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I think there are a lot of the true believers in government posts, because the person most likely to take a job in government is the one with the least realistic outlook on most issues mostly for lack of experience. They’ve never been to a ghetto at all with or without police, they don’t know anything about people who live there.
Second, excluding the very top tiers of government, the job is one that you take as a middle class job of last resort. Thus those in the government are likely to be uncritical of anything popular that they’ve been told. They went from their communications degree at some middling university to answering emails on behalf of the government because the6 honestly cannot get a middle class position in the private sector.
Put those together, and you end up with isolated mandarins who believe exactly what the cathedral has told them about the world and who know that not toeing the line is dangerous anyway.
In addition to what @SSCReader said, this is simply incorrect. And kind of ironic, because when people complain about the "generous salaries and great benefits" that feds get, that is only kind of true with respect to feds doing blue collar or very light white collar work. Admin assistants, HR people (hate them all you want but someone has to actually process paperwork for new hires, retirees, pay issues, etc.), installation and logistics, motor pool and janitorial services, etc., as well as many specialized government functions like IRS auditors and accountants - these are jobs where a GS employee might make more that his or her private sector counterpart. The job stability is a further bonus, which means many people do not see a government job as a "middle class job of last resort."
Now if you look at tech workers- software developers, engineers, research scientists, etc. - they are usually making considerably less than their private sector counterpart. They might take the government job because they want the stability and to get out of the contractor look-for-a-new-job-every-two-years rat race, they might take it because they want the work-life balance (government workers are almost never required to work more than a standard 40 hour week), they might genuinely believe in the mission of the agency they are with or find it to be interesting work. But they are generally speaking not losers who couldn't get a job anywhere else either.
Your "isolated mandarins" mostly applies to the folks at the top who do nothing but attend meetings all day in DC, or a certain tier of low-level workers who got an in early (maybe with a "useless communications degree" but often with no degree at all) and have never known anything but government work.
These people mostly don't live in ghettos (though many do live in working class neighborhoods in Baltimore or DC), but they mostly aren't living in those McMansions in NOVA either (those aren't government workers, those are lobbyists, contractors, lawyers, and other politician-adjacent people). They know plenty about the area and have plenty of contact with "the real world." I don't know where you get this fantasy that all government workers are "true believers" living in some rarefied academic bubble, and as for the idea that they just "uncritically believe anything popular that they've been told" - well, speaking of generalizations based on anecdata, have you ever actually met a FAANG employee? (Yeah, we have some here - and my point stands. Everyone, especially here, thinks they are an independent critical thinker unswayed by what moves the herd.)
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Most civil servants, numerically, have perfectly intelligible job titles like 'VA nurse', 'mail carrier', and 'border patrol agent'. None of these things require a degree in communications and all of them are things normal working class people take as a job, on the same terms and for the same reasons as they would take a job doing the equivalent for someone else. You're really only talking about senior managers of bureaucrats.
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Just by numbers most people in government posts are people who deal with the public and just want a job. Your description really only applies at management layers and above. Remember only a third of federal employees even have a degree let alone one in communications or similar, and many of those are in the Medical field as part of the VA and the like. Entertainingly USAID is the best counter-example with two thirds of its workforce having an advanced degree or higher! But that is not the norm across the Federal bureaucracy.
Your social security local office people are dealing with being yelled at by people losing their welfare and the like, they are VERY familiar with the lower/underclass and all their foibles and are probably not true believers in ideology as much as they are average workers worrying about making ends meet. Their direct managers will be as well. The local DMV is staffed by people from or close to the ghetto in fact here, so that wouldn't apply even for a lot of local government jobs. Remember most government jobs just by numbers are front facing. It wasn't until I moved to the higher echelons in the Civil Service I found all the politics and classics degree types.
From the point of view of the Federal government that would probably be the Senior Executive Service, of which there are about 9,000. If I were wanting to re-organize the Federal bureaucracy I would start with those 9,000 because they manage large projects and departments (basically the steps below political appointees) But of the sheer scale of the government in the US the vast majority do not appear to match your description.
In other words, the person most likely to take a government post is a non-degree having, neo-customer service worker, who (if you have never worked a customer facing job like that) will be very clear about how the rubber meets the road. Your Ivory Tower idea really only applies to a small minority in the upper ends of the government (but they are of course much more influential.)
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Maybe at the federal level, but some of the most experienced at the local level are certainly civil servants. The police are mostly responding to calls in the bad parts of town, as are the paramedics and fire fighters. Even the health inspectors are boots-on-the-ground visiting all the establishments in the city on a regular basis. Much more so than your corporate desk jockeys or even service workers. Maybe your plumbers and electricians make it out to those areas too, though.
Tradesmen and certain service workers make it into... interesting areas. Corporate workers don't.
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I'm pretty sure that rank-and-file police are more sympathetic to the Republicans than the average person.
I just did a bunch of googling and Google absolutely refused to give me the stats. I smell the stink of filtered search results.
Anyways, duckduckgo.com gave me this interesting 2016 article.
But that's just subscribers to this cop website clicking an option, not a rigorous polling method. On the other hand, geeze that's lopsided. Hillary barely beating out Gary Johnson with single-digit percentage support.
For another datapoint, the NYPD union went hard for Trump.
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