Word came across the wires this week that Ethiopia’s prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, took his cabinet ministers, deputy ministers, and assorted high-ranking bureaucrats, stripped them of their tailored suits, dressed them in standard-issue military fatigues, and sent them crawling through the dirt. The ministers were put through basic training drills, early-morning calisthenics, and weapons handling, all under the watchful eye of actual drill instructors. You can almost hear the nervous chortles and patronizing sighs wafting through Georgetown dinner parties and United Nations committee rooms. To the global credentialed class, the whole thing looks crude, performative, and backward. But sitting at a diner counter in the middle of the country, watching the daily parade of our own self-important managerial elite, you cannot help but crack a wry smile at the sheer poetry of it.
Let us be honest about the context before anyone gets carried away. Ethiopia is not an idyllic Jeffersonian township, and Abiy Ahmed is not holding town halls to debate property taxes. The country has endured harrowing internal bloodshed, particularly in the northern Tigray region, and the centralization of authority there carries genuine, dangerous risks. As Edmund Burke famously reminded us, a state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation, but tearing up civil institutions in favor of raw martial displays rarely leads to enduring peace. The rule of law and the quiet dignity of representative government must always trump the drumbeat of militarism.
Yet, there remains something deeply instructive about the spectacle of desk-bound rulers being forced to confront physical reality. Consider the contrast with our own homegrown ruling class. In Washington and the coastal enclaves that feed it, governance has degenerated into an exercise in bloodless theory. The people who staff the federal agencies, churn out thousands of pages of strangling regulations for family farms, and pontificate about global stability on Sunday morning talk shows have spent their entire adult lives in air-conditioned comfort. They moved smoothly from elite prep schools to Ivy League dormitories, and from there straight into taxpayer-funded sinecures. They have never carried sixty pounds of gear on their backs, never worked a twelve-hour shift on a loading dock, and never had to look a foreman in the eye.
When those very same American elites decide it is time to flex their geopolitical muscles or restructure the domestic economy by administrative fiat, it is never their own children who bear the burden. It is the sons and daughters of working-class families from places like Ohio, Iowa, and Missouri who raise their right hands, pack their sea bags, and head overseas to carry out strategies drafted over oat-milk lattes in the capital. The administrative state has effectively insulated itself from the consequences of its own decisions. They view the nation not as a living community bound by shared duty and tradition, but as an unruly spreadsheet to be managed from three thousand miles away.
That growing chasm between the governor and the governed is the fundamental rot at the core of our modern politics. In the older tradition of statecraft that Burke defended, leadership was never meant to be a detached managerial science. It required skin in the game. It demanded that those who held power had an intimate, personal stake in the soil, the customs, and the hardships of the people they were presumed to represent. What we have built instead is an unaccountable technocracy that risks nothing, sacrifices nothing, and yet presumes to lecture everyone else on how to live.
No doubt the Ethiopian leader is playing his own hard-knuckle brand of domestic politics. He is reminding his subordinates that loyalty to the state must be total, and he is signaling to rivals that his government intends to project strength. But putting a pencil-pusher in combat boots and making him run laps in the mud serves a universal purpose. It is a blunt, unyielding reminder that authority does not belong entirely to the world of paper memos and abstract policy papers. Government exists in a world of friction, physical cost, and unavoidable sacrifice.
We do not need martial drills in the United States, and God forbid we ever turn to strongman theatrics to fix what is broken in our republic. The genius of our constitutional system lies in the supremacy of civil society over military coercion. But we would all be better off if our senior regulators, career bureaucrats, and congressional grandstanders were forced to take an extended sabbatical from their cocktail parties. Imagine if, before handing down mandates that shutter local factories or drafting orders that deploy young Americans abroad, our administrative masters had to spend a month living under the very conditions they manufacture for the rest of us. They might just return with a little less arrogance, a little more humility, and a healthy respect for the folks who actually keep the lights on.