These days, you can easily find signs of panic about the status of career public servants and their future. They are said to be hated by the public, targeted by political enemies, hounded by the courts. You can count on reliable allies in academia and media willing to testify that the attacks are unfair, undemocratic, even dangerous. This debate is being had not just in the United States but all over Europe and Latin America too, with the defenders and critics of administrative rule pitted against one another.
In some ways, this debate is not new but rather goes back centuries as administrative rule and confidence in expertise began to take an ever larger role in public life. It’s possible to trace the origins of administrative rule back to Louis XIV in the 17th century, who gathered the aristocracy to reside at Versailles as political protection and also the extension of his legacy. His hope was that his bureaucracy would outlast him, which it did, until it did not.
In the U.S. case, the Constitution made no provision whatsoever for any kind of federal government beyond that elected by the people or, in the case of the judiciary, appointed by the people’s representatives. From George Washington through the late 19th century, the pattern was that every newly elected president would hire his own staff to carry out political priorities, with a full understanding that it could be for four years or possibly eight but that it would not be a permanent job.
But the ethos of everything began to change once peace and technological innovation kicked into overdrive in the 1870s and following. These times saw the birth of the new in every area: armaments, communication, electricity, architecture, steel, steam and internal combustion, and eventually even flight and sound recording. There was a growing sense of awe throughout the culture in the West of the very idea of progress through engineering, technical skill, and expertise.
It seemed to make sense in those days that we should dispense with what was decried as the “spoils system” and instead turn toward a permanent civil service in order to bring science and skill to matters of government. Most Americans do not know that we had no such thing as a civil service until 1883 with the Pendleton Act. Even then, the new civil service was not immune from political pressure and untouchable. That would wait for many generations to come into existence.
Let’s quickly take a step back to look at events in Russia. It’s hard to believe now, but the mass movement against the person and family of Czar Nicholas II was generally regarded in the liberal West as a step toward modernizing the country. Respectable intellectuals who would never call themselves communists regarded Vladimir Lenin as an enlightened figure, someone who would bring the glories of modern science and technology to a country long dominated by peasants and backward authoritarian rule.
It’s true that information flows were primitive and they could know only what they knew. They had little understanding of the brutality going on behind the scenes and simply could not imagine the horrors that awaited in the period of War Communism.
It’s also the case that Lenin played to his audience. In his first address after taking power, he addressed the great question of what communism in Russia would mean. He defaulted to a cliché (“dictatorship by the proletariat”) and technocracy: He announced the grand plan for the electrification of Russia. In other words, he pitched communism as nothing other than a big infrastructure program. In this, his views were not unlike the fashionable progressivism in the West.
And what was the core of progressivism? Once you get past the specific policies and get to the crux, it comes down to a passionate belief that the right experts, with enough resources and power, could manage the social and economic order better than the seeming anarchy of freedom and democracy. This belief, which amounted to a kind of religious faith, was the animating principle of the age, a core doctrine that enticed an entire generation.
In order to understand the times, it’s best to visit the writings of Woodrow Wilson, who won the presidency in 1912 almost by accident. He did not win a majority of the popular vote because the opposition was split because of Theodore Roosevelt’s Bull Moose party. The mostly unpopular Wilson took power and embarked on a completely different program.
“We used to say that the ideal of government was for every man to be left alone and not interfered with,” he wrote, “except when he interfered with somebody else; and that the best government was the government that did as little governing as possible. That was the idea that obtained in Jefferson’s time. But we are coming now to realize that life is so complicated that we are not dealing with the old conditions, and that the law has to step in and create new conditions under which we may live, the conditions which will make it tolerable for us to live.”
What is this new freedom? It is a management project: “Human freedom consists in perfect adjustments of human interests and human activities and human energies.”
And who would do the adjusting? The experts, of course, with credentials, high learning, access to resources, and lots of executive power. This was the essence of Wilson’s administration. Very quickly, we saw the tariff replaced by the income tax and the creation of the Federal Reserve, which was supposed to control business cycles and tamp down inflation and bank failures. Also, he helped bring about the 17th Amendment, which converted the U.S. Senate from an appointed body representing the whole of the states to yet another popularly elected version of the House of Representatives.
These three changes upended the constitutional constraints on government put in place by the framers.
The next step was to enter the Great War that had emerged in Europe, in an attempt to bring “new freedom” and expertise to international affairs and the use of armaments. Following the war, Wilson exercised the main controlling power in the new map of Europe that simply could not last because of the deep ignorance of European history that was behind the new border lines and country names.
The failure became evident as the conditions for a repeat of world war gathered following the Great Depression. Each of these disasters that unfolded following the imposition of the “new freedom” only ended in expanding and entrenching the role of expertise backed by power and resources. Liberalism had converted itself into progressivism, which ended up being nothing other than rule by administrative agencies.
We look back at many of the founding documents of liberty and find nothing in them about how credentialed, permanent, resourceful, and powerful experts will run our societies for us. That ethos is not a “new freedom”; it is a reversion to the old world of despotism and feudalism except under the cover of science. The information age has blown the cover, of not just one administrative empire but all of them at once. This is the essential issue of the day, and precisely why this topic is in the news and driving politics here and abroad.
Liberalism gradually came to mean something other than what it was, and we are all paying the price for this now. Woodrow Wilson wrote with confidence that he would usher in a “new freedom,” but his ideology, widely shared among his class, led civilization into a cul de sac of failure and far less freedom than was enjoyed before this great experiment began.
