Let me confess here a nostalgia for the managerial professionalism that I have just described. It was, after all, the system that administered the country’s great corporations, its news media, its regulatory agencies, and its welfare state in the more benevolent years of the American Century. Here and there, in certain corners of our national life, this older organizational form still survives, keeping our passenger jets from exploding and our highway bridges from collapsing. But generally speaking, that system of professionalism was long ago subverted and transformed into something different
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