Bureaucracy and Populism

Valentine's Day Dispatch

Greetings, Citizens!

Ok, the subtitle is a joke. Dark February. I’ll do something lighter soon, promise.

I regard technology, bureaucracy, finance, and military force as entertwined aspects of the contemporary that simultaneously seem inescapable, sometimes beneficial, yet often deeply inhumane. No doubt I am too delicate, but the questions for me, at least in what we might very loosely and somewhat cuttingly call political philosophy, all fundamentally ask: how can we humanize the contemporary? Or at least make our peace with our worlds? I have recently realized that the books I have written and indeed the books I am struggling to write are efforts (extended essays?) in these problems, efforts to try to love my home. Therapeutic, maybe, failures notwithstanding. Be grateful, even. It’s not going great, frankly, despite decades of work. Maybe I should stick to family, pictures and the odd poem. Dogs and beer. Cultivate the garden.

The unedited, unfiltered images in this Signal were all taking on February 7th, in Eastern Colorado and Western Kansas, the sun lowering at my back, the light from very good to magic. Strong winds out of the South. “Kansa” (various spellings) means “People of the South Wind.” Please view on a large screen if you can, for reasons that will be obvious. For an hour or so, the moment sufficient unto itself. Now that was something.

Back to discontent. I’ve been thinking about populism, and government, and legitimacy, and — like lots of people. I recently recorded this text for an audiobook; maybe it is helpful for your thinking.

Towards the Reimagination of Bureaucracy.

Much contemporary governance is actually done through decidedly undemocratic bureaucracies, what we might collectively call the administrative state. In this regard, at least, the liberal democratic order is much like the old Soviet order, whatever it is Russia has now, or China, or even a large corporation or university – actual governance is bureaucratic. It is true that in liberal democracies, adminis- tration is legitimated by reference to ... liberal democracy. Representatives are elected by “We the People,” more or less, and those representatives delegate power to administrative agencies and bureaucracies. This, at any rate, is the story we tell in any number of regulatory law classes in the United States. What the US Environmental Protection Agency, or the Securities and Exchange Commission, or any agency does is presumptively legitimate because it is done by bureaucratic officials hired – or their bosses were hired – by people who were elected by the people, or who were nominated and approved by people who were elected by the people. For present purposes, the point is that “liberal democracy” is not the mechanism of governance, it is the mechanism of, at most, distant oversight over the bureaucracies that actually wield power, and the mechanism of legitimation for such bureaucracies. A similar dynamic plays across the European project – whatever the Commission does is said to be democratic because of the democratic process in the Member States. It need hardly be said that such legitimacy is thin, believed by few.

Harold Berman argued that the twentieth century “social” revolutions, especially the Russian Revolution, experienced in the United States in attenuated form as the New Deal, gave rise to a new understanding of the state. In this understanding, the state is directly responsible for civil society writ large – health and welfare and such. This vast expansion of the role of the state required a concomitant expansion of the apparatus of the state – the growth of the modern bureaucracy. This can be seen architecturally, in Washington DC, if one heads northwest from the White House, in the rows of fine apartments built for civil servants in the 1930s and 1940s out Connecticut Avenue. One might also tell a parallel story about the rise of the giant modern corporation.

The changes wrought by the English, American, and French Revolutions – and a great deal of civil life and law in between – carried with them their own legitimacy. These revolutions made the set of ideas for which “liberal democracy” is a shorthand a presumptively legitimate armature or model of governance. A judiciary ought to be independent, a legislature democratically elected, and so forth and so on. Such understandings have become part of the collective unconscious, at least in many societies. The twentieth-century social revolutions that ushered in the modern administrative state, however, were not as successful as a matter of culture and collective psychology. In particular, the social revolutions were not very successful in legitimating the administrative state. Although it came to be widely understood that the government should be responsible for education, health care, and social rights generally, the social revolution left us with little normative ordering of bureaucratic governance along the lines of the legitimating tales told for liberal democracy. Bureaucracy was and is generally seen as alienating, Kafkaesque. Weber speaks of disenchantment. Russians have endless jokes. Populists decry distant elites. Talk gets rougher; violence may break out.

Even within the capitals, bureaucracy is almost always legitimated not on its own terms, but instead by reference to liberal democracy, the achievements of the earlier revolutions. In particular, legislatures are said to “delegate” specific regulations and other decisions to administrative agencies. The exercise of power is legitimate because decided – in the abstract and not in detail – by the duly elected representatives of the people. The legitimacy of bureaucracy is thus derivative, even parasitic. If elections are seen to be less than genuine, as they sometimes are, and as the distance between election and bureaucracy grows, as it seemingly inevitably does, the idea that bureaucratic power is either democratic or liberal becomes harder and harder to sustain. Thus “government,” “elites,” “Europe,” and so forth are easily cast as the enemy of democracy, indeed the enemy of the people. In other words, the “crisis of liberal democracy” is largely a crisis for the administrative contemporary state, understood operationally in bureaucratic terms. For a long time, states, that is, bureaucracies, could use stories about “liberal democracy” to legitimate themselves. In many societies and for many people, such stories no longer seem convincing. Instead, bureaucracies are seen to be self-perpetuating expressions of elite power.

What is to be done about this situation? One answer, beloved by people that in the United States are called liberals, is to “try, try again,” that is, to make bureaucracy more directly subject to liberal democracy. Require more transparency. Limit the discretion of officials. Subject administrative action to legal review. There is much to recommend this approach, which is basically the approach of US administrative law, but it has its limits. Judicial review, transparency, and limitations all tend to produce more bureaucracy, more of the same complexities, delays, and inscrutable exercises of power that were the source of frustration in the first place.

The opposite approach, ostensibly beloved by many conservatives (also as popularly used in the United States) is to do away with bureaucracy whenever possible. Shrink government! Drain the swamp! There are times when this makes some sense, or is at least appealing, but the limitations are equally obvious. Bureaucratic institutions, whether deemed public or private, are often required to make life possible in complex societies, indeed constitute complex societies.

Rather than thinking about bureaucratic legitimacy in derivative terms, perhaps bureaucracy could be at least partially legitimated by directly addressing the central philosophical problem of liberalism itself, the absence of a shared notion of the good? Like other critics of liberalism, Alisdair MacIntyre argued that modern political and legal thought moves from substantive commitments to particular ideals of the good towards procedural commitments, and perhaps to purely formal goods, such as equality, defined in terms of such procedures. This abandonment of notions of the good and settling on procedure, preeminently contract, in fact, is what makes the writings of Hobbes, or the Peace of Westphalia, “modern” rather than medieval achievements. If the wars of religion cannot be solved by disputation or on the battlefield, perhaps we can agree to disagree.

But, as MacIntyre delineates in After Virtue, such peace comes at a great price. There are things that cannot be thought or discussed without some shared notion of the goods appropriate to such things, and ultimately important to human fruition. That is, ideas of whether this or that is better for some X presumes a knowledge of what X, ideally, should be. A telos is an end in terms of which a thing may be understood, a watch in terms of keeping time. The watch may also be jewelry or a paperweight, but it is “timekeeper” that defines the watch as watch. This is teleology, Aristotle through Aquinas. It is classical and medieval, but by definition not modern, thought.

One way to understand bureaucratic delegation is that it implicitly creates spaces in which such thinking or such conversations can happen today, that is, spaces for teleological discourse within a frame of liberal democracy that explicitly denies the possibility, much less achievement, of such discourse. For example, a legislature may decide that “it would be good if” we had clean water, or secure borders, or stable financial markets, or what have you, and then – in an organic statute such as the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 – creates an institution devoted to such ends. In this view, bureaucracy is not illiberal merely because of its distance from liberal processes and its employment of elites. Bureaucracy is illiberal in intention and in principle – it is the way liberal societies manage to have teleological political discourse. The problem – especially for diverse polities like the United States, or Europe, and perhaps less obviously, Russia or China – is that teleological discourse, agreement on the good, is hard to come by. People think differently about such things. So vague abstract standards suffice to authorize a regulatory agency, but must be ever half-articulated, somewhat disingenuous.

Telos is associated with the stake towards which Greek footraces were run – out to the stake, around it, and back to the start line. So the idea of “telos” has not only purpose – run fast – but a temporality built into it. The stake is a goal, the thing to be reached, the not yet achieved. The future. So, with only a little violence, we might understand teleology in terms not of purpose secured by consensus on the nature of the good, but in terms of preferred futures.

At this point it is no more than a vague hope, but perhaps people can come to understand their bureaucracies as places where different futures are collectively thought and worked upon, places of – at least on good days – good faith and team effort, with a good will. Rather than Hobbes’ Leviathan, or Weber’s rationalist disenchantment and petty power politics, we might think of bureaucracy as public service towards some, always yet to be finally articulated, notion of the collective good. Bureaucracy humanely conceived could thus compliment and buttress those forms of government that we, somewhat misleadingly, now call liberal democracy.

— Mark Maguire & David A. Westbrook, “Security and the Humanization of Bureaucracy,” ch. 13 of Getting Through Security: Counterterrorism, Bureaucracy and a Sense of the Modern

I suppose it needs to be said that such vague hopes rely on widespread belief that the mandarin class is deserving of its authority. In different ways in roughly my lifetime, elites of both “the left” and “the right,” have squandered their authority. Stringfellow Barr may have said that the Athenians lost due to “lack of nerve.” If and insofar as we lose, I will amend to “lack of sympathy.” Enjoy the election.

Windmills

Safe travels, Pilgrims.

— David A. Westbrook