The Tyranny of the Clerks:

What the 2024 election is really all about

I’ve never liked the term Deep State; it stinks of Far Left paranoia about things like the CIA, paranoia that was rampant in the 1970’s American Left, presented in a stack of books and movies like The Conversation and Three Days of The Condor. Small, conspiratorial little groups of people doing their stuff inside US government agencies. It’s even funnier – if you like black comedy – to see how the Left has now embraced the FBI, CIA and others: extolling them, defending them.

I prefer to call it The Administrative State because huge numbers of public servants are in your face every day; no need for conspiracies when herd thinking and echo chambers apply. Sir Humphrey’s antics certainly provided plenty of laughs back in the 1980’s as he and his bureaucratic minions “guided” their hapless Minister, Jim Hacker. But as Danyl Mclauchlan pointed out in 2022 it’s no longer funny as he ticked off the litany of Labour fail:

The crisis in the health system is happening alongside an $11 billion project to reform the health bureaucracy. Also underway is the centralisation of the polytechnics…. “FENZ had $468m capital expenditure in the last five years and firefighters are questioning where the money has gone,” Muller said. “There has been no improvements to resourcing over that period… We are witnessing fire trucks breaking down across the country.”…

Billions upon billions upon billions of dollars spent with huge increases in the numbers of Public Service (HA!) staff and private consultants. I’ve said before that Labour 2017-2023 was the most useless and incompetent government in my lifetime aside from Muldoon. And sadly these screw-ups are not because of the command and control fixation of one man or corruption or stupidity, although there are probably portions of all those (I say sadly because those can be fixed). Mclauchlan puts forward a still sadder theory:

In 1994 the US historian and cultural critic Christopher Lasch died, and a year later his final book The Revolt of the Elites was published. Lasch started his career as a socialist and ended it as a hard-to-categorise hybrid of anti-capitalist, anti-consumerist pro-environmental conservative. The revolting elites in his book are the professional managerial class: the educated technocrats who occupy a commanding position across post-industrial economies, not by direct ownership of capital or overt command of the political system but by managerial  control of all our institutions. They run everything. I’ve written about the professional managerial class [PMC] before – I don’t think you can understand 21st century politics without them – and for Lasch their most important qualities are: a) they’re a global class; b) they’re more concerned with the virtual and abstract than the physical, and, c) the primary purpose of their politics is therapeutic.

The PMC are not just lawyers and academics but programmers, bankers, and that catch-all horror, consultants. (Confession time: I once was one of the latter). Basically they work with information and as Lasch says they’re not really connected to the people they basically rule over. Mclauchlan points out specific examples from Ardern herself and the rest if her ilk; their aspirations (unmet), huge comms staff and so forth:

And,  from Lasch’s perspective, this all makes total sense. For his managerial class the primary purpose of the transport agency and the rest of the state is to create high income jobs and lucrative contracts for the cognitive elite – they are the true value creators, after all – and to deliver media campaigns celebrating the bravery of their visions, the nobility of their aspirations; to affirm that they are the good and smart people.

Incredibly, in the USA, it’s actually worse, and has been for some time, as none other than Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas explains:

The separation of powers, the enumerated powers, federalism. The whole point was to keep the government in this box. Justice Scalia and I often talked about that, that the structure was the main way to protect your liberty. The danger in the administrative state is seeing those powers all coalesce again in various agencies. If you think about your life today, there’s very little major legislation that comes from the legislature. The legislation comes in the form of regulations from agencies. They tend to have all three powers. They have the executive power, the enforcement power, they have administrative judges to adjudicate, so they have all three. And the question for us is, where do they fit in the constitutional structure?

He stands with history. As historian Walter A. McDougall wrote:

“[A]ll Federalists believed human nature was flawed . . . envisioned no utopias, put little trust in republican virtue, and believed the only government liable to endure was one taking mankind as it was and making allowance for passion and greed.” 

It was one of those dated, anachronistic Founders, James Madison, who said that if you combine the executive, legislative, and judicial in one person, or branch, it’s the very definition of tyranny. But You can go even further back in time and look at the clash between Plato’s famous one in his Republic, where he imagined a state run by smart, elite “guardians”, and the Roman satirist Juvenal’s question: “Who will actually guard the guardians?”

But for the USA the clash became real with the advent of the arch asshole, Woodrow Wilson (D) becoming President in 1912. Wilson despised the Founders and regarded the Constitution as something that could and should be “flexible” (meaning bending to administrative whims), as well as this, described in an accurately titled article, The Tyranny of the Clerks: (it argues that this is what the 2024 election is really all about)

Progressives like Woodrow Wilson and Herbert Croly, in contrast, argued that new “sciences” such as economics, sociology, and psychology had made obsolete tradition, faith, and history as guides to human nature––and Darwinism’s “natural selection” had shown that human nature, rightly guided by technocrats, similarly could progress beyond the old realist view of it as flawed and unchanging. This new “knowledge,” then, should be integrated into a more powerful centralized government, which would create, as Wilson wrote, a “public bureau of skilled, economical administration,” one staffed by the “hundreds who are wise” given the authority to manage and guide the thousands who are “selfish, ignorant, timid, stubborn, or foolish.”

In 1920 Wilson’s dream got stuffed back in the bottle courtesy of a stroke, the Republicans winning huge that year and rolling back much of his garbage – including his efforts to impose segregation on the federal government. Unfortunately the dam couldn’t hold forever and in 1933 FDR (who had served Wilson as Assistant Secretary of the Navy and was hugely impressed by all the administration of the War Government of the day) unleashed the bureaucratic monsters that continue to this day. How monstrous? As the Competitive Enterprise Institute writes:

For decades, the Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers have tried to claim that almost every bit of domestic water imaginable is a federally regulated water”––including private property like that of the Sacketts, who spent 15 years confirming their Constitutional right to build a house on their own property. The “rule” they fought was conjured by distorting or simply ignoring the Clean Water Act, a typical example of how an agency’s power to interpret the law can produce violations of the rights of citizens.

And the thing is that these people are not wise in their decision making, Womp Wonk:

There is a type of person interested in politics who restricts his concerns to policy. He may claim to be above the “distractions” of the culture war, which is just bloodsport for partisans. Our real focus, he will insist, should be figuring out legislative strategies to remedy the problems we face. Any discussion beyond tinkering with policy threatens to undermine the collaborative decision-making that is necessary to implement effective policy. Many who fit this type are intelligent but miss the whole picture.

The article points out that this is all a bit dated considering that it requires the following to apply in a democracy:

  1. The government and the governed must agree about what problems the nation faces and what the priorities of them are.
  2. The majority of people who hold elected office must agree upon the stated rules and unstated conventions that set the procedural limits for political action.
  3. When the new policy is implemented, there must be a common interest in making it work and a public belief that the new policy will endure.
  4. If those preconditions are not met, citizens must have the means to ensure that they are reestablished.

The article goes into some detail about how all this no longer seems to apply in America, whether we’re talking about foreign policy regarding Ukraine, Taiwan, Israel and other places, or domestic policy:

When Democrats demanded action from Barack Obama to address the situation of the so-called “Dreamers” brought to the United States illegally as children, he rightly and repeatedly insisted that he couldn’t act without the approval of Congress on this matter. Then, using the “pen and phone” that he was so fond of, he conjured the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals into being all by himself. This usurpation of legislative power was later upheld by the courts.

Who the fuck can have confidence in a system run like that?

There is no agreement on the rules and procedures governing policymaking in the nation. When the formal rules benefit the Left, those rules are said to be the very fabric of democracy—unyielding, good, and just. But when the rules are a hindrance to the implementation of leftist policies, they can be safely ignored
…
There is no broad agreement on what our problems are; increasingly, one ideological disposition celebrates the realities their opponents decry. We can’t even agree on basic features of reality like whether men can get pregnant.

And the policy wonks jump into these political vacuums thinking they can fix the problems. WRT New Zealand and the current fight over having a referendum to determine what the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi are, the overwhelming response of our Policy Wonks, our technocrats (elected and otherwise) and our Professional Management Class is that the debates need to be kept “in-house”, and away from the “selfish, ignorant, timid, stubborn, or foolish.”

Is it any wonder that, especially in the US, elections show declining numbers of people voting. What’s the point? The lie is that presidential elections matter, and it comprises three supporting lies that conservatives especially are prone to accepting (see the gruesome details at the link) – and I love the fact this is written by one Theodore Wold, who was the Acting-Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Policy at the Department of Justice and Deputy Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy during the Trump Administration, so he has an insiders view:

  1. Unitary Executive Theory of power
    It’s not so powerful, especially when it comes to firing bureaucrats. And the bureaucracy essentially knows how much time is on the shot clock and what opportunities the president has to run his offense.
  2. A positive conservative governing agenda
    Nope! The GOP talks big about shrinking the government, but Nixon created the EPA, Bush the DHS and even when they control the Federal budget via the House they crap themselves and vote for increased “omnibus” spending – terrified by a Democrat-MSM machine that sees a slight reduction in the increase as a “cut”.
  3. The reach of the Presidency’s ceremonial power.
    Again, I think this is one of these areas where we think we’re governed by Prospero on the island, and he can summon the spirits and beasts, and it’s really more like Duncan in Scotland. He’s weak, he’s enfeebled, most of the things he’s done happened a long time ago, and there’s a lot of people trying to kill him….The ceremonial trappings of the presidency are part of its major defects. The amount of time and resources and money that are expended in creating the choreography of statecraft would boggle the mind….  I would argue that the second most important office in the presidency, behind the Communications Department, isn’t the National Security Council. It’s not the Council of Economic Advisors. It’s the Office of Advance aides.

Wold doesn’t mention it but here’s a classic example of how the bureaucrats sometimes beat Trump, in this example with SCOTUS booting Trump’s DACA policy:

[As the NYT] reporter makes sure to tell readers, Duke is a “lifelong Republican” and “veteran of nearly 30 years at the Departments of Homeland Security and Defense.”
…
Ms. Duke’s most lasting legacy is likely to be the memo she signed — under pressure — to end that program. Her decision not to cite any specific policy reasons was at the heart of the Supreme Court’s ruling, which said the Trump administration had failed to substantively consider the implications of terminating the program’s protections and benefits.

That sounds like a very bone-headed mistake to make for such an experienced person. How did that happen?

Ms. Duke said she did not include policy reasons in the memo because she did not agree with the ideas being pushed by Mr. Miller and Mr. Sessions: that DACA amounted to an undeserved amnesty and that it would encourage new waves of illegal immigration.

Oh! So it wasn’t a mistake. It was deliberate and subtle sabotage by a bureaucrat.

Wold finishes on a hopeful, if sober, point (although there’s a Kim Kardashian reference which is as sad as anything written by Christopher Lasch):

As I said at the outset, the purpose of that lie is to distract the citizenry from the illegitimacy of the regime. So forget that our federal bureaucracy is inefficient, full of incompetence, and increasingly woke. The deeper problem is that it is illegitimate. Regardless of who is elected to the presidency, things do not change here in D.C. The ruling class is permanent and fixed.