A few weeks ago, we watched Democrats take another step into making Virginia permanently blue. They had a great turnout, lots of victories and set the table for Virginia to go blue in 2020.
We’ve heard a lot about the growing number of federal employees who live in Virginia. They are also voting and donating to Democrats in large numbers, as David French wrote:
While there are certainly some biased, partisan conservatives in the federal bureaucracy, the ideological imbalance in the civil service is striking. It’s not quite at university-faculty levels, but it’s getting close.
For example, in the 2016 election cycle, Hillary Clinton received an astounding 95 percent of all federal-employee donations.
Over at the Department of Justice, it is 90%! The DOJ is where the investigations happen.
Is it unreasonable for people who live in the “flyover country” to be skeptical of lawyers and bureaucrats in a department that donated 90% to Mrs. Clinton?
As French wrote, there is also a terrible danger of “groupthink” under such circumstances. It discourages creativity, specially if the person proposing a new idea does not support the favored candidate.
Beyond turning Virginia, and most of Maryland suburbs rather blue, this is a threat to our democracy.
How can a federal bureaucracy be so different than the people that they are serving?
President Trump won 31 states or 306 votes. On a county by county basis, the U.S. is a red sea with islets of blue.
Shouldn’t the bureaucracy reflect some of that vote? I understand that we’ve just finished two terms of a very partisan Democrat who used the bureaucracy to go around Congress, from immigration to ObamaCare. I further understand that it will look a bit more balanced after President Trump’s, hopefully, two terms.
We’ve often mentioned that there is a lack of political diversity in our university staffs. I would argue that the media could use a little political diversity. Absolutely, the federal bureaucracy would benefit from some diversity as well.
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