Broder on Federal Debt and Politics

It is instructive to listen to David Broder (“Government Gasps Its Last as Debt and Politics Thrive,” Op-Ed Page, Oct. 31) and simultaneously to dip into Edward Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” once again. Broder, quoting a Beltway bureaucracy expert, summarizes the deterioration of government as government, with the President and Congress shrugging off responsibility, deciding to play personal politics, while automatic cuts further decimate the services 250 million people depend on.

Similarly, after Augustus (Gibbons’ “sly tyrant” and our Ronald Reagan) the streets of once-great Rome were abandoned to the homeless and ragged refugees from the empire, while the emperorship succession was accomplished by bribery, murder or military conquest. In those latter days the famous bureaucracy of Rome, which created modern civilization as we know it, had become a mere ghost of its former self.

Columnist Broder dismisses the present bureaucracy as “hollow government,” but offers no solution--perhaps because no solution is visible from where he sits. He and other faithful purveyors of news have been effectively sidetracked by diversionary displays of a government indifferent to the nuts-and-bolts of governing, and/or without direction; e.g. the drug “war,” the flag caper, the education divertissement , with further events as Circus Maximus limited only by the unlimited imagination of Lee Atwater. And all presented to us, out here, as “reality.”

But other hints sneak through, that there is a solution to our national government’s indifference to governing. For example, the Environment Protection Agency--so badly battered under Reagan--has outraged state (especially Californian) environmentalists by attempting to “preempt” state laws by less restrictive national law. But the severity of its environmental laws is a good measure of the competence of an environmental bureaucracy. The California resistance thus becomes a further shift of authority from less competent to more competent hands.

Thus the sequel to Broder’s gloomy “decline and fall” is that the people of the United States have no intention of eating dirt for a thousand years just because their imperium in Washington is about to, or has, collapsed.

DAVID ALAN MUNRO

Laguna Beach