Clairemont, "The Threat To Liberty

The Threat to Liberty:

This column from Claremont Review of Books is a gem, and oh so applicable to our current situation. The gigantic federal bureaucracy has struck back since Trump took office. A little over a month ago, documents "hacked" from Hillary's private server or Podesta's email account "secured" with the password "PASSWORD", were worthy of risking an international incident with Russia.

Now,  we see that every phone call between Trump or his staffers and anyone else is being tapped by the security apparatus and whatever allusions, innuendo, or potentially juicy tidbits can be lifted out of context can be widely shared with pure joy by the very same people who blanched in horror at anything at all coming out from the Hillary camp.

The administrative empire has managed to tack the scalp of Michael Flynn to it's digital wiretapping trophy case. The linked column gives some introduction to the powers and intent of the Administrative State as a law unto itself. Here we have a good introduction of how President Wilson thought of power, and thus why he started our nation on the road to being ruled by unelected "experts".

Wilson thought the conditions of modern times demanded that government power be unified rather than fragmented and checked. His great confidence in the wisdom of science and benevolence of expert administrators led him to the view that the founders’ worries about concentrated power were obsolete. He exhibited the combination of love for power and unbounded paternalism that is the hallmark of the administrative state today. He wrote in Congressional Government that “I cannot imagine power as a thing negative and not positive,” and on another occasion that “If I saw my way to it as a practical politician, I should be willing to go farther and superintend every man’s use of his chance.”

One must remember the times that Wilson lived in. The feeling was that we were living in a completely clockwork universe. "Free Will" was an illusion -- if one could work out all the proper equations, EVERYTHING could be understood and "controlled" by "the experts" (apparently it didn't occur to them that if everything was predetermined anyway, this all seemed a fools errand ... but the power mad tend to only think to a level that justifies their power). Wilson and many of his lefty contemporaries were also in favor of eugenics, and why not? ... science was the new god and explained EVERYTHING. To let the "inferior" breed was criminal ... best let the "experts" sort it out!

The Administrative State was and is the mechanism of extra-constitutional power where "elite experts" centralize power and make "better decisions" using knowledge and processes completely beyond the abilities of the masses.

A chief feature of the administrative state is its relentless centralization, but with a reciprocal effect: its mandates, regulations, distorting funding mechanisms, and elitist professionalism have corrupted our political culture all the way back down to local government. It is the chief reason why Americans increasingly have contempt for government.

It is all the "alphabet agencies" ostensibly under the control of the chief executive (president), but feeling totally OK with tapping the phones of him and his staff and leaking results, or in the case of the EPA, refusing to even fill out a survey.

... the most potent part of Progressivism, and its chief legacy for today, was its theoretical attack on the American Founding. Progressivism reduced to the proposition that the principles of the founding were wrong for the 20th century, and needed to be discarded. The swirling currents of Darwinism, Hegelian historicism, and scientific hubris all combined, in the summation of Harvey Mansfield, Jr., to make Wilson “the most powerful intellect in the movement” and “the first American president to criticize the Constitution.”

The progressive oath should replace "we hold these truths to be self-evident" with "we hold these truths to be false".

Wilson laid out his criticism of the separation of powers in his book Constitutional Government in the United States, in which he argued in favor of a “Darwinian” Constitution. Government, he argued, is not a machine, but a living, organic thing. And “No living thing can have its organs offset against each other as checks, and survive….  

His great confidence in the wisdom of science and benevolence of expert administrators led him to the view that the founders’ worries about concentrated power were obsolete. He exhibited the combination of love for power and unbounded paternalism that is the hallmark of the administrative state today. He wrote in Congressional Government that “I cannot imagine power as a thing negative and not positive,” and on another occasion that “If I saw my way to it as a practical politician, I should be willing to go farther and superintend every man’s use of his chance.”

The main reason Progressives like Wilson no longer shared the older liberal suspicion of government power was the new view that politics and administration could be neatly and cleanly separated, with administration entrusted to scientifically trained and disinterested experts, who by their very expertise should be insulated from political pressure.

The fact is, then, that there is a large part of administration which is unconnected with politics, which should therefore be relieved very largely, if not altogether, from the control of political bodies. It is unconnected with politics because it embraces fields of semi-scientific, quasi-judicial and quasi-business or commercial activity—work which has little if any influence on the expression of the true state will. For the most advantageous discharge of this branch of the function of administration there should be organized a force of government agents absolutely free from the influence of politics. Such a force should be free from the influence of politics because of the fact that their mission is the exercise of foresight and discretion, the pursuit of truth, the gathering of information, the maintenance of a strictly impartial attitude toward the individuals with whom they have dealings, and the provision of the most efficient possible administrative organization. The position assigned to such officers should be the same as that which has been by universal consent assigned to judges. Their work is no more political in character than is that of judges.

Writing in the Harvard Law Review in the early 1990s, Gary Lawson of Boston University School of Law put the proposition with admirable directness and concision:

“The modern administrative state is not merely unconstitutional; it is anti-constitutional. The Constitution was designed specifically to prevent the emergence of the kinds of institutions that characterize the modern administrative state.” And he says “the destruction of this principle of separation of powers is perhaps the crowning jewel of the modern administrative revolution.”

That bureaucratic government is the partisan instrument of the Democratic Party is the most obvious yet least remarked upon trait of our time (though this lack of public identification can be taken as additional evidence of the incompetence of the Republican Party).

The entire article is well worth the time!