Bureaucracy and Liberty

 I spent my last term as a college undergraduate in the spring of 1969.   For many of my classmates, that was above all the time of the occupation of University Hall, a student strike, the end, for decades, of ROTC programs on the Harvard campus, and the creation of a black studies department.  I watched all t hose events as an observer, because I had just handed in my senior these on George Orwell--which anyone can read here--and the SDS reminded me much too much of the communists he had encountered in Spain and in the British intellectual community to persuade of much of anything.  And at the same time, I was taking the second half of Stanley Hoffmann's course on modern France.  I wrote another big paper for that one, on the split between Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus.  Then, during that great Harvard institution Reading Period--eliminated by Larry Summers to put Harvard's fall exams before Christmas, as they were at its major competitors--I read The Old Regime and the French Revolution, by Alexis de Tocqueville, for that course.  My concentration  has never been sharper, partly perhaps because I was in denial over my coming separation from Harvard, and it had a tremendous effect on me.  Now I realize that Tocqueville, in that book--which was more perceptive than Democracy in America, which I discussed here many years ago--had identified the critical problem of the modern age.

Tocqueville wrote that book in the early 1850s, after the French Revolution's democratic experiment had given way successively to the Napoleonic Empire and two different monarchies.  The 1848 revolution had established a new Republic, in which he served as foreign minister, but it in turn had given way to the revived empire of Napoleon III in 1851.  After extensive research in the pre-revolutionary archives, Tocqueville had concluded that these changes reflected a much longer-term trend.  Centralized bureaucratic control had begun to replace traditional authority in France more than a century earlier, in the reign of Louis XIV.  Napoleon had completed this process after the brief revolutionary interlude, and his successors had kept the bureaucratic structure that he created, centered on the departmental prefects who administered the country, much like Louis XIV's provincial intendants. This had prevented the French from governing themselves in the manner of the New Englanders Tocqueville had analyzed at length in his earlier work.

Tocqueville's particular genius lay in a contradiction.  On the one hand, he saw the shape of the coming new world that was replacing the traditional society and government of the Middle Ages--but on the other hand, he was himself an aristocrat and preferred in many ways the dying society to the new one.  Tocqueville also had an English wife, and he saw 18th- and 19th century British society as the counterpoint to what was happening in France.  There the aristocracy paid most of the taxes the government collected, cooperated with the gentry to govern the country in parliament, and played leading roles in local government as well.  No national bureaucracy had developed, as in France.  Tocqueville evidently believed that medieval France had functioned in much the same way, and claimed that the meetings of the Estates General during that period showed lots of cooperation between the nobility and the common third estate.  He even found village democracy in medieval France that reminded him of the New England town meetings he had observed first hand.

I realized at once while reading the book that his whole argument contradicted most of what I had been taught for fifteen years or so.  Bureaucracy had replaced town meetings in most of the United States by the 1960s, and thanks to FDR and LBJ, we now had a centralized bureaucracy that regulated many areas of American life.  I had grown up regarding all this as a good thing--yet I also knew that a vocal minority of Americans, the Goldwater supporters who were still gaining ground within the Republican Party, violently disagreed.  The last half century have taught me a lot more about bureaucracy and its discontents.

Bureaucracy represents impersonal authority based upon written rules, enforced, in theory, for the common good.  The human mind can impartially determine what would be best for everyone, and the human spirit can respond emotionally to achieving it.  These are powerful antidotes to another key element of human nature, pure self-interest.  A respect for rules and for the common good are also essential, in my opinion, for large institutions to function effectively.  Yet any attempt to sustain a bureaucracy based upon these principles runs into big obstacles also inherent in human nature.  Bureaucrats can be powerfully affected by their own self-interest or by their obligations to their families.  The Ottoman Empire created an exceptionally effective and long-lived bureaucracy by kidnapping Christian male babies and raising and training them to run both its civil bureaucracy and its military.  The initially had no other loyalty.  Bureaucracies in Prussia and eventually in Britain developed remarkable esprit de corps, as did some United States bureaucracies.  Eventually however that esprit de corps can become based upon institutional and personal self-interest, not on the values that initially defined the institution.

And meanwhile, bureaucracy arouses the opposition of powerful groups outside it.  In early modern France those were the clergy and the aristocracy--the groups Tocqueville thought had initially kept the monarchy in check but lost power under Louis XIV and then finally under Napoleon and his successors. Tocqueville did not live to see the rise of great industrialists, who fought bureaucratic restraints upon their activities and accumulated enough wealth to exercise enormous influence over elected governments.  Now great industrialists have given way to all-powerful financial institutions, and to the tech aristocracy, which seems about to take over much of the economic activity of the United States.  For the last half century such institutions have been winning their war on the American regulatory bureaucracy that FDR created, while essentially taking over both political parties with campaign contributions.  And the United States now has a president who believes that the entire role of the federal government is to reward himself and his friends while punishing his enemies. 

The growth of bureaucracy was intimately connected to the spread of education, particularly higher education.  Here another paradox has emerged.  Education makes effective bureaucrats, but it can also make more effective pursuit of self-interest.  The elite American higher educational system, of which I was a product (see above), began by training clergymen, and then trained professionals.  As late as the 1960s it seems to have turned out more doctors and lawyers than anything else.  It also turned out more academics to staff our vastly expanded university system.  Now, more than half the class of graduating seniors at Harvard goes into tech or finance, the newly dominant sectors of our (and the world) economy.  They are not using their highly developed intellects for the common good.

I remain in some respects an idealist, and I really believe human beings are much happier when they live within institutions that serve a clearly beneficial purpose, and whose rules insure that we can rely upon them for what we need.  My reverence for certain earlier eras, noted last week by google AI, stems largely from that.  Yet I know now that movement in that direction eventually provokes an at least equal and opposite reaction--particularly in relatively prosperous times when resources are plentiful.  We must not try, I think, to tie our own personal happiness to the broader human political and social struggle between community and self-interest.  Even if we could live forever--and we cannot--that struggle will never end, and ground gained in one era will be lost in the next.  Yet the human endeavor--looked at a s a whole--remains inspirational.

An "opinion" of historyunfolding

 One of my sons asked a leading AI program, Claude, for its analysis of History Unfolding.  Here is the result:

"Let me read a few more posts to get a fuller range across time.David Kaiser is a genuine article: a trained diplomatic and military historian (the book list—origins of WWII, the Vietnam War, the JFK assassination, Sacco and Vanzetti—is a real scholarly career, not a hobbyist's) who has been blogging current events through a historian's lens since 2004. That long vantage point is the most distinctive thing about him, for better and worse. He doesn't react to the news; he tries to locate it inside arcs measured in decades. He dates the current "national crisis" to roughly 26 years ago, repeatedly invokes the mid-twentieth-century New Deal/WWII/early-'60s period as a lost reference point of shared national purpose, and reads the Constitution through fresh work on the early nineteenth century. The blog's title is a thesis: events are unfolding according to patterns a historian can recognize.

"Politically he's hard to slot, which I find to his credit. He's economically a New Deal Democrat—anti-neoliberal, pro–Medicare for all, focused on inequality as the country's central problem—but he's sharply, almost relentlessly critical of his own side. His recurring argument is that the Democratic Party accepted the Reagan settlement, substituted identity politics for class politics, and keeps losing because it holds its own candidates to elite moral standards most voters don't share while offering no economic program beyond "we are not Trump." He defends colorblindness, calls DEI and affirmative action elite-diversifying but useless to the non-elite poor of every race, and openly dissents from the academic "new left" turn in his own discipline (the Jill Lepore exchange is the clearest example). On foreign policy he's a restraint-minded critic of forever wars and of unconditional support for Israel. That combination—left on economics, heterodox on culture, dovish abroad, and alarmed about Trump and authoritarian drift—is a coherent old-school liberalism that doesn't map cleanly onto either tribe.

"His intellectual habits are mostly good ones. He reaches for specifics: poverty figures broken out by race, historical precedent for how contested elections get adjudicated, a factual correction on the medieval-then-pirate origin of the skull-and-crossbones. He'll argue against his commenters rather than flatter them. The Barney Frank memoir post shows real warmth and a good ear for anecdote, and the prose throughout is lucid and unpretentious.

"Where I'd push back. First, the long-cycle framing—he's associated with the Strauss–Howe generational "crisis" school—can be self-confirming. Once you have a model in which the country is in a foreordained crisis, every headline becomes confirmation, and the frame stops being tested. Second, there's a strong declinist nostalgia: the mid-century consensus he misses was also far more exclusionary than the "what united us" framing admits, a point one of his own commenters makes pretty effectively against the colorblindness argument. Third, and most worth watching, the recent Graham Platner post shows the motivated-reasoning risk that attends any committed partisan analyst. He's careful and hedged—he explicitly says he's not calling Platner a saint—but he does contextualize and somewhat minimize one woman's account by setting it against other ex-girlfriends' and against Trump's worse record, in service of a candidate whose politics he favors. The "voters don't share elite standards" point is a real observation about electoral reality; it sits a little uneasily next to being deployed on behalf of someone he likes.

"Net: he's a serious, independent-minded thinker whose core diagnosis of the Democratic Party is a substantive thesis shared by plenty of thoughtful people, delivered with a historian's command of precedent and a refreshing willingness to annoy his own side. I'd read him for the structural argument and the historical reach, while keeping some skepticism toward the cyclical determinism, the golden-age nostalgia, and the occasional partisan tilt. (Practically: these are fast, lightly edited blog posts—the typos and the stray "2024" where he means 2028 are a reminder you're reading first drafts of a smart person thinking out loud, not finished work.)"

I plead guilty.

Why Democrats Keep Losing

 The election of 2016 might have taught both parties something, but one of them didn't get the message.  On the Republican side, Donald Trump, a man with a highly checkered past  as a businessman and a man, swept a bevy of establishment Republican candidates aside to take the nomination--an episode without precedent in American politics.  On the Democratic side, an unknown professed socialist, Bernie Sanders, nearly won the Iowa caucuses, won the New Hampshire primary, and eventually won 23 primaries or caucuses while Clinton on 34.  Trump had the advantage of running against several establishment candidates, while Sanders was running against only one.  Despite her loss to Obama in 2008, Clinton had gone into the race as an overwhelming favorite, but Sanders gave her a serious scare. The Democratic National Committee pulled every possible string to help Clinton, and she got the nomination.  Then she lost the election, and the US will never be the same again.

Since then the Democratic establishment has lived in terror of the emergence of another Bernie Sanders.  The Democratic left itself, to be fair, did its cause enormous harm in 2020 by running two strong candidates, Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, and neither of them developed any real momentum.  Helped by Trump's unpopularity over COVID, the establishment's candidate Joe Biden won the nomination and the election comfortably.  Trump however maintained and strengthened his grip over the Republican Party.  When Biden in 2024 had to drop out of the race, he and most of the establishment immediately anointed Kamala Harris, who (like Biden) had failed disastrously in her attempts to get the Democratic nomination before she became Vice President.  She lost to Trump by a considerably larger margin than Clinton had.

This year another populist Democrat has come on the scene--Graham Platner of Maine.  Zohran Mamdani has become a national figure thanks to his victory in New York, but he can never run for president because he was not born a US citizen.  Platner, like Sanders, is from a small New England state.  He was born to a wealthy family and went to boarding school but his life went in a completely different direction after he joined the military.  He is a true economic liberal who wants to do something about the wealth gap and the health care crisis, and he now opposes our bipartisan forever war policy in the Middle East and our support for anything Israel chooses to do.  He made such an impression on the voters of Maine that his establishment primary opponent, Governor Janet Mills, dropped out of the race.  And that immediately sent the Democratic establishment, both in Washington and in the media, into a panic.

The attack on Platner initially focused on a skull and crossbones tattoo that he acquired while a Marine.  Platner is unreservedly anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian in connection with the Gaza war, and advocates an end to US military aid to Israel.  (In the last few days, remarkably, Prime Minister Netanyahu has also suggested that Israel might be better off without that aid.)  That was enough for some elements in the Democratic coalition to regard him as a mortal threat--even though Biden's essentially unremitting support for the Gaza war probably cost him the state of Michigan last time out, where the significant Muslim-American voting bloc turned against him.  I must make one point about the tattoo.  Contrary to what at least one New York Times columnist has written, the skull and crossbones was not originated by the Nazi SS.  It dates from the Middle Ages and was adopted later by pirates, which is how I first saw it watching Disney movies in the 1950s.  In any case, the argument that the tattoo disqualifies him from holding public office typifies the new Democratic attitude towards certain kinds of sins.  Those who have committed them face immediate and permanent excommunication, regardless of any excuse the sinner can put forward, any contrition he (or she) shows, and no matter how much he or she is contributing to the Democratic cause.  That is why Al Franken, who had done essentially nothing, no longer sits in the US Senate.  We will return to this attitude in a moment.  Platner seemed initially to have survived the tattoo controversy.

Today, another titan of the Democratic establishment, the New York Times, leads with a very long story about Platner's relationships with women.  Like so many accomplished politicians from the past, he has had quite a few such relationships, although he is happily married now and his wife is standing with him.  The story focuses mainly on one woman with whom he had an unmarried affair in Washington, who has been a career Republican political operative.  She accuses him of grabbing her rather aggressively on several occasions, although she adds that he never hit or injured her, and of talking demeaningly at times about women, and says she suffered long-term emotional harm from their relationship.  She insists that politics has nothing to do with her coming forward.  Other former girlfriends, on the other hand, speak highly of him, clearly do not regret their involvement with him, and do not report anything similar.  In addition, it has leaked that Planter was sexting with other women in recent years while he was married.  That story came from another Maine Democrat named Genevieve McDonald, who worked for a while in Platner's campaign and became a confidante of his wife, and then quit the campaign and leaked the story.  I could be wrong, but I read the Times every day and I think this is the longest story to have appeared this  year about any Democratic politician.  It is obviously designed to end his political career.  I do wonder whether the Times  now believes that any presidential candidate deserves such a long and carefully researched story about their romantic history.  I don't.

Political parties exist to win elections.  If the Democratic Party wants to go on winning enough elections to take power, it needs to face certain facts.

Donald Trump, needless to say, has been repeatedly accused of far worse behavior, behavior for which he has paid a legal price more than once, and bragged about it in a taped conversation.  When that tape broke in 2016 we thought it was the end of his candidacy--but it wasn't.  Trump has proven that--for better or for worse--a large portion of the electorate does not share the elite establishment's standards for the behavior of public officials and will not follow the instructions of the elite media when it comes time to vote on candidates.  Bill Clinton, a Democrat, had actually proved this already during his two campaigns for president, even though the Lewinsky affair, such as it was, did not break until after he had been re-elected.  Trump has broader and deeper popularity than any other politician of the 21st century, in my opinion, and one reason is that he has repeatedly defied the establishment and gotten away with it.  He has even appointed men like Pete Hegseth and Kash Patel to some of the most important positions in government despite questionable episodes in their past that would probably have doomed any Democrat.  

I am not excusing Trump or Hegseth for what they have done in the past, nor am I arguing that Platner is a saint.  I am simply pointing out that leading Democrats, in an effort to maintain neoliberal orthodoxy in both economics (no Medicare for all) and foreign policy (continuing support for Israel, no matter what), and because of the power of feminist ideology in the Democratic party, are holding candidates to standards much higher than Republicans are  held to, and standards that the bulk of the voting population does not share.  Since Donald Trump came onto the scene, Democrats have run on not being, or not supporting, Donald Trump.  They have not offered any broad solutions to our most important economic problems--which as I have tried to point out many times are NOT directly related to race or gender--or admitted that our Middle Eastern policies might be wrong.  They are standing for the status quo, which the country rightly rejects.  I'm glad that there is room in the Democratic Party for Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and Pete Buttigieg, but we need room for Graham Platner as well.  If we can't make room for him we will continue to lose the votes of the majority of poorer Americans and uneducated Americans, as we do now.  The American people resent the assumption of our educated elite that we know what is best for everyone, and the educated elite has to give that idea up.  Rather than nominate a real economic populist like Sanders or Platner, the Democrats think they can prove their moral credentials by nominating someone other than a straight white male.  That strategy might work within the Democratic Party but it will not work in the electorate at large.