Culture Eats Everything for Breakfast
If one has read enough corporate management “literature” — an activity I strongly advise against — one quickly encounters the “culture eats …” phrase. “Culture eats strategy for breakfast,” or it eats “policy,” or “plans,” very specifically the best-laid plans of new managers who wish to energize a business or take it in a fresh direction. The phrase in its many forms is widely — and perhaps falsely — attributed to the famous management “guru,” Peter Drucker. Drucker may not have said it quite so pungently, but he certainly expressed similar thoughts, and, were he still alive, he might well have adopted it for his own. It’s that popular, and it’s that powerful.
Why? Simply put, it’s because it offers a compelling explanation for why achieving change in any organization is surpassingly difficult. One reads all the time about “change agents” and their achievements, but, having watched more than a few of them in action, I was reminded repeatedly that the most loudly touted changes frequently came to nothing, and even the most carefully conceived and executed strategies quickly ran aground among the rocks and shoals of entrenched values.
In the wake of the recent elections, as conservatives of every stripe express hope that the tide has finally turned in their direction, we might well take a moment to remind ourselves of the challenges that lie ahead. This time round, it’s evident that Donald Trump is taking a more radical approach to establishing his administration.
Trump 45 relied to a great extent on the usual Republican suspects and churned through them as they repeatedly frustrated his agenda. Trump 47’s cabinet picks have been widely derided as “inexperienced” and lacking the stature to lead large government agencies, as witnessed, for example, by the strident criticisms of Pete Hegseth and Tulsi Gabbard. (READ MORE: Trump’s ‘Unqualified’ Courageously Diverse Appointees — and a Conservative Hope)
But what Trump seems to be about this time is something rather different, not so much a program for managing the government but a campaign to tear away the dross and rebuild from scratch. Having witnessed up close what the government has become, one can only wish him well. We can’t go on the way we’ve been going, particularly after the accelerated downhill slide of the last four years. It’s all very well and good to say that “we have to keep the government going,” “we have to see that the people’s work gets done,” or “we have to protect ourselves against all enemies foreign and domestic.”
One wonders. Why, for example, must we keep that part of government going that, in the name of education, actually — and energetically —subverts it in the name of teacher’s union featherbedding and the promotion of woke pieties? What good comes from continuing a regulatory regime that thwarts the goal of energy independence in the name of dubious climate “science.” (RELATED: The Federal ‘Swamp Thing’ Cut Down to Size)
How are we protected against domestic enemies when senior FBI agents can’t seem to identify terrorism when it stares them in the face, or when the Secret Service can’t protect a former and future president? How well-protected are we against foreign enemies when we can’t build enough ships or maintain the ones we have just as the operational tempo goes through the roof? How can we be assured of future protection as our armed services fail to meet their recruiting and retention goals?
Still, let’s not kid ourselves. We can certainly nibble around the edges of the problem with changes in policy, but real change will require changing cultures, and not just the corporate cultures of federal agencies, but the larger culture that informs how we have come to think of ourselves as a nation.
Our own Jed Babbin offered an example of the problem the other day, writing that “The Woke FBI is a Mess.” Babbin begins his essay by wondering whether the current FBI TV series features “a very diverse bunch of FBI agents who never, ever, have a politically incorrect thought.” My wife and I watch the show, and, surprisingly, it sometimes breaks against type. Unlike many crime shows, the bad guys are not always drawn from the white working class — one actually has to follow the plot, rather than simply assuming that no black or Hispanic could ever be a villain.
Babbin is broadly correct in his suspicion that the FBI agents on TV portray the usual diverse and politically correct stereotypes. And the related spin-off series are even worse. We watched one episode of FBI: Most Wanted and were so insulted by its characterizations that we’ve never watched it again, and FBI: International proved almost as irksome. Sadly, we’ve come a very long way from Efrem Zimbalist Jr.’s 1960s FBI series. Then again, in real life, Zimbalist had been a wounded and decorated WWII infantry officer — he knew something of the world beyond Hollywood, and Hollywood then occupied a very different cultural space.
In other words, the internal agency culture is downstream of the dominant larger culture.
My point, however, is that the TV versions of the FBI aren’t so much reflections of the current real-world FBI as the opposite — I don’t think that the producers of the TV series have consciously set out to portray the agency in all its wokery. Instead, it seems more likely that the TV shows are shaped by today’s Hollywood values and, critically, those same values are at work in the actual agency.
My government experience tells me that this is almost always the case. I worked occasionally alongside younger representatives of the State Department and several of the various three-letter agencies involved with national security policy. In my generation, those who gravitated toward national security work tended to be rather more conservative than the culture in general, but the younger generation, recruited heavily from Ivy League schools, less often leavened by prior military experience, trended more “woke” in their everyday values. But they brought the values with them from their schooling and from growing up in “the right neighborhoods,” surrounded by the “right people,” and watching the “right shows.”
The same has been true in my experience with law enforcement agencies. Street cops tend to be pretty conservative, and tactical officers even more so — SWAT isn’t a hothouse in which progressive sensitivities are nourished. Direct, hands-on experience with criminals has a sobering effect. But when, for example, a city government is run by progressive politicians, the officers who rise along the promotion path quickly learn how to speak the progressive language and, sooner or later, internalize many of the same values.
For example, over the years many big city — and even smaller city — police chiefs have lent their voices in support of the usual progressive gun control pieties, knowing that this is what’s expected if they wish to succeed.
The men and women who are actually out on the street largely reject these pieties. Instead, they tend to support “stop and frisk” and, if they are against any category of gun possession, it’s confined to a desire to take guns out of the hands of gangbangers. This, of course, is anathema to progressive urban leaders and those who shape the media narratives, as we’ve just been painfully reminded.
It wasn’t a man who killed those people in New Orleans — it was a truck, and in the typical headline, apparently one of those new autonomous vehicles, no driver required.
The good news is that a rebellion against progressive cultural dominance has begun, and the better news is that a string of small victories was ratified, decisively, in the November elections. Corporations are getting the message, as witnessed by a retreat from some of the most insulting marketing trends (although some still haven’t gotten the message — looking at you Jaguar). State legislatures are sending a powerful message to public universities to dismantle their DEI bureaucracies. (READ MORE: The High-Water Mark of Woke Corporate Activism)
It’s time, quite clearly, for the same to take place across the federal government as well. If the new cabinet secretaries can shake up their agencies, then well and good, and if the “Department of Government Efficiency” delivers even a quarter of what’s been promised, then that would be outstanding.
But let’s not kid ourselves. None of the changes now occurring, nor any of those proposed, are likely to have any lasting effect without changes in the culture. An executive order may change the direction of the ship by a few compass points, but a genuinely new course, a genuinely lasting course, will require much more work over a much longer time. The distance from Efrem Zimbalist’s FBI series to that of the current show’s characters, Maggie and OA, is measured in 60 years of cultural change for the worse. It’s reflected in a real-world agency culture unwilling and unable to deal honestly with Islamic terrorism.
Hollywoke culture has feasted on our institutions, as “Drucker” would have it, at breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Regardless of the institution, be it a government agency, a Fortune 500 business, or, sadly, the current Catholic church, if we mean to see things change, we can’t simply leave the task to a small cadre of cabinet secretaries or other functionaries.
Instead, we need to set ourselves to the task of taking back the culture, in our communities, our schools, our places of work and worship — and in those sources that we turn to for news and entertainment. We need to eat Hollywoke for breakfast, and we need to sit down at the table today.
READ MORE from James H. McGee:
The ‘Wright’ Choice at the Department of Energy
Weimar America: The Threat Is on the Left
James H. McGee retired in 2018 after nearly four decades as a national security and counter-terrorism professional, working primarily in the nuclear security field. Since retiring, he’s begun a second career as a thriller writer. His recent novel, Letter of Reprisal, tells the tale of a desperate mission to destroy a Chinese bioweapon facility hidden in the heart of the central African conflict region. A forthcoming sequel finds the Reprisal team fighting against terrorists who’ve infiltrated our southern border in a conspiracy that ranges across the globe. You can find Letter of Reprisal on Amazon in both Kindle and paperback editions and on Kindle Unlimited.
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