by Bruce Thornton
What the 2024 election is really all about.
The Framers of our Constitution were well-versed through experience
and history in the dangers of tyranny. Their education in Classical
history and literature familiarized them with the political theory and
practice of the world’s first constitutional governments like democracy
and republics. Their European influencers like Montesquieu and David
Hume were similarly trained. From these sources, and their own take on
their experiences with King George III, the Framers learned that
concentrated and centralized power ultimately leads to tyranny–– the
degradation of civil liberties, freedom, and equality.
One form of despotism, however, they could not have anticipated is
our modern tyranny of the clerks, the functionaries in hypertrophied
government bureaucracies that degenerate into instruments of political
factions to be used against rivals. For over a century the Constitution
has been weakened and compromised by these unaccountable, mostly
anonymous bureaucracies––as the excesses of federal agencies over the
last seven years are now making obvious.
The idea of technocracy or rule by “experts,” of course, was not unknown in antiquity. Plato’s famous utopia in the Republic
(c. 375 B.C.) imagined a state run by cognitive elite “guardians”
created by covert eugenic marriages, and trained for five decades in
philosophy and virtue. Subsequently the idea of the “philosopher king”
remained a staple of political fantasy all the way down to Marxism’s
“vanguard” of the elite intelligentsia who could discern what Marx
called the “inner but concealed essential pattern” of economics and
history.
But Plato’s ideal has always encountered the problem that Roman
satirist Juvenal identified: “Who will actually guard the guardians?”
Such utopian notions foundered on the empirical reality of a flawed,
irrational, universal human nature driven by “passions and interests.”
And one of the most dangerous and destructive is the lust for power that
seldom is sated, and always craves more.
That tragic realism, an inheritance from both our Judeo-Christian and
Greco-Roman cultural traditions, was also shared by the Founders. As
historian Walter A. McDougall writes, “[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.” Hence the Constitution’s structure of divided, mutually checking
balanced powers.
The progressives at the turn of the 20th century, however,
believed that the Constitution was an anachronism based on outmoded
beliefs like mankind’s flawed nature. 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.” We
see previewed here the arrogance and contempt of government agencies for
the citizens and taxpayers subsidizing their abusive powers.
Apart from the begged question that such knowledge of human motives
and behavior could be subject to the methods and protocols of real
science, the creation of such agencies housed in big bureaucracies
ignored the malign tendencies of those institutions. An obvious one is
called “professional deformation”: the shift of a bureaucracy’s
loyalties, duties, principles, and functions away from the
Constitutional purposes it was created to fulfill, to the increasing
advantages, enlargement, and scope of the agency and its powers.
This tendency worsens with government bureaucracie, the lion’s share
of whose members are not accountable to the market or the voters, which
means they can fail with impunity. Indeed, federal government workers
are doubly insulated from accountability by both civil service laws and
unions. As Ronald Reagan quipped, “No government ever voluntarily
reduces itself in size. Government programs, once launched, never
disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal
life we’ll ever see on this earth!”
Our country’s regulatory regime illustrates this tendency. The
expansion of government agencies that took off during FDR’s New Deal
legislation has relentlessly continued, at a total compliance and
economic cost
of their regulations estimated to be $1.927 trillion annually. And
these agencies thrive by dint of Congressional laws that mostly set out
general goals rather than detail the specifics of the law’s functioning.
That’s how we’ve ended up with two million federal workers who
typically enjoy wages and benefits well beyond the private workforce’s.
It seems we have created de Tocqueville’s prescient “soft despotism,”
a government that “covers the surface of society with a network of
small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most
original minds and most energetic characters cannot penetrate.”
As a result of this public institutional gigantism, the
interpretation, enforcement, and punishments for breaking these
regulatory rules are left to the agencies themselves, whose procedures
and powers are visible only to those who fall afoul of these
regulations, and can afford lawyers. And all these functions are
conducted by anonymous clerks who are not accountable to the voters, and
vitiate the “checks and balances” of our government’s divided powers.
Perhaps that’s why, as Kimberly Strassel commented
recently, these agencies have been hostile to every Republican
president since Ronald Reagan––not to mention explaining the federal
clerks’ overwhelming preference for Democrats when making political
donations. The party of Leviathan takes care of its minions.
And when litigation does succeed in stopping an agency’s abusive
power, it takes years and usually a Supreme Court decision to make it
stop. A recent example is Sackett vs. EPA, the third time the
Court has had to rein in this agency’s notorious penchant for expensive
and needless encroachments on the rights of individuals, states,
businesses, and civil society.
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.
Moreover, the EPA bears much of the blame for the lengthy delays,
most instigated by well-heeled environmental lobbyists, that add more
costs to big infrastructure construction. As Jonah Goldberg points out,
“it took 410 days to build the Empire State Building and 16 months to
build the Pentagon but nearly 20 years to complete Boston’s Big Dig
highway tunnel project. The Hoover Dam was scheduled to take seven years
but was completed in five. That would be a generous timetable for
Environmental Protection Agency review of the proposal today.”
Such hubris and incompetence can be found in practically every
federal agency, because each is beholden to the federal government, not
the voters. In other words, they are political entities, not a
collection of objective “experts.” A particularly egregious, if not
shameful, recent example is the Pentagon’s addition of transgender and
“systemic racism”––both dubious political phenomena––“training” for our
troops. No wonder the services are falling short of recruits, when they
choose sides in a divisive political debate, rather than sticking to
their sole purpose of training warriors to defend our nation’s security.
Finally, for nearly six years we have witnessed some of the worst
abuses of government power in our history. Powerful agencies like the
Department of Justice, the FBI, the CIA, and the IRS, which are
sanctioned to surveil, investigate, arrest, and subject citizens to dawn
raids by heavily armed agents, have been weaponized to serve the
political interests of one party at the expense of the other, thus
trashing the Constitution to which they have supposedly sworn fealty––
especially its tattered 14th amendment’s promise of “equal protection under the laws.”
The indictment of Donald Trump for improperly handling classified
documents is just the latest in a series of government actions that
deface this critical defense of our freedom and political equality.
Former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy, no Trump cheerleader,
recently has emphasized the patent injustice of our government’s “selective, vindictive prosecution” of Donald Trump:
The Obama-Biden Justice Department gave former Secretary
of State Hillary Clinton a complete pass on similarly egregious
offenses.
The Biden Justice Department — even as it indicts Trump — is laying
the ground work to absolve President Biden himself on what appears to be
appalling classified-information violations going back decades.
Yet the earth has been scorched to make a criminal case against
Trump, not only a former president but a current presidential candidate —
right now, the prohibitive GOP favorite to run against Biden.
To anyone watching this, the normal reaction to Trump’s indictment is: What about Hillary? What about Biden?
Come to think of it, what about Sandy Berger and David Petraeus, who
got slaps on the wrist rather than the serious felony prosecutions for
classified information crimes? What about Mike Pence?
It couldn’t be more obvious that these cases are pertinent to the question of whether the indictment of Trump is fair and just.”
Equality under the laws, one of the most important bulwarks for
protecting our freedom against tyranny, is in danger. The politicized
excesses of our government agencies fit Aristotle’s definition of
tyranny: “arbitrary power responsible to no one,” and that governs “with
a view to its own advantage, not to that of its subjects, and therefore
against their will. No freeman willingly endures such a government.
In the end, the 2024 election is not about Donald Trump or Joe Biden.
It is about whether we will live free to govern ourselves, or whether
we will further endure the tyranny of the clerks.
Bruce Thornton is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center,
an emeritus professor of classics and humanities at California State
University, Fresno, and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution.
His latest book is Democracy’s Dangers and Discontents: The Tyranny of
the Majority from the Greeks to Obama.
Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-tyranny-of-the-clerks/
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