If anything characterizes the current moment in American political history, it’s not words like crisis or chaos or socialist or fascist. It’s powerlessness. Impotence. Whether it’s gun control or spending reduction, tax reform, or environmental policy, the overwhelming sense one feels, regardless of ideological position, is a sense of acute impotence. The big things seem unchangeable. That is a big part of Trump’s appeal: he’s playing the strongman who can get things done and, if he can’t, the one who will blow it all up. Either way, he breaks his supporters’ feelings of powerlessness. People are so tired of feeling this way that they don’t care so much about how their frustration is directed.
That sense of impotence is the primary fuel for Trumpian populism, especially among the working and middle classes. Many liberals and progressives point to Republican legislative intransigence as the primary cause for this sense of irritation and immobility. That the congressional GOP has been intransigent is certain; everyone remembers Mitch McConnell’s desire to make Barack Obama a one-term president by simply refusing to take up anything the new president wanted. But if you ask Republicans, they aren’t happy either. They may have notched a big win with the Dobbs decision, but their supporters are unhappy over immigration, free speech, big tech, and other issues. They sense that the system is also aligned against them and their interests.
Those of us on the progressive left should pay more attention to some of the conservative critiques of the past. I want to see a more active government that redistributes wealth from the super-rich to the poor and a state that assures its people of basic levels of healthcare, housing, labor rights, and safety.
It is always popular on the left to shit on the 1950s and ‘60s conservatives as the “bringers of Reagan” or, more recently, the “intellectual enablers of the far-right.” And I have to confess, I’ve often found myself looking back at Milton Freidman or Friedrich Hayek in the same way I look at Ayn Rand. They contributed ideas that led to our current neoliberal world and the government bankruptcies and economic unfairness that we face today. Conservative intellectuals of the middle twentieth century have much to answer for. They often made common cause with McCarthyists that undermined trust and civil society. Many of them supported racial segregation. But they weren’t all wrong about everything.
Consider James Burnham. Like many on the right, Burnham’s political ideals moved increasingly right over time. Some of his later work is highly problematic; a Trotskyite in his youth and middle life, he was a fairly typical conservative for a while, though in his later years, he went Pat-Buchanan-crazy. However, in at least three of his books, he focused on a problem that many on the left would do right to pay more attention to. All of his prescriptions were not correct, but his diagnosis, in many ways, was spot on.
Burnham became concerned over the increasingly complex government of the post-World War II world. He worried that bureaucratic management had become much more important to the government and was concerned that its dominance put new pressure on institutions and American democracy. He saw the problem as a trap: as the amount of information Congress and other institutions could collect and consider multiplied due to new technological capabilities, bureaucracy grew to support its management and distribution. This increase in complexity led to more bureaucracy, which actually undermined Congress. In his 1959 book Congress and the American Tradition, Burnham warned: “If the bureaucracy swells in relative power to a level from which it can challenge, even dominate, the other branches, then, of course, the American tradition will have been violated, and the American system of government will be in mortal danger.”
The Burnham trap is a big part of what ails American democracy today. The bureaucracy has become extremely powerful, whether in the federal executive branch, which commands the bureaucracy through executive orders, or in regulatory branches like the EPA or Department of Education. This expanded bureaucracy hasn’t come with a corresponding efficiency, making it much harder to realize outcomes.
When the government fails to complete the basics, like simply passing an annual budget, it undermines its constituents’ belief in its value. Some estimates show that more than 2 million new undocumented immigrants entered the US this year. Even with the knowledge that Donald Trump and Republicans are going to use these numbers to demagogue and manipulate Americans, the Biden administration is apparently incapable of reducing them. And that’s partly because, over the last sixty years, the federal bureaucracy has become more powerful than Congress regarding its ability to mobilize state power. And Congress’s powerlessness impacts the entire political system; it damages the systems of belief – of Faith – that American democracy is, ultimately, built upon.
President Biden has done the right thing politically. He has called the Republicans’ bluff and tried to move legislation that tackles some of the crises contributing to America’s border issues. He must resist his party’s calls to undertake further executive actions. He should let House Republicans sweat over their inaction. Too often, temporary bureaucratic action has insulated Congress from the impact of their failures.
Conservatives, like Burnham, usually want to dismantle the bureaucracy to deal with this problem. He wanted to shrink the government to ensure it could never gain the managerial capacity to outstrip a small “D” democratic government. He also failed to predict the other side of the congressional powerless coin: lobbying. He viewed lobbyists as important democratic actors. Again, in Congress and the American Tradition, he wrote, “Congress represents the people on a territorial basis, whereas the lobby represents them on a functional basis, according to their occupations as members of organized groups,” he said. That naivety sums up a big problem with the right– they embrace lobbying by big business as free speech but decry that of labor unions even more than they complain about bureaucracy. In fairness, Burnham could not have been expected to foresee the positively eye-watering amounts of money lobbyists now spend in Washington, D.C. He should have seen lobbying as another unaccountable minoritarian power center, much like his dreaded bureaucracy.
Liberal progressives like myself have become too dependent on the bureaucratic and managerial to get things done. We’ve become far too willing to get things we think are positive done quickly if it means a bureaucratic solution rather than via the slower, more fraught, democratic one, and in so doing, we’ve fallen into a trap. Executive orders, ordering the federal bureaucracy to do all kinds of things like forgive student debt or provide paths to citizenship for the Dreamers are all policy goals I am 100% behind. Doing them through executive orders and the federal bureaucracy isn’t lasting and isn’t how the American system is supposed to work.
At some point, progressive means have become disconnected from the broad democratic base their policy ends should be about.
In short, liberal Democrats’ embrace of bureaucratic methods of governance has alienated the very voters that governance was supposed to be for. Combined with the mass amounts of cash being doled out by big corporations for Democratic reelection campaigns and to their aligned Super PACs, the faceless regulations of bureaucracy have completely split the Democrats from workers and petty bourgeois business owners.
What to do? This is where the pre-Trump conservative position is almost no help. Simply shrinking government and eliminating whole departments, the go-to for Republicans since Goldwater, is killing the patient instead of administering medicine. The bureaucracy is needed precisely because Burnham was right: society is complex, and modern technologies – the modern economy – create massive amounts of data that must be analyzed and understood by the state to function in its people’s interests. We need bureaucracy. Shrinking and modernizing the bureaucracy where it is too big, using technology more to understand these data, and replacing regulation with a more democratic (legislative) process must be the goal.
It’s been decades since both sides have bemoaned Congress’s collapse as an effective institution. Old-school conservatives have been too willing to contribute to Congress’s failures to govern because they benefitted politically from perceived government dysfunction. As recent retirements, the collapse of traditional conservatism in Congress, and the chaos in the House have demonstrated, Trump and his followers also threaten conservative goals like fiscal responsibility and order at the border.
Perhaps Burnham inadvertently offered a solution: combine the issues of the money lobby and the bureaucracy. Democrats looking to defeat MAGA should offer bureaucratic shrinkage and reform in exchange for the remaining sane Republicans agreeing to a crackdown on lobbying. There is a chance for compromise on this issue. We aren’t likely to ban legislators from using social media or appearing on TV, and we aren’t close to a major constitutional reform. The Supreme Court doesn’t look to revisit Citizen’s United anytime soon. So why not try a bargain like this? If some power and relevance can be returned to Congress, it would go a long way toward breaking this populist fever.