A Response to Grayson Walker
In a recent response to my argument that the New Right needs to employ new strategies, Grayson Walker cogently proposes a tactic of infiltration or integration (similar to that floated by Adrian Vermeule) in order to steer the Washington bureaucracy toward better government. Walker argues that the administrative state is just as much a “platform to be stewarded” as it is a “problem to be solved.” He notes that conservatives tend to recoil from administration because it is alien to constitutional government, and it is often the source of many problems conservatives have with a big, corrupt, and unaccountable Washington. Yet no bureaucracy is neutral, and so expecting it to give fair outcomes to conservatives when it is staffed with leftist and liberals is foolish.
I agree with Walker that we should seek to infiltrate and influence the administrative agencies and use them for good. I agree that we need fewer and better bureaucrats, those that are “our bureaucrats.” And I agree that to do this, we must think creatively and act deliberately in constructing our own educational pipeline to raise up conservative bureaucrats well equipped for the job. However, I think there are three major challenges to this that must be articulated and accounted for.
The Anti-Founding and New Founders
The first challenge is that the current administrative leviathan that runs Washington is a kind of anti-founding regime. The nature and function of the administrative state represent a rejection of the political thought of the Declaration and U.S. Constitution. It was the brainchild of Woodrow Wilson, John Dewey, Frank Goodnow, and James Landis, all of whom explicitly rejected the political culture and principles of the American founding. It was an attempt to modernize American politics, to apply evolutionary and Darwinian social thought to American governance, and to scale up Washington to deal with complex social, financial, and economic problems early in the twentieth century.
The result is that the administrative state today requires that its operators violate the Constitution on a daily basis. In general, the administrative agencies operate by congressional delegation of lawmaking power, which is illegal. At the most, the agencies combine the three branches of government under a single bureaucratic institution, what the founders explicitly called tyranny—“the accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny” (Madison, Federalist no. 47).
This means that any conservative working in the Washington bureaucracy will have to be okay with governing in an unconstitutional manner. They will have to adopt the attitude and understanding that I outlined in my previous article: to transform the agencies toward the ends of the Preamble of the Constitution, even if that means violating or suspending the constitutional mechanisms (means) that we are all familiar with. This will also require them to withstand the withering criticisms from Conservatism, Inc., which has made a career and technique out of defending a procedural constitutionalism as the bulwark against the specter of tyranny.
The upshot is that a “conservative” infiltration of the agencies is not really conservatism at all. There is little left of the founders’ regime to conserve, and what the modern conservative movement is conserving is not what the founders established but instead a creature of the twentieth century. Thus, those persons we want to raise up and empower to transform the bureaucracy must be more akin to forward-thinking founders than conservatives. This requires a new education, a new disposition and attitude, and a new perspective of America, old and new—all of which modern conservatism is incapable of producing. Thankfully, with the rise and triumph of Trump and the New Right, the Millennials and Zoomers are poised to place individuals like this in positions of leadership now and in the coming years.
Walker and I probably agree on the need for a new kind of “conservative” leadership in American politics. Yet this leads to a second challenge.
The Cult of Expertise and Its Death
The second challenge is that running the Washington bureaucracy requires a kind of expert training and single-mindedness that many conservatives lack. It’s not that conservatives are not smart enough to learn the ins and outs of agencies and their specialties, but that conservatives by habit and temperament, are of a different disposition. They are not activists and agitators; they are not community organizers or credentialed fraudsters; they are not apt to give their entire lives to mastering environmental or labor law; nor do they have the patience to sit through thousands of hours of committee meetings, micromanage bureaucratic affairs, or fight and scramble up the staff career ladder. In general, bureaucracy is boring and soul-sucking; it is for the small-minded, the complacent, and uncurious.
Conservatives, however, desire grandeur, knowledge, truth, and beauty. They are more typically grill Americans, devoted to hearth and kin, as well as to the good of their local community, churches, and schools. Which means, they are more American than bureaucrats (see below).
To ask American conservatives to infiltrate and transform the administrative state is, in a sense, to ask them to lose their Americanness. This is a hard ask. How do we train up a new generation of conservatives to be knowledgeable and qualified enough to be able to run the EPA or CDC or Treasury Department, or FAA? Walker understands that we must create independent institutional pipelines that include “think tanks, churches, and classical academies” if we are to succeed. I do not disagree. But these cannot replace the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard or Yale Law School, or the University of Michigan’s top pharmaceutical school. It takes generations to build such institutions, as well as lots of money and millions of people acting collectively toward a single goal.
This means, apart from first commandeering or turning the academy itself, we must send our students to these institutions even while equipping them to weather the ideological, cultural, and spiritual onslaught they will endure. This is difficult, but doable. It requires, however, that our think tanks, churches, classical schools and colleges orient themselves toward this task.
Even if we were able to do this, there is another problem: the current Washington bureaucracy is corrupt. It functions through quid pro quo, blackmail, bribery, sexual favors, and all kinds of underhanded and unethical behavior. To climb the cursus honorum in Washington often means being cut-throat, selling out your soul, compromising your faith, or destroying your family through overwork. It is possible to enter the bureaucracy from the outside if a private citizen is nominated by the President to lead an agency (as, say, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is doing with Health and Human Services). But this applies only to top cabinet members. Millions of undersecretaries and staffers enter from the bottom up, starting as Washington interns and working their way up over many years of shrewd and calculating behavior, as well as quality work.
I have known more than one conservative who, with good intentions, went to Washington to try to help, only to find that “the swamp” was a place of corruption and death. They hated it and left. Thus, we are in a bind: the current bureaucracy primarily draws and rewards those who are materialistic, scurrilous, and cunning. This is not to say there aren’t good and intelligent people who work in our national government, as Walker notes. Merely it is to observe the kind of institutional prejudice we face in trying to turn around a parasitic and diseased organ. The challenge is one of institutional inertia, ideological hostility, and hedonistic temperament.
Perhaps I sketch a picture that is too bleak and one-sided. I do not want to discourage Walker and others from seeking to direct the Washington bureaucracy toward good governance. But I do not think it is a task for anyone, but only for those “conservatives” who understand the nature and challenge of the job, and who possess ambition as well as a great sense of self-confidence and unflinching character.
The Best Administration Trap
The final challenge comes from an observation made by John Adams. In his pithy pamphlet, Thoughts on Government (1776), Adams opens by quoting the English poet and satirist, Alexander Pope, and his words: “For forms of government let fools contest, that which is administered is best.” Adams’ response? “Nothing can be more fallacious than this.” In other words, Pope had made the mistake of thinking that the form of government (monarchy, aristocracy, democracy, republic, oligarchy, etc.) was irrelevant, as long as it was administered well.
Adams’ warning should continuously echo in the minds of conservative bureaucrats who take up the daunting task of making Washington’s administration better. It is, in many ways, a necessary job; but we should not confuse administration with governing, nor bureaucracy with politics. Administration is a subtask of politics, but it is not statesmanship itself. America is not an administrative state; our political DNA is local, self-governing communities of free men and women, ordering themselves under God, for both their temporal and spiritual (eternal) good. Modern administration is the antithesis of this, a swamp of mediocrity, materialism, and corruption.
America’s current administrative state is a disease of a foreign import—the conscious attempt by progressive educators in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to transplant German bureaucracy to this country. The short-term goal of infiltrating and influencing the Washington administration is to make it better, to make it work for Americans and the good of this country. But the long-term goal is to deconstruct much of it, to cut out the cancer that has metastasized and choked out constitutional government altogether.
We are asking the conservative bureaucrat to do what is almost impossible for any human to do: to commit themselves to arduous expert education in a hostile educational environment, labor long hours to get into the agencies, climb and claw their way to top, to turn these agencies around and make them efficient organs for governing for the public good—and then, after a lifetime of sacrifice and dedication, to be willing to dismantle and destroy the bureaucratic institutions to which they have dedicated their career and working life. Is this too much to ask? Probably. This is the power of the administrative state, that it captures those who work within it and converts them to its own preservation.
Of course, as Walker notes, it’s not about the total liquidation of the administrative agencies. Yet some agencies will need to be axed completely, and all will need to be substantially downsized or repurposed. Conservative bureaucrats must embrace the fact that their work, in part, is to make this bureaucratic downsizing possible.
Conclusion
Perhaps the best angle by which to turn Washington’s bureaucracy is to flood red state governments with conservative leadership and staff in order to return to an aggressive federalism. The states, after all, are the engines of American constitutional government. If conservative states can weaken the power and reach of the administrative state, it might become more amenable to reform. If nothing else, conservative administrators trained at the state level will be able to make the transition to the national bureaucracy more easily.
Above all, conservatives need to reach a common, pragmatic goal regarding the administrative state. While ideally we would like to eliminate it altogether, that will not happen. Not only because it is too big, but because it now runs American government. Congress is basically a defunct institution, replaced by the agencies. So the three new branches of American government are the President, the Agencies, and Courts. How to conquer and turn the Agencies toward good government, while resisting their corruption and preserving (what’s left) of American localism and constitutionalism, is the great political challenge of our generation.
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