ONE WAY GOVERNMENT
THE DEEP STATE AND THE RATCHET: HOW POWER INSIDE THE US
GOVERNMENT REALLY WORKS
As the
Biden administration attempted to create its own Ministry of
Truth with the Disinformation Governance Board this month, it was common to
hear conservatives and Republicans saying things like “just wait until
President Trump or President DeSantis is the one appointing the head of that
agency, then you’ll be sorry.” The underlying assumption is that, once the
administration changes, the natural pendulum swing of democracy will act to punish
the Left for overreaching and consolidating government power while in office.
But that’s a common and very serious error in understanding how power really
works inside the American government.
We are
taught that the natural ebb and flow of electoral politics acts as a safeguard
against tyranny; that a cost will be paid by the Left if they accrue too much
power to themselves while in charge because, eventually, they will have to hand
the apparatus they constructed back over to their enemies. Once the machinery
of state is in the hands of their opponents, conservatives believe, the Left
will finally be punished and realize their mistake, which will temper their
desire to gain power the next time. The fear of a weapon in the hands of the
enemy is supposed to govern the desire to wield it yourself. Self-preservation
limits the aspirations of the country’s ruling class.
This check
and balance that the mechanism of democracy is meant to provide may have
functioned at some point in the country’s past, but that’s not how the United
States government actually operates today. The majority of our government’s
day-to-day decisions are not made by the legislature or even the President. The
elected officeholder is not even the one regularly exercising discretion. Today,
those decisions are handled by the technocracy, which is safely tucked away in
our government agencies, i.e. the permanent bureaucracy that has come to be
known as the deep state.
Advanced
liberal democracies like to maintain the myth of ‘objective public policy’.
This fallacious belief rests on the assumption that, by utilizing the
bureaucratic expertise of credentialed experts, we can arrive at an objective
and value-neutral solution for government policy that is guarded against the
ugly bias of purely political actors. The public has been taught to love the
idea of getting the politics out of things and letting scientifically-minded
people make data-driven decisions. But this is a sleight of hand. Whenever
someone proposes to have decisions become ‘less political’, i.e. to be made by
the experts, what they are actually doing is handing more power over to the
bureaucrats in the deep state, which are their own political class holding
similar views.
To be
credentialed as an ‘expert’ today, and thus qualify to work within the
bureaucracy, you must attend university. The more prestigious, and most likely
progressive, the university you obtain your degree from, the higher you are
likely to climb in the deep state. What this means is that every boss and
coworker who a bureaucrat needs to interact with and impress to climb the
ladder was required in his or her formative years to absorb the morality of
increasingly radical college professors. In other words, it is in the nature of
the deep state to select those who constantly signal the virtues of the woke
institution, which will one day inevitably go on to inform all of their
day-to-day policy decisions.
Whenever the Left consolidates power and creates a new agency, it is
immediately staffed with diehard progressive bureaucrats. In many cases, it is
literally required by law that experts be placed in key positions of authority,
who are all but guaranteed to be leftwing zealots (See highlighted
text in post below). And the vast
majority of this staff does not rotate out or get laid off when a Republican
administration or legislature comes to power. Protected by their status as
credentialed experts, the ideological foot soldiers of the bureaucracy stay
firmly entrenched in the deep state. That’s why things always seem to sprint
left when progressives are in charge and at best grind to a halt when the GOP
has its turn at the wheel.
We are
still told that our government operates by the formal dictates outlined in the
Constitution — checks and balances carefully designed to limit the power any
one side can wield while in office. But that is no longer the case. In our
desire to remove politics from public policy decisions we have replaced our
constitutional republic with governance by technocracy, i.e. governance by the
deep state. And the deep state is a ratchet: it only moves in one direction
because that is what it is designed to do. The deep state ensures that our
government, if it moves at all, always moves to the left, especially when it is
gaining power. This is why the Right has a very difficult time establishing
lasting change in the permanent machinery of Washington. By controlling the
institutions that credential bureaucrats, the Left controls the ideology that
will guide the decisions of the technocracy, no matter who ‘officially’
controls it.
We have
been told that the education and training which credentials someone to the
level of ‘expert’ grants the recipient a natural dedication to their craft that
protects them from personal bias. Experts place the integrity of their work
over personal partisan concerns, that’s what is supposed to make them so
valuable. But it is increasingly obvious that this is not the case. The
disasters of the Biden administration of the past two years have made more and
more clear to the average person how all these “experts” do not actually hold
any kind of sacred gift for objectivity. Not only does being educated in, and
dedicated to, a particular field not free you from political
bias, but it instead guarantees a particular form of bias.
The
official response to Covid by many different Western governments provides a
perfect example. Prior to the pandemic, there was no issue experts were more
trusted to handle than public health. If a strange new disease is sweeping the
globe, you want the world’s best doctors leading the charge. And so most people
happily placed their faith in highly-credentialed bureaucrats to manage the
Covid response. But it wasn’t long before people started noticing how the
public health establishment’s decision seemed to have very little connection to
the actual science. The WHO praised China’s management of the disease
despite its obvious and repeated lies about the origin and spread of the
pathogen; experts in America initially claimed that masks had little to no
impact but then spent months advocating for mandatory masking; social
distancing was said to be a precaution and people were forced to stay indoors –
until the BLM riots in the summer of 2020 when medical experts suddenly claimed mass gatherings had no
impact on the spread of the virus, and so on.
The idea
that the Left will pay a cost for centralizing more government power once
Republicans return to the driver’s seat, is a myth. The battle the Right is
fighting both culturally and politically is an asymmetrical one. Until we
understand that, we are destined to keep standing bewildered as the losses for
our side continue to pile up. Yes, Republicans have become a lot more
optimistic lately about their prospects in upcoming elections. Approval numbers
for Joe Biden have cratered, and so many on the Right expect a significant
electoral backlash due to the horrific job done by Democrat Party since 2020.
But any future leader on the Right who is serious about fixing our problems
must start by aiming to dismantle the administrative state, clear out the
entrenched bureaucracy, and return power back to an executive who can actually govern
the country. Anyone who isn’t planning to do that is only wasting our time.
Auron MacIntyr
_______________________________________________
Wednesday,
December 19, 2018
Hillary,
Woodrow, and Walter...
By Norman E. Hooben
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