There’s a subtext to nearly all American political trends today. It’s hardly ever spoken about overtly and explicitly. But the topic is nonetheless always there. All insiders know about it. It’s also the central and critical debate concerning America’s future.
The question is as follows.
Will the United States continue the present system whereby representative democracy persists as a mere veneer to keep the public distracted and defocused on the real rulers in the nation? Or will something dramatic be achieved whereby the swamp is truly drained, the administrative state gutted, the agencies disempowered, and we return to an actual constitutional system in which the people truly rule themselves through their elected representatives?
These are the two paths. It’s one or the other. They’re mutually incompatible.
For the first time perhaps ever, there are Republicans and others who have a bead on the problem. They’re determined to find a way forward to bring accountability to the deep state, one way or another. Their opponents in this exist within the Republican Party and constitute most of the Democrats. But the true bulwark of deep-state hegemony is within the public-sector bureaucracy itself along with those industries that are closely connected to it: media, medical, and tech, alongside the army of nongovernment organizations, wealthy foundations, and consultancies.
The system of administrative despotism under which we live—a kind of corporatist/statist amalgam that no elected official can truly control—has deep roots tracing to the Progressive Era. It grew over wars and crises throughout the 20th century and gained new energy and power in the 21st century. It involves not just Dwight Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex but also a tech-and-censorship industrial complex that seeks full control over domestic life too, including commerce and culture.
This system has long grown and entrenched itself without much public debate at all. People have had a vague sense for decades that something has gone wrong with too many bureaucracies and agencies mucking everything up. But the sheer scale of the problem has long eluded public consciousness.
All of this changed since the election of President Donald Trump in 2016. Much to his amazement and to the shock of the myriad people he appointed, the entrenched machinery of D.C. control worked daily and hourly to thwart his every effort to drain the swamp. Indeed, they worked to overturn the election itself (so much of the maudlin rhetoric about Jan. 6 is really Freudian projection).
President Trump rode into town thinking that the president would have power and be respected. He found out otherwise very quickly. He was treated as an invader into a settled system, and the hostility was intense. It took President Trump and his entire administration—none of whom had been prepared in any way for what they faced—fully two years to figure out that they were being thwarted and confounded at every turn.
The true and massive revenge of the administrative state came at the end of his term. His appointees were hatching a plan to reclassify many lifetime bureaucrats as directly accountable to the president. This plan made the struggle to preserve entrenched power absolutely existential. Two impeachment efforts failed, and seemingly out of nowhere, there was a massive national and global frenzy over a virus that we know now had been circulating widely for at least six months prior.
This period of the pandemic response had two main features: First, it demonstrated the astonishing power, reach, and pervasiveness of the machinery in a campaign of microbial control comparable to the “shock and awe” military response against Iraq.
Second, it alerted the American people to a massive problem of the system that they had previously attempted to ignore. Suddenly, the beast of administrative hegemony reached deeply into the private lives of every American with closures, masking, and vaccine mandates, thus enlivening a mass movement built on absolute fury and determination to change this system.
There’s a reason why this trauma is being buried by the mass media. The ruling class is attempting to impose a kind of mass amnesia in hopes that everyone will come to forget the whole thing. This involves gaslighting, yes, but it mostly means shutting down any serious debate or even conversations about this trauma of our lives.
Instead of honesty, we’re now back to a massive ruling-class effort to use every possible mechanism available to drive away popular political figures who would dare raise serious questions about the system as it is.
This has been the subtext behind the wild debate over the speaker of the House of Representatives. Kevin McCarthy was far too deep state for the rebels in the party. He was mercifully driven out but thus commenced the frenzied search for a replacement. Jim Jordan’s entire political career has been about ferreting out deep-state corruption, so there was no way he could emerge on top.
Finally, they reached a compromise with Mike Johnson, partially because his loyalties are rather unknown. Once he was voted in, people on the left began to look more closely. They’ve been horrified as to what they have found. This is good news, by the way!
“Last week,” Mr. Bouie wrote, “on the eve of his first attempt to become speaker of the House, allies of Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio confidently predicted that his more mainstream and institutionalist opponents would cave rather than resist his ascent.”
Institutionalist? Where did this word come from? I can’t remember anyone talking this way—that is, identifying certain political figures as “institutionalist” versus “anti-institutionalist.” It’s pretty odd. But our writer stuck with it, invoking the phrase fully four times in the course of his op-ed.
He takes this language all the way:
“Mike Johnson is neither a moderate nor an institutionalist. Just the opposite. A protégé of Jordan’s, he comes, as you have doubtless heard, from the far-right, anti-institutionalist wing of the congressional Republican Party.”
Are you getting the hint here? Institutionalist is a synonym for moderate, mainstream, and works and plays well with established state interests. Such a person is a defender of the institutions that exist. An anti-institutionalist in this context means someone who doesn’t obey the rules, doesn’t respect the corrupt system, doesn’t defer to the real rulers of D.C., and is determined to make fundamental change.
Ever since this column came out, I’ve been searching my memory for some history of this idea of institutionalism. I’m aware of the school of thought in economics called institutionalism that puts down economic forces to focus on culture, society, biases, and the brokenness of market forces. It’s essentially left-wing and pro-state.
Then I remembered the predecessor school of thought: the German Historical School of the late 19th century. These were the academics doggedly opposed to enlightenment wisdom and deference to organic social processes and instead rallied around elite management of the social and economic order according to science and expertise (“servants of the House of Hohenzollern”). It was a foreshadowing of 20th-century central planning of the sort that came to be instantiated in Communist and Nazi practice by mid-century.
Totalitarianism was the fulfillment of the “institutionalism” of the German Historical School of the Bismarck era, complete with its imperial foreign policy, central bank, bureaucratic empire building, and cradle-to-grave welfare state. So we know something about this way of thinking. In this way, anyone who believes in freedom simply has to describe himself as an “anti-institutionalist.”
So perhaps we owe Mr. Bouie a debt of gratitude. His cheeky, fancy-pants way of signaling to his readers that “Johnson is NOT one of us” turns out to be revealing of what’s really going on here. The attack on Speaker Johnson—actually the attack on anyone these days who seeks a restoration of representative democracy—is really just a skirmish in a much bigger battle.
There are two sides: the people versus Goliath the institution. That’s the main issue of our time.
We can only hope that Speaker Johnson turns out to be as good as The New York Times predicts in its familiar and upside-down way. He probably won’t, but it’s satisfying that all the right people are getting more scared by the day.
