LIAR’S POKER: Michael Lewis: Won’t Somebody Please Think of the DC Bureaucrats?!
Trump’s America moves fast and breaks things, including careers. Eighteen months ago the Washington Post asked Michael Lewis, the great American storyteller and illustrious business journalist, to conjure up a series of lengthy features on federal government personnel. He would write two of them, six other distinguished writers the rest. This almost ruthlessly unsexy commission delivered the glad tidings that the government is manned by decent, hardworking employees, some of them near-geniuses. The series featured, among others, the Department of Labor man who has spared miners’ lives by inventing safer pillars for coal-face tunnels, the military cemeteries chief devoted to ensuring no American hero lies unburied or unmarked, and the woman at the National Archives who meticulously unearths and cherishes the country’s history.
To the surprise of everyone, not least Lewis, the pieces proved among the Post’s most read features of last year. Having now collected them into a book, Who Is Government?, Lewis, who regards himself as habitually lucky, has the mixed fortune of finding himself holding both a hot property and a hot potato. Those the book celebrates are now living in fear of the chop from President Trump’s proxy, Elon Musk, the axe man who regards civil servants as monsters from an infinitely drainable swamp.
“I do think that there is this kind of bigotry about civil servants,” says Lewis, the 64-year-old author of The Big Short, from his writer’s cabin in the garden of the home overlooking San Francisco Bay where he lives with his wife and two children. “For whatever reason, people will accept a false portrait of them. In the same way they accept a false portrait of immigrants and trans people. The Trump administration has identified that you can put into the same bucket with immigrants and trans people, civil servants. You can beat up on them relentlessly, say whatever you want to say about them and people will kind of nod their heads.”
This is a significant shaft of pessimism from a writer whose journalism can cast a withering eye but is personally noted for his sunniness. His optimism, after all, survived the scandals of Salomon Brothers, where he had worked in the Eighties and whose obnoxious culture he colourfully depicted in Liar’s Poker, and the great homes-destroying crash of 20 years later (as featured in The Big Short, which, like many of his books, became an unlikely but compelling feature film).
In 2012, “Vanity Fair writer Michael Lewis agreed to allow the White House to approve the quotations he used from President Barack Obama in his story about the president in this month’s magazine.” So why is Lewis now attacking Doge, a thoroughly Obama-endorsed idea?