Roger Kimball - Saving the Republic: The Fate of Freedom in the Age of the Administrative State

2018 by Roger Kimball; the individual chapters, the individual authors

Foreword 2018 by Victor Davis Hanson

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First American edition published in 2018 by Encounter Books, an activity of Encounter for Culture and Education, Inc., a nonprofit, tax exempt corporation.

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FIRST AMERICAN EDITION

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Kimball, Roger, 1953 editor.

Title: Saving the republic: the fate of freedom in the age of the administrative state / edited by Roger Kimball.

Description: New York: Encounter Books, 2018. | Includes index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017049918 (print) | LCCN 2017051722 (ebook) | ISBN 9781594039669 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Political cultureUnited States. | Politics, PracticalUnited States. | United StatesPolitics and government.

Classification: LCC JK (ebook) | LCC JK1726 .S328 2018 (print) | DDC 323.440973dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017049918

CONTENTS

Table of Contents

T HESE FOURTEEN ESSAYS first appeared as short monographs as part of Encounter Books Broadside series during and after the heated 2016 presidential election campaign and victory of Donald Trump. They address a variety of contemporary dangers to the American republic under the general aegis that our government is becoming far too big, too powerful, and too dangerous. If the successful populist presidential campaign of Trump and his signature slogans of Make America great again and Drain the swamp make this collection especially timely, the authors in turn also remind us why people were justifiably infuriated by the status quo and felt pushed to the edge in 2016.

I

The warnings issued in Saving the Republic are diverse. The wide range of topics is justified by the multifaceted pathologies that are eroding constitutional government. That said, all the essays do share a common historical approach of charting the relentless and insidious explosive growth of the administrative state in the late twentieth century. They also ominously conclude with warnings that caution that the finite resources of the state are now nearing exhaustion as the demands put upon them continue to escalate or that the administrative state has made the current US government almost unrecognizable to what the Founders envisioned.

The irony of supposedly good intentions gone wrong is also thematic. One would expect naivet from rigid bureaucracies, which, unlike individuals, do not react quickly to changing stimuli and unfamiliar conditions. It follows that gun violence grows as gun control spreads, almost as if our inability to deal with the felony is psychologically excused by focusing on the misdemeanor. The same state that once had the power to ensure race-based segregated houses naturally demands race-based remedies to many of its own self-inflicted disasters. Left-wing free speech movements on campus turn totalitarian as unpopular speech is libeled as being hate filled and thus by definition are not free. Government-mandated redistribution to alleviate inequality usually leads to greater impoverishment. Equality is achieved only in the sense of making richer people poorer, rather than making poorer people richer. The United Nations is neither united nor in most cases even nations, as we understand that word.

These essays, however, are not pessimistic, despite detailing the existential dangers posed by the expanding administrative state. They offer recognizable antidotes that are as time tried as they are simple: Trust the individual to make better decisions than unelected bureaucrats. Seek solutions by empowering grassroots democratic bodies rather than distant, centralized, and unelected agencies. Understand the fated cycle of higher taxes leading to larger government, to less freedom, and to greater impoverishment. Accommodate and react to predictable and unchanging human nature rather than empowering the state to try to change or deny it. Place confidence in human ingenuity and inventiveness as collective assets rather than demonizing them as selfish and disruptive traits deserving of fear and punishment.

II

The huge and still-growing permanent bureaucracy and deathless administrative state have become unaccountable to the voters by outliving elected officials, outlasting reform movements, and counting on revolving-door elected officials to stay dependent on stationary and tenured entrenched experts. One natural result, according to Jay Costs initial essay, is that the pragmatic attitude of if you cannot beat them, join them leads to the permanence of crony capitalists, both liberal and conservative. These insiders stifle competition. They redirect economic activity away from market rationalism and private-sector profit and loss. And they drive up consumer costs. Crony capitalism ensures that regulations are aimed at perceived innovative competitors who play by new rules while government and private-sector managers switch occupations so frequently that they become almost indistinguishable.

Philip Hamburger emphasizes how the growing tentacles of the government octopus are nourished by the full assets of the state. In comparison, the targeted individual citizen usually has neither the time nor the money to fight back, whether in the courts, against imposed regulations, or when hounded by vindictive civil servants who are legally and financially exempt from the consequences of their overreach. The local midlevel bureaucrat can draw on his resources to make a regulatory case that his targeted offender cannot match a fact known to a state auditor that only further encourages his sense of unchecked ambition and vindictiveness. The psychosocial landscape assumes that the state is working on behalf of the people; the individual solely for himself.

It is difficult to know, in this chicken-and-egg dilemma, whether such an administrative state restricted our freedoms or those opposed to free expression naturally created the administrative state. It is perhaps easier to appreciate just how compatible bureaucracies are with censorship and a servile press. As Mollie Ziegler Hemingway goes on to show in a prescient essay on the new twenty-first-century media written during and right after the release of the WikiLeaks trove revealing journalists collusion with the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign cronyism is not just confined to business. It infects and has nearly destroyed a once-independent media as well.