– “The Great Disruptor – Part II” Sydney Williams
http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com
Creative destruction is a school in economics, popularized by Joseph Schumpeter[2], that explains the process by which innovation obsoletes older processes, equipment and products. While disruptive in the short term, it is the driving force for long term economic growth and progress. In Scenes from American Life: Contemporary Short Fiction (1973), Joyce Carol Oates wrote: “It is only through disruption and confusion that we grow, jarred by the collision of someone else’s private world with our own.” On November 5, 2011 in an op-ed in London’s The Guardian, Naomi Wolf noted: “Democracy is disruptive…there is no right in a democratic civil society to be free of disruption.”
Disruption is the antidote to complacency, the enemy of innovation, and it is challenging to those of the status quo – those whom we call the “establishment.” However, disruption is not always good. We can think of dozens of instances – a child throwing food at the table; protestors shutting down university classes; strikers blocking the entrance to a grocery store. But throughout history, progress has thrived on disruption. We see the beginnings of such positive disruption in Washington today: addressing the border crisis, eliminating fraud and waste embedded in federal bureaucracies and confronting anti-Semitism on college campuses. On the other hand, we are also witness to negative disruption: the, seemingly random, use of tariffs by President Trump and belittling comments about allies by Vice President Vance.
That President Trump is a disruptive force is a fact universally accepted. The question we and the world face: Is President Trump a disruptive force for good or bad? “There are times,” Karl Zinsmeister, White House chief domestic policy director 2006-2009, wrote recently in The Wall Street Journal, “when some messy political demolition and noisy rebuilding are necessary.” Is this such a time? I believe it is.
To many there is much that needs to change: The porous southern border, which has recently been tightened. The House Committee on Oversight and Accountability put the number of illegal migrant crossings at 8 million during the Biden years, with 6.7 million crossing along the southwestern border. And those migrants brought in an estimated 50,000 lbs. of fentanyl. Air Traffic Control (ATC), under the purview of Congress, obviously needs fixing. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has promised to revamp the technology. Culturally, a preference for DEI came to dominate schools and colleges; it is divisive in that it emphasizes identity politics, Wokeness, racial discrimination and transgenderism, while de-emphasizing family, church, community, and school choice. Banning books is despicable, no matter one’s politics. Yet books like Gender Queer, prohibited by the Right, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, forbidden by the Left, have been banned by schools and libraries. Federal debt has spiraled from $5.7 trillion in 2000 to $35.5 trillion in 2024. Interest expense last year exceeded defense spending and will continue to do so. Excessive regulation inhibits innovation and productivity. In 2024, the Biden Administration finalized 3,248 new rules, 124 of which will each have an estimated impact on the economy of at least $200 million, a record according to a study by George Washington University. Excluding the military, the federal workforce is approximately three million, a third larger than it was twenty-five years ago, with increased costs and diminished accountability. Our military needs revamping. The U.S. Navy lost more than a third of its fleet between 2000 and 2024, a loss of 172 naval vessels. Today, China’s 370 naval vessels compare to our 296 naval ships. China dominates the western Pacific. That situation needs to change.
Will President Trump and his team shake up Washington in a positive way? Certainly, the opportunity is there for “creative destruction.” But alienating allies, praising dictators and randomly imposing tariffs, and what Karl Zinsmeister called the “flaming hubris and overreach” of the Trump era may prevent that from happening.
While disruption may be the right prescription to our current polarized political state, any reform should be guided by principles laid out in the Declaration of Independence and in the words of our Constitution. It should take into consideration the inviolable bases for our Republic: the rule of law, the separation of powers, and government that is “of the people, by the people, for the people.”
Only history will answer the question as to whether President Trump’s disruptive ways will prove good or bad. There are no Pythia’s on the slopes of a modern day Parnassus. Regardless and in my opinion our government, with its ever-expanding bureaucracy, has strayed from our Founders desire for limited government and a belief in the fundamental rights of the individual. A disruptor is what Washington needs.
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