would never be regained.

In this I take Jellicoe to have taken the only correct action. As he emphasized repeatedly in his reports to the Admiralty—with which the Admiralty concurred—the overriding strategic imperative for the Royal Navy was to maintain command of the North Sea—to maintain the blockade that was starving Imperial Germany to death. Doing this required preservation of his numerical superiority in battleships. And a few unlucky torpedo hits would have changed that—decisively. As Winston Churchill would later put it, John Jellicoe was the only man on either side who could lose the war in a day. If Britain lost command of the seas she lost the war and she lost it fast.

In this respect Jellicoe's caution was absolutely warranted. The result of Jutland was exactly as he intended: the British maintained their naval superiority and maintained the blockade; indeed the High Seas Fleet would never again attempt to challenge it. Jutland was a decisive strategic victory.

And yet it was also an indecisive scuffle. And it was indecisive not because of Jellicoe's caution, but because of the lack of initiative displayed by Jellicoe's subordinates. After some maneuvering (which we will skip the details of) Jellicoe had put the Grand Fleet between the High Seas Fleet and the safety of its port in the Heligoland Bight. The Germans were desperate to escape the certain destruction that awaited them if Jellicoe ever brought them to battle.

Then night fell. The Germans made for Heligoland. Jellicoe—again demonstrating a real mastery of seamanship—accurately guessed their destination and likely course, and put the Grand Fleet on a course to intercept. In the end he was off by a few miles. And so the tail end of his battle line came into contact with the front end of the High Seas Fleet, leading to a few chaotic exchanges of naval artillery fire at near point-blank range. Indeed, the destroyer Spitfire was rammed by the German battleship Nassau. Nassau, unable to bring its guns to bear on the close-lying ship, simply fired them over the Spitfire's head. The muzzle blast alone killed everyone exposed on deck and devastated Spitfire's superstructure. This should give a sense of the close range and brutal stakes of this night action.

Meanwhile, Jellicoe was asleep on a cot aboard Iron Duke—not out of laziness, but because nobody on any of the ships engaged—nor any of the ships that were merely nearby and could clearly see and hear battleship guns firing behind them—thought to radio Iron Duke to tell Jellicoe that the High Seas Fleet was in the process of escaping. If they had Jellicoe could easily have been in position to crush the Germans when the dawn came.

Jellicoe, in other words, was a master admiral of the Signals Book navy. He understood gunnery and seamanship, and had a tremendous ability to maneuver fleets—remember, the British line of battleships in those days stretched six miles from end to end—from one edge of the horizon to the other. But he did so via highly centralized command-and-control, mostly by running little colored flags up the mast. When this system broke down—which is to say, when the friction of war intervened—things suddenly got much messier.

Beatty's role in this system is interesting. Beatty himself was a man of no character—I mean this genuinely—he was a liar, an adulterer, a faithless friend, a fabricator of historical record and a man who as First Sea Lord would abuse the power of position to cover up his own failures during the war. Nor was he redeemed by being a particularly competent naval commander: he wasn't.

Yet he also recognized that there was something wrong with the Royal Navy. He recognized that the overreliance on the Signals Book had destroyed the initiative of subordinate captains. Unfortunately, merely yelling at your subordinates to have more initiative is not an effective remedy for this problem. All of this shows plainly at the Battle of Dogger Bank, in which Beatty's Battlecruiser Force was in a position to run down and destroy the German battlecruiser force... until an ambiguous signal from Beatty led his own ships to break off the pursuit and shell an already-dying obsolete German heavy cruiser.

Beatty would later evince enormous frustration that his subordinates had not simply taken the initiative themselves and continued the pursuit. This is a demonstration of how the culture of initiative cannot be created in a day nor by one man, but rather exists as part of a larger system dependent on flexible doctrine, relief of command, and most fundamentally culture and mindset. These are institutional structures that must be cultivated over time.

For more of the details discussed here, I recommend Castles of Steel, for a general overview of naval operations during World War I, as well as The Rules of the Game, for a more detailed look at Jutland. The Rules of the Game is also the basis for the picture of the culture and doctrine of the Royal Navy given in this essay.

Featured image is "Fernando Álvarez de Toledo, III Duque de Alba," Antonis Mor 1557.