Beginning, I suppose, in the early twentieth century, when the ancestor of the FBI was first created, and accelerating very rapidly during the New Deal era and afterwards, the United States federal government acquired enormous new powers, vastly increased its budget and personnel, and became involved in many more areas of American life. All this happened, for the most part, in the spirit of the Enlightenment. It attempted to improve American economic and social life, and also to deploy federal power to correct vast economic imbalances. The Enlightenment, in practice if not always in theory, relied on bureaucracies operating according to impartial rules. That was what our new federal bureaucracies, including our vastly expanded Department of Justice, claimed to do.
This process aroused considerable opposition from the beginning. Some progressives and some conservatives feared the growth of federal power, and some of the nation's leading progressives opposed US entry into the First World War because they did not want a militarized state. Many Republicans became apoplectic during the 1930s over FDR's expansion of federal power, which they viewed similarly to the way many liberals view the Trump Administration today. After President Truman began trying to put the federal government behind the civil rights movement in 1948, many (but not all) white southern Democrats became deeply hostile to federal power once again as well. In the 1960s Kennedy and especially Johnson resumed the expansion of federal power over civil rights issues and other matters, leading to the nomination of Barry Goldwater in 1964 and the political realignment that in 1968 reduced the Democratic presidential vote from 60 percent in 1964 to 43 percent in 1968. That percentage reached 50 percent only once between 1964 and 2008, in 1976.
Ronald Reagan campaigned against federal power in 1980 and 1984, but he did relatively little to decrease it, even though he created permanent large federal deficits with his tax cuts and military spending increases. George W. Bush destroyed the balanced budget that Bill Clinton had left him with tax cuts of his own, but also expanded the federal government's reach in certain areas. Donald Trump also moved relatively cautiously in his first term. Now, however, the situation has completely changed.
Bitter arguments over race, sex and gender have now joined with the century-old struggle over the economic role of the federal government to divide Americans as deeply, probably, as they were divided in the 1850s, and more divided than they were during the New Deal. The Trump Administration, which represents a coalition of the fossil fuel industry, an increasing segment of Silicon Valley, the financial community, conservative supporters of the Israeli government, the religious right, and free-market ideologues, has now declared a long-term political struggle against the ideology of the Democratic Party and the institutions that support it, led by universities and certain foundations. Discarding the idea of a federal bureaucracy operating according to impartial rules, it has begun distributing and withholding federal money arbitrarily to achieve political objectives. Money approved by Congress for medical research and parceled out bureaucratically to universities has been blocked to force universities to abandon ideologically motived programs like DEI and to do more to stop anti-Israel protests, which they label as anti-Semitic. And this may only be the beginning.
Based on statements by Christopher Rufo, who is not part of the Administration but seems to be closely connected to it, and leaks from Washington in the last few days, it seems that the Justice Department is contemplating cases against the Soros and Ford Foundations based on the RICO Act, which was passed to go after organized crime. In the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, they are thinking about charging those foundations with leading a criminal conspiracy to incite violence against conservatives by spreading hate speech against conservative ideas. Rufo, a fellow of the Manhattan institute, outlined this idea here. This concept is, to put it mildly, a remarkable stretch of the RICO Act in defiance of numerous precedents about free speech, but the recent indictment of James Comey shows that the Bondi Justice Department, prodded by the White House, is not likely to be deterred by that. If such cases are indeed filed, they could drain enormous resources from those foundations even if they are eventually thrown out of court. In a parallel development, today's papers report that FBI director Kash Patel has ended long-term cooperative relationships between the Bureau and both the Antidefamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center because those two groups have cited many conservatives for hate speech.
I believe that there are ample constitutional and legal grounds to block the administration's discriminatory use of federal money, as well as further tortured legal attempts to bring down the left, but we have no idea in today's climate whether federal courts will, or can, ensure that those laws will still be applied. As regular readers know, I myself reject many aspects of mainstream Democratic ideology nowadays, and I also think that our leading universities need drastic reform and re-orientation. This is not how I would like to see necessary changes come about, but history does not care what I want. I also believe that broader forces are at work here. More than a century ago the German sociologist Max Weber defined three kinds of authority: traditional, bureaucratic, and charismatic. We established key elements of our bureaucracy under Franklin Roosevelt, who had charismatic authority of his own, but I don't think we have had a truly charismatic spokesman for strong federal authority since John F. Kennedy, and perhaps Lyndon Johnson in his first two years in office. I do not think modern life can exist without bureaucracy, but we all know how stultified and frozen it can become, and we could see back in the late 1960s, if we were looking, that some aspects of human nature instinctively revolt against it, even when it is doing good. We are watching history lurch back and forth, as it always has and probably always will.
In that connection, I am once again teaching one of my favorite novels, Doctor Zhivago, in an older students' program at a local university. One striking passage occurs during a house party in Moscow in the fall of 1917--after the overthrow of the Tsar, but before the Bolshevik Revolution. Zhivago, speaking for author Boris Pasternak, makes the following speech to the guests.
"During the revolution it will seem to you, as it seemed to us at the front, that life has stopped, that there is nothing personal left, that there is nothing going on in the world except killing and dying. If we live long enough to read the chronicles and memoirs of this period, we shall realize that in these fie or ten years we have experienced more than other people in a century. I don't know whether the people will rise of themselves and advance spontaneously l ike a tide, or whether everything will be done in the name of the people. Such a tremendous event requires no dramatic proof if its existence. I'll be convinced without proof. It's petty to explore causes of titanic events. They haven't any. It's only in a family quarrel that you look for beginnings--after people have pulled each other's hair and smashed the dishes they rack their brains trying to figure out who started it. What is truly great [or terrible--DK] is without beginning, like the universe. It confronts us as suddenly as if it had always been there or had dropped out of the blue."
Having spent my whole life trying to uncover the causes of titanic events, I never really liked this passage--but now I think I understand it. I would change "They haven't any" to "They have too many." But that doesn't change the thought that much.
