Trump Is The Only Man Who Can Take An Axe To The Administrative State

Trump alone holds the keys to unleashing America's long dormant enterprising spirit upon the world

Please consider upgrading your subscription here for a little over $8 per month to help me keep providing you with the latest content. Though I have no immediate plans to paywall any of my writings, your monthly financial subscription will help ensure that I can keep providing you and others with political commentary of the highest quality. Also, if you have not done so already, please subscribe today! Thank you for your continued support!

The modern bureaucracy is an aberration in the context of classical political philosophy.  It is structurally and ideologically novel, the byproduct of technology, the latter a function of modernity’s radical subjugation of the natural world to man’s apparently limitless appetite for conquest. Thus, what resembles the bureaucratic state only came to the fore in the late nineteenth century and reached its modern iteration in the twentieth. The so-called “end of history” thesis ultimately goes to the domination of the bureaucratic state as the political form par excellence – that perfect culmination of Western thought which entirely subordinates the political to the administrative, whereby all historically recognizable political functions are disabused of their effective political currency. In this regard, politics vanishes entirely to the total state, which displaces human needs – and particularly, that which satisfies the soul, the one thing needful for man – with a system that merely caters to the baser appetites. These are the appetites that man shares in common with brutes – those which are necessary for mere life or a system denominated by and only by self-preservation. The transformation of homo sapien into homo brutalis is complete. That fundamental distinction which separates man from the beasts of nature is eliminated – things administer themselves, and to the extent politics continues, it is permanently in these bureaucratic or administrative terms.

So, how might the advent of the administrative state be interrogated from the vantage point of classical political philosophy? Another way of putting the question is how might thinking man – i.e., historical man; in other words, rational man possessing the faculties for language – assess post-historical man – i.e., man as he exists in the post-political state where things administer themselves? In profound ways, these are the set of conditions that now define our political frame of reference. If the administrative state might only truly be understood as a manifestation of technology, which prerogative is to transform man into a fungible cog of the bureaucratic machinery, there must be something of a nonrational, albeit readily identifiable, force at play behind the scenes when viewed in the much broader context of history.

So, raises the question: what is history? History only became a meaningful barometer for wisdom in the early nineteenth century with the Hegelian revolution. At that point, liberal modernity became understood as a kind of secularized logos. The transformation of the logos, understood Biblically (or Platonically), into one denominated by human, all too human, terms marks a fundamental development in political philosophy. Human knowledge was therefore to be understood not in terms of the nebulous albeit discernible horizon that exists “in nature” as understood in classical terms , but by a new horizon that referentially stakes itself to the human being alone. The authority of the human being as an absolute threshold for wisdom was the result of a revolution in thought which occurred, beginning in the sixteenth century, with Bacon and later Descartes. And so, marks the origins for the supremacy of modern science – empirics – over and above “traditional” authorities such as the Church and the philosophy the Church had for centuries incubated – namely, some combination of Platonic-Aristotelian thought. These historical circumstances that gave rise to modernity ought not to be forgotten at the other end of modernity – i.e., the end of history, whose defining hallmark is the abolishment of rational faculties, understood in their true, historical framing.

What is the key feature of the rational faculties but language – yet again, logos. Language in its traditional referent is eliminated by the completion of the historical process and the transformation of man from thinking man to brute. This completion is marked by political technology, which usurps language’s former authority and establishes a new type of language or logos that radically alters the meaning of history itself from the conventional, empirical frame of reference. The authority, then, of the scientific over the traditional – whether defined ecclesiastically, Platonically, or otherwise – is permanently undermined by the utter collapse of the rational faculties to the newfound political technology, best manifested in the administrative state, that brutally displaces the logos that gave rise to the apparent authority of the scientific, to a nomadic relativism that finds itself unanchored in any sort of horizon due to the impermanence of being: the discovery of modern political philosophy brought to its organic completion.

These extraordinary conditions ultimately provide a unique opportunity to critique modernity in ways that otherwise would have been impossible in any other age. That is to say, with the completion of history and the utter bankruptcy of empirics that such completion would necessarily and ineluctably entail, gives rise to the possibility that long dormant authorities – particularly theological authorities – might take hold. If the administrative state, then, is to be understood not by its conventional, empirical referent, but rather, by reference to a radically theological terminology, the foundations upon which its authority rests undergo radical transformation. A theological, rather than an empirical, framing would indict the modern political technology of the bureaucratic or administrative state in the most damnable of terms as essentially inhuman because it denies the existence of the soul, or that which bonds mankind to a higher, superhuman order: in other words, that which orients the City of Man to the City of God, the heavenly kingdom.

The administrative state, which severs any reference to the City of God, therefore does the work not of the Heavenly Father, the Supreme Creator, but of those who rebel against Him. The counterfeit of the Divine author’s creation thus most truly characterizes the politics of the administrative state and modern politics overall.  Secularism therefore loses whatever purchase it had staked to mere empirics or modern natural science because the transformative process that supposedly undermined the ancient authorities for good utterly collapses upon the groundless authority of modernity. If that authority were to be taken seriously, temporal history abdicates any claim to truth because that reputed horizon which grounds the completion of history – and therefore by extension the new, secularized logos by which that process is only ever made intelligible – is cast endlessly adrift at sea. This irreparable void would endure but for a radical return to faith – a rediscovery of political theology – that would force Apollonian order upon the Dionysian chaos that marks the present age.

*                *                *                *

Our age’s Apollo is personified by none other than Donald J. Trump, who, in his recent policy agenda, has laid down a sweeping vision to reform the administrative state that would permanently alter the way American politics has operated for at least a century, injecting a potent dosage of classical politics into the matrix. Since the civil service was created in the late nineteenth century with the Pendleton Act, the legislature has ceded increasing power to unelected bureaucrats. This abdication of formal power has over time become more and more unmanageable, leading to the modern leviathan that is the administrative state, which effectively operates in the shadows as a fourth branch of government. Government bureaucrats, in the process of consolidating power over the course of more than a century, have radically exploited and redefined the legal and constitutional semantics by which Americans have come to understand their government.

Now, to launch an attack against the administrative state – which, in our parlance, amounts to “draining the Swamp” – is condemned as “undemocratic” by the most illegitimate of government actors – namely those agencies who never once face democratic scrutiny by way of regular elections, and despite themselves in many cases – notably, the intelligence agencies – are founded upon dubious if not downright unconstitutional grounds. The historicity of their constitutionally doubtful (to put it mildly) origins – from which any good-faith legal argument must ultimately redound – is something that gets irretrievably lost in the legal grammar, which denotes the impossibly tangled rulemaking process from which these agencies repeatedly draw, and weaponize, to justify their continued existence.

For their part, the Congress and the courts have done little to meaningfully disrupt the baseless constitutional grounds on which these bureaucratic agencies ultimately rest. Indeed, in many cases, they have further empowered our administrative state by resorting to the custom and usage of how the government has operated for decades. But custom and usage, however much a pretext it might substitute for legality, is never a meaningful source of legitimacy. Legitimacy in our government derives ultimately from the law of the land, the Constitution, which establishes by its own precepts three – and only three – branches of government, each with clear and specific functions – namely, to make laws, execute laws, and interpret laws. To the extent any government institution engages in these constitutional roles, it must necessarily fall within one of the three delineated branches of government expressly conferred by that document. There has yet to be an amendment that radically altered our government by either abolishing the duties expressly granted by the document to each of the three branches of government, or which created a fourth branch of government tasked with making, enforcing, or interpreting laws separate and apart from whatever respective branch of government the Constitution ordains for that specific purpose. So, to the extent the written Constitution remains the operative law, any government institution which cannot justify its authority from the source text itself is fundamentally illegitimate.

At the bare minimum, so long as such illegitimate institutions may continue to carry out their duties, they must never overstep the authority of any of the three expressly delineated branches. For the purposes of this discussion, the main focus would be the subordination of the administrative state to the Executive Branch – whose power is expressly “vested in a President of the United States of America.” That is to say, all executive power arrogates to one individual – namely, the President. If the President therefore cannot exercise power over one of his subordinates, that failure is in violation of the Constitution. If a conflict then obtains between a presidential prerogative and an administrative state official, that conflict must invariably yield to the President, bar none. This would be true under any circumstances, let alone for officials belonging to agencies that exercise illegitimate powers at their core. For example, the Department of Justice, while certainly operating well beyond its original mandate, nevertheless can trace its origins to one of the four original cabinet departments from the Washington administration. It therefore obtains a level of legitimacy – or, at least, a stronger argument can be made along those lines – that is absent in the National Security Council, for example, which was established shortly after the Second World War by shredding the Bill of Rights to enact a permanent security apparatus for waging endless wars, while eroding what remaining freedoms existed of citizens at home. And so marked the beginnings of the creeping totalitarianism that now has unleashed a surveillance state upon the world, stewarded by an illegitimate regime with an equally illegitimate “President,” that derives its authority by running roughshod over due process of law.

President Trump’s policies include reining in the leviathan through such welcome reforms as Schedule F reform, that would make any bureaucrat that deviates from the agenda of the President fireable. The fact that a reform is needed in the first place merely to get us back to the Constitution’s textual mandate is, of course, the real story as it would mark a genuine return towards restoring true democratic legitimacy to the Executive Branch. Another part of the reform package involves cutting bureaucratic largesse – government waste, in other words, that mires the governmental process and makes difficult if not impossible the conditions for genuine innovation that would unleash America’s long dormant enterprising spirit upon the world, responsible for building some of the greatest cities and technological achievements in human history. Today, that spirit of entrepreneurship has been all but lost on a population dragged down by the absolute dearth of innovation in our own times. Instead, to find inspiration we constantly must draw from an increasingly unapproachable past. Though, for example, the Apollo 11 mission is still within living memory for a huge swath of the population, having occurred in 1969, it feels like a medieval relic compared to the totalizing mediocrity of our age, which grips nearly every aspect of modern life and makes even relatively recent accomplishments seemingly irretrievable.

https://twitter.com/TeamTrump/status/1646943856305250339?s=20

Aside from cutting regulations, in which President Trump pledged to cut two pre-existing regulations for every new one enacted, continuing a policy from his first term in office, the 45^th President has also pushed for transparency in government – calling for any regulation not made public to be rendered null and void. He has also committed to implementing a regulatory budget to place a hard cap on the costs of government regulation, which would go further towards restraining the bureaucracy than any president in modern history. Perhaps most dramatically of all, President Trump has pledged to create a new civil service examination that would require of government bureaucrats to showcase a baseline level of proficiency in our constitutional processes and history. This last program would go a long way towards restoring accountable and truly democratic government, especially considering how many bureaucrats work for agencies whose histories are permeated by gross abuses of the constitutional process, which have only compounded over time and account for so many of today’s woes – whose apex is represented by the systematically corrupt and illegitimate tinkering of election procedures in 2020 that bequeathed us the Biden regime on the one hand, and the wholesale trampling of the justice system by deep state federal prosecutors resorting to banana republic methods to penalize their political opponent on the other.

Therefore, Trump’s commitment to dramatically overhaul the Department of Justice and equip it with an army of one hundred valiant federal prosecutors devoted to executing the rule of law in accordance with the Constitution, while excising the communist infiltration root and branch that has corrupted our administrative state to the core is a remarkable policy – unprecedented for its ambition and scale. The policy further displays an uncanny recognition of the grave urgency that defines our ongoing political crisis, and the always precious balance separating freedom from slavery whose scales now teeter closer than ever to absolute despotism. It also underscores just how distant President Trump is from the rest of the pack of presidential contenders, none of whom have even discussed – let alone promulgated as part of a comprehensive policy agenda – anything close to what President Trump has put out in recent weeks.

Which ultimately speaks to the kind of rarefied gift that President Trump alone possesses. President Trump represents the kind of great man found throughout history singlehandedly capable of ushering regime-level changes. In American history, those types are few and far between – the Washingtons, Lincolns, and Roosevelt-caliber talents can likely be counted on one hand. Trump certainly belongs to that number, and the political moment to which he responded exemplifies a crisis that only the rarest of political breeds found in history – the genuine statesman – are capable of meeting. On those occasions when a constitutional crisis emerges of the order of magnitude now afflicting our regime, it is incumbent upon a small group of great men – or even a single great man – to establish a new basis of authority – on which the germ of a new regime that once again consecrates liberty might spring.

At the beginning of the rule of law are the often forgotten achievements of a courageous group of extraordinarily gifted men, on whose authority is founded the constitutional order and the legitimacy that passes from their great feat to every future generation. The memory of the achievement transforms into mythos over time, and is the model by which all successive leaders are compared. However, once that model vanishes and the old regime is terminally corrupted, then presents that rarefied moment in which a new model must be established. Hence the inspiration behind those words in the Declaration of Independence – “That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” Of course, when Jefferson wrote those words, the great achievement was happening in real time – and thus the necessity was readily palpable.

In our time, however, dramatic measures such as reforming the bureaucracy are needed in order to preserve freedom for our own generation, which bears witness to a government becoming “destructive of these ends” – namely, the cause of free and truly democratic government. Let President Trump’s example be a model for creativity, so lacking in our generation, and inspire those men in his wake to continue the task required of them – to think big, and imagine great feats not seen in recent generations – to hopefully one day restore a political order in which human greatness once again is celebrated, not condemned, and where freedom, not creeping despotism, becomes the norm.

Paul Ingrassia is a two-time Claremont Fellow: he was the Jack Roth Charitable Foundation John Marshall Fellow for 2022 and a Publius Fellow in 2020. Mr. Ingrassia graduated from Cornell Law School in 2022 and is a member of the New York Young Republican Club. His Twitter handle is: @PaulIngrassia.