I am not going to argue that the legend of King Arthur and his knights of the Table Round was originally intended as a thought experiment, not even in T. H. White's marvelous novel, The Once and Future King (the basis for the Broadway musical Camelot).  But I shall argue that it is very useful to consider it as such, a model of a perfect government, a utopia, that comes inevitably to wrack and ruin.

    Let's consider some of the problems, problems the supposedly scientific utopias (and the civics books) conveniently ignore.

    The first problem is that you can't have Camelot without Arthur, and, in the real world, nobody wants to be Arthur.  Indeed, even in the legend, Arthur himself didn't want to be Arthur.  And for good reason.  

    To be Arthur requires, first of all, a vision.  In the generic case, a vision of "Might for Right" instead of "Might Makes Right."  The knight should slay the dragon and rescue the fair maiden, not seek accommodation with the dragon and rape the maiden (or the taxpayer).

    All politicians are happy to endorse the Rule of Law as a principle.  But to be Arthur requires sticking with it even when it is painful to do so.  This we do not find in the real world.  In 1996, Bill Clinton found the campaign finance laws standing in the way of his reelection -- so he disregarded them.  When this inconvenient truth was pointed out to him, he responded by declaring that the system was broken and that therefore it was ok to violate the law until a better, more comprehensive law could be enacted.  In the case of George W. Bush, we find that from the outset of his administration he steadfastly refused to enforce the immigration laws on the books because he disagreed with the policy that was written into them.  He too, justified trashing the rule of law by appealing to the need for "comprehensive reform" of immigration law.

    If nobody wants to be Arthur, everybody wants to be Lancelot, the greatest knight that ever lived.  Every  politician understands that in order to do any good at all he (or she) must have power.  Every idealist in politics therefore  strives for power, sacrificing principles when necessary.  This leads our great champions of public life to behave like parodies of Lancelot, trimming to the winds of public opinion and the zephyrs of "political reality" to attain or maintain power.

    Our great politicians thus end up acting a lot like Mordred.  And the lesser lights Inside the Beltway never pretend to be anything else.  The trouble with big government is that it is a collection of little pieces.  This bridge, that sewer and water project, the seemingly minor amendment, the mention in the State of the Union Message are the product of never-ending struggle inside the beltway as all the little hustlers compete for a piece of the action.  Public policy emerges as a vectoral result of hundreds of political versions of king-of-the-hill, which means that it usually ends up being a mole hill.  Instead of the nation's capital being the place where the noblest and wisest in the land go to  provide direction to the free world, it is the place where the sharpest and smoothest go to carve out careers.  Whether members of Congress, White House staffers, lobbyists, bureaucrats, political consultants, journalists or activists, the goal is an ever-larger place at the public trough.  Corruption is not just the heart and soul of the process of making public policy, it is the goal of the policy-making process.  Making public policy, like making sausages, is a process that would make a normal person puke; the media never covers it because journalists are integral components of the system.  When politicians extol the virtues of a national health care system, they describe a horse, but everybody inside the beltway knows that what would actually happen would be a camel.  The purpose of national health care is to create a larger empire to accommodate more corruption -- like the national K-12 education system.

    And what about Sir Galahad and the other genuinely great knights of the Round Table?  They give up and leave town to pursue noble, but private occupations -- questing for some Holy Grail or other.  This, of course, gives the Mordreds a clear field and makes it even more impossible for anyone to be Arthur.  

    This is the basic message of Camelot as political science.  But we cannot close without at least mentioning Guinevere and Merlin.  One of the reasons big government fails is that inside the beltway significant behavior is often personal.  Some of these poltroons actually like each other.  Even if they have ideological disagreements, they will often try to accommodate one another as personal favors, moving public policy even further away from the civics-book model.

    Camelot is thus a detailed model of how government really works  in today's world.  Oh, and Merlin?  The sad truth is that every member of the chattering classes in the country is absolutely certain that he (or she) is supposed to be Merlin (including, God forgive me, your servant).