The House That Woodrow Built

Progressivism may be on the verge of destroying "our democracy"

President Woodrow Wilson: founding father of America’s administrative state

---

In last week’s “Quick Take: Have They No Shame?” I noted in passing that “It is…in the bunkers of the bureaucracy that the real power of government is concentrated. That power rests in the hands of nameless, faceless, unelected apparatchiks, America’s real legislators.” It was a throwaway line, but it stirred up an echo in my mind.

Progressives brand their present political offensive as a defense of “our democracy.” But do we still have a democracy, really? Have we, indeed, a republic? If political power is concentrated elsewhere than in our constitutional bodies and institutions, who’s really running the country?

Traditionally, the American political system has been characterized as both a democracy and a republic.  Democracy: government by the people. Republic: things public. The theory of government embodied in the Constitution amalgamated the two. Political power is held originate with the people, but is delegated to their chosen representatives, the system being regulated by a constitution that separates power, mutually checks it, and balances it. The Founders and Framers thus strove to create a national government armed with all the power necessary to carry out its legitimate tasks as constitutionally defined, but not so much as to trample the rights and liberties of the states or of individual citizens.

Those who wrote the Constitution were practical men of affairs with a realistic view of human nature. Though of course they believed in the moral and practical virtues of republicanism and government by consent, they did not claim to have cleared the way to some Radiant Future. For instance, they were all too well aware that slavery, that blight on the American founding, contradicted the soaring words of the Declaration of Independence—which, so to speak, had laid out the moral case for the work later done in Philadelphia. But since an attempt to abolish slavery would surely have broken the union of the states, they dodged the issue, never explicitly mentioning slavery in the Constitution’s careful compromises over it.

The American experiment in constitutional government is often touted as an historical success, but this cheery judgement overlooks two discontinuities: the Civil War and the advent of Progressivism.

As some of the Founders had foreseen, in less than a century slavery undermined the union of the states, such that a bloody four-year conflict was necessary to restore it. From the moment that South Carolina succeeded from the Union on December 24, 1860, to President Andrew Johnson’s formal proclamation of the war’s end on August 20, 1866, constitutional government was in abeyance.

The Progressive Era, which historians date from the late 1890s to 1917, also undermined American constitutional government—in a manner more peaceful than succession and civil war, but in the long run more destructively. The foundational principles of Progressivism were rationality, expertise, and efficiency; these, it was believed, were the key to political reform and effective government. Progressives therefore looked with disfavor on the Constitution, whose checks, balances, and separations of power were held to be cumbersome and obstructionist. They championed instead an activist executive branch controlling an administrative apparatus staffed by expert professionals who would employ sound scientific and managerial techniques to run the government and solve the nation’s problems.

These attitudes and beliefs were personified by Thomas Woodrow Wilson, twenty-eighth president of the United States and one of the most malign figures in American political history.

Progressivism thus expressed a degree of faith in activist government amounting to hubris. It was a mechanistic faith that regarded politics and administration as analogous to industrial production: The proper inputs, the proper machine tools, the proper controls and maintenance, would yield predictable results. Contemporary progressivism’s fetishistic embrace of “the Science” is a degenerate form of this faith.

But people, especially people in large numbers occupying a nation that stretched from sea to sea, were not so easily managed. For Progressivism, human nature was an intractable problem, even among the expert class. Vanity, ambition, self-regard, false assumptions, magical thinking—these were the frictions that inhibited the wonderful machinery of government.

It turned out that activist, centralized government throve best when a state of war or emergency existed. Danger and crisis served as lubricants; they inspired a sense of national solidarity that made the masses easier to manipulate. In this way two world wars, with the Great Depression intervening between them, gave a tremendous boost to the development and prestige of the administrative state. The period 1917-45 was held to validate the original Progressive vision—and indeed, who could argue with such victories over economic crisis and foreign enemies? That these victories were the product, not of efficiency but of excess, was a point conveniently overlooked.

In some ways postmodern progressivism has transcended its origins—not in a good way—but it remains devoted to the idea of activist, centralized government. Today’s progressives are just as impatient with the Constitution as their ideological ancestors. They see it—rightly—as an impediment to their vision of a future people’s republic under an elite ruling class. There is this difference, however: Though lip service is still paid to rationality, expertise and efficiency, the postmodern progressive elite’s chief characteristic is ideological homogeneity.

Its fervent embrace of gender theory is sufficient evidence of postmodern progressivism’s profound irrationality. Its hostility to objective standards of achievement and competence is sufficient evidence of its lack of concern for mere efficiency. And the growing dysfunction of the administrative state, attributable to the influence of progressive ideas in its departments and bureaus, is a preview of one possible, profoundly irrational, American future.

The concept of an irrational bureaucracy may seem counterintuitive. But the bureaucrats who attended the Wannsee Conference were the servants, orderly and efficient in their way, of a regime founded on a profoundly irrational idea—which they elaborated into a government program called the Final Solution. Efficiency in the service of irrational ideas is itself irrational.

The concentration of power in the executive branch of American government, and its exercise through the administrative state, have already compromised the constitutional republic bequeathed to us by the Founders and Framers. The cult of the imperial presidency is the most visible symptom of this malady. Members of Congress and self-proclaimed defenders of “our democracy” beg the president to use his “pen and phone” to enact policies that can’t be implemented through the normal legislative process, in effect demanding that he strip them of their share of political power. Because the courts stand in the way of the implementation of such policies, they demand that the judicial system be emasculated.

But the imperial presidency is an illusion. Except perhaps in the field of foreign and defense policy, the demise of constitutional government would cede all power to the faceless, entrenched administrative state. It’s America’s misfortune to be going through this process just as those irrational fanatics, postmodern progressives, are crowding forward to close their fists around the levers of bureaucratic power.