Reason, Bureaucracy, and History

 The eighteenth century has long been called the age of revolution, often without acknowledging that at least two different revolutions were taking place.  That was the great insight of Alexis de Tocqueville, who described the two revolutions separately in two great books, Democracy in America, about the egalitarian society and representative institutions of the newly formed United States, and The Old Regime and the French Revolution, about the growth of a bureaucratic state in France in the 17th and 18th centuries and the failure of the  French Revolution to stop it.  The relationship between democracy and bureaucracy has changed a great deal over the last 250 years, especially in the United States, and it is entering a critical phase now, with potentially enormous consequences of the US and the world.

Some years ago I wrote a series of posts here about Democracy in America after reading it from cover to cover for the first time.  The search box at the top of this page will lead any interested readers to it.  I had read The Old Regime and the French Revolution much earlier, in the spring term of my senior year in college, with tremendous effect.  It emerged clearly from that book that Tocqueville personally preferred aristocracy to democracy, although he knew, as he had written twenty years earlier in Democracy in  America, that aristocracy was doomed and that democracy--by which he meant above all the legal equality of all citizens--was sweeping over the world.  His model of aristocratic rule was Great Britain, his wife's home nation.  The British aristocracy, he argued, had governed its nation in a public spirited manner, paying the lion's share of taxes through the land tax, allowing commoners to file suits against them in court, dominating local government, and cooperating with the lower classes in various ways.  The Old Regime argues repeatedly that the French aristocracy had behaved similarly in the later middle ages--an argument that I do not think many other historians have endorsed--but that things changed under Louis XIV, who began building a more centralized bureaucracy to govern the nation based mainly on his Intendants, the officials who represented him in the provinces. The French Revolution had tried to institute a democracy based in part on the new US model, but the nation had collapsed into near anarchy within a few years, leading to the dictatorship of Robespierre.  After a confused period in the late 1790s, Napoleon Bonaparte took over and revived the centralization of the Old Regime, with prefects taking the place of royal intendants.  

Tocqueville wrote The Old Regime in the 1850s and noted that the system of centralized administration and prefects had survived for half a century, through several dynastic and regime changes.  It survived all the way into the current Fifth Republic, buttressed by the grandes écoles, the national professional schools that trained young people for it.  Other European nations, led by Prussia and the German Empire that Prussia created in 1871, also had highly developed bureaucracies.    The early American Republic inspired Tocqueville largely because it did not have such a bureaucracy.  Its democratic institutions began at the local level, with New England town meetings, and US citizens constantly formed political associations to pressure their local, state and national officials.  The whole citizenry followed political affairs closely and took part in them.  That, he thought, was what made democracy a living thing.

Things began to change very slowly in the US in the last decades of the nineteenth century.  While the federal bureaucracy remained relatively small, dominated by postal workers and customs inspectors, elected senators and representatives now controlled appointments to it through informal arrangements worked out within the Republican Party in the wake of the Civil War.  The civil service reform movement began to argue for a permanent corps of non-partisan officials who could pass competitive examinations.  The Pendleton Act of 1883 created such a system for a few individuals, and in successive decades more and more of the federal service was brought under it.  In 1921 the Budget Act created a federal budget office, and in 1924 the Rogers Act created the Foreign Service, our first professional diplomatic corps.  The US never developed anything like the French grandes écoles, but an expanding higher educational establishment helped fill the ranks of the new civil service.  As in Germany, France, and to a lesser extent in Britain, the civil service was viewed as an outgrowth of the Enlightenment, trying to use science to promote the greater good.  That idea also had roots in Plato's Republic and its dream of a government ruled by philosophers, literally, lovers of knowledge.

The real explosion of US bureaucracy took place, of course, under Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal.  The new SEC began regulating Wall Street trading, the NLRB provided a mechanism to settle disputes over union registration, the Department of Agriculture began trying to control crop production, and public works agencies supervised huge projects.  The Federal Security Agency, the ancestor of the Department of Health and Human Services, administered social security.  The Second World War and its aftermath created huge new defense bureaucracies, and new agencies sprung up in the era of the Great Society under Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, including the Office of Economic Opportunity, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Occupational Health and Safety Administration.  Most Republicans had opposed the New Deal agencies, but by the time of the Nixon Administration Republican leaders were going with the flow.  Barry Goldwater in 1964 had waged the first all-out presidential campaign against the bureaucratic state, and lost overwhelmingly.  In 1971, however, the then-confidential Powell memorandum by future Supreme Court justice Lewis Powell laid down a countermanifesto, proposing a political offensive against government regulation of free enterprise.  In 1980 Ronald Reagan was elected president based upon anti-government rhetoric.

Reagan's bark turned out to be worse than his bite,  but something was changing in public opinion.  With the possible exception of Joe Biden, every president since Gerald Ford--including Bill Clinton and Barack Obama--has complained and joked about the size of the federal government and tried to cut it back.  The size of the federal work force has been remarkably stable for most of the period since 1970, which means that it has shrunk substantially as a percentage of our population.  Meanwhile, bureaucracies have had a decidedly mixed record in other advanced parts of the world.  The most powerful bureaucracy in the world now appears to belong to the European Union.  It administers and regulates a vast territory but it has aroused a great deal of resentment, leading to Brexit and to the growth of rightwing parties all over the continent.  The Soviet bureaucracy--probably the largest and most intrusive in history--collapsed in 1989 and has not been rebuilt.  China still seems to have a very powerful centralized bureaucracy, even though its economy is largely privatized.  In general, it seems to me that state authorities have been losing effective power and influence to private interests, especially here in the United States.

Over the last thirty years or so a new anti-bureaucratic movement has grown up within the Republican Party, fueled by foundations like the Koch brothers' and ideologues like Grover Norquist and foundations like the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute.  Those interests are now aligned with Donald Trump and Elon Musk and they are mounting an unprecedented attack on the federal bureaucracy, beginning with efforts to eliminate the Agency for International Development and the Department of Education.  They seem likely to reduce the size of our public health bureaucracies and may even try to privatize the post office.  The fate of these efforts will remain somewhat uncertain at least until the Supreme Court rules on various parts of them, but I think they represent a turning point in human affairs.  The Republicans have declared war on the ideal of an educated bureaucracy reordering economic life to promote the common good, and the closely related idea of a national government empowered to keep private economic power within certain limits.  Those ideas date back to the 18th century.  I deeply regret the decline of those ideas, but I also believe that Tocqueville's criticisms of impersonal bureaucracy had a point.  Our public institutions have become unresponsive in many ways, not least because of the influence of private interests exercised through our political system.  Bureaucracies do become devoted to their own self-preservation, if not their own growth.  Our vast state and local educational bureaucracies--probably the ones with the greatest impact on the average citizen--have been doing a very ineffective job for decades and let the nation down badly during  the pandemic.  And bureaucracy and regulations have made it almost impossible for governments of either party to accomplish great things, such as the proposed high-speed rail line between San Francisco and Los Angeles.  

I doubt very much that the federal government as I have known it all my life will survive this administration.  Even if a Democrat succeeds Trump, they will not have the power to restore it to where it was two months ago, even if they want to.  I cannot possibly predict where this will lead the nation, but I conclude that an important era of modern history is indeed coming to an end.