Setting Fire to the Deep State
Editor's Note
In order to achieve its goals, a revolutionary regime must first attain power, either through violent conflict or through slow and stealthy transformation. In America, the process has taken this latter shape, as unelected experts assumed control over the course of the twentieth century. Glenn Ellmers reviews a recent “scholarly” treatment of this “administrative state” and finds reason to hope that a new era may be approaching — though, Ellmers cautions, it would be a grave error to assume the war is over.
God will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.
It would certainly be overstating matters to suggest that Donald Trump is fulfilling this prophecy from Revelations 21:4. There will be plenty of mourning and crying before his second term is over, and not only from the Left. As I have written before, we are still very much in a war, and it would be reckless to declare victory prematurely. Trump’s astounding first weeks in office have left Democrats reeling, but they will regroup and mount a fierce resistance. Nevertheless, there are reasons to be cautiously optimistic that a tectonic shift in American politics is underway.
Not only is Trump a very different man from his first term (hardly surprising after having been indicted, convicted, impeached, and shot), the whole mood of the country has changed profoundly. Trump and the MAGA agenda now have a broad legitimacy and public approval that was absent the first time around. Many formerly apolitical Americans are becoming radicalized by the mismanagement of public funds that Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are uncovering. Even my most cynical and politically astute friends have remarked, in response to these revelations, “It’s worse than we ever thought.”
Although the waste is inexcusable, Trump and Musk will likely get that under control, and the taxpayers should expect some relief. Perhaps more interesting than the scale of financial abuse, however, is what we are learning about the mindset of the many thousands of bureaucrats, contractors, and non-profit employees who felt entitled to use the citizens’ hard-earned money for so many absurd and partisan purposes. We are getting to see for the first time, not only how the sausage was made, but how the sausage-makers saw their roles in the broader agenda of progressive government.
A new book by two Ivy League professors, offering a “scholarly” defense of the administrative state, provides just such an opportunity — not despite, but because of, its complete lack of academic merit. The book is exactly as predictable, stale, and superficial as one might expect; and under normal circumstances would deserve little notice. But if “the old order of things” is indeed passing away, then this volume and others like it might be reconsidered in a new light. What makes a book like this newly interesting is the glimpse it offers into how elites of that old order understood themselves. It reveals how the economic corruption of the progressive administrative state, however bad that may be, is dwarfed by its moral and intellectual corruption.
More on that in a moment; first, a prediction and an observation.
As shocking as the DOGE revelations of the last few weeks have been, I suspect that much more will come out — and the effect on our domestic politics will be even more enormous than most people now suspect. The Democratic Party may not recover for generations. Trump is clearing out a half-century or more of accumulated privilege and corruption.
The problem of bureaucratic malfeasance has a striking parallel to the way government interference greatly exacerbated the wildfires in Los Angeles. In both cases, powerful interests prevented the natural process of small, localized burns that are necessary to clear out the deadwood periodically. This interference directly contributed to a far more catastrophic conflagration.
Political scientists have long wondered why we have not seen a “realigning election” in several decades. Throughout most of American history, national elections followed regular cycles in which one party would win a decisive victory and then exercise governing authority for 30 years or so, until another critical election gave the other party dominant control. This exercise of the people’s consent prevented either Democrats or Republicans from making the government itself a permanent faction with its own interests.
All that changed in the wake of Watergate, when the deep state first overturned an election by ousting Richard Nixon after his landslide victory in 1972. Ronald Reagan’s big wins in 1980 and 1984 should have marked the beginning of a new alignment with a 30-year cycle of Republican control. But by then, the administrative state had already managed to insulate itself from electoral accountability.
The political scientist John Marini was almost alone in recognizing that the natural election cycles had been thrown off track because the government itself had become the most powerful faction in American politics. We now have confirmation of how they did it: by directing taxpayer money to interest groups and media outlets that funded and protected the permanent ruling class (which is closely aligned to the Democratic Party).
Before Trump shut it down, USAID alone was spending $1 billion per week, including grants to a vast array of left-wing causes. Trump has now set a match to this tottering pile of bureaucratic tinder. What is being revealed in the heat and light of this destruction has been eye-opening, or even eye-popping. But as with the fires in California, liberal Democrats have only themselves to blame for allowing the kindling of partisan corruption to accumulate for so long.
One important aside: while the big-government agenda of the Democrats is the natural ally of the bureaucracy, we should not let Republicans off the hook. The ruling class has always operated across the aisle as part of the uniparty establishment. How often have voters elected Republicans with the hope and expectation of “fixing” Washington, D.C., only to see more business as usual? The lame answer from the GOP leadership was always, “It can’t be done. Our hands are tied by… obligatory entitlement spending, the courts, international commitments, civil service protections, etc.” Perhaps the most amazing fact of Trump’s first weeks in office is just how often he has done the (allegedly) impossible. He has demonstrated unmistakably that the problem was always — as many voters suspected — cowardice, incompetence, and greed.
That brings us back to the book under review. Notwithstanding the general passivity of Republicans prior to Trump, Professors Russell Muirhead (at Dartmouth) and Nancy Rosenblum (at Harvard) are greatly agitated that the formerly comatose GOP might be showing signs of brain activity.
A MAGA blood infusion seems to have revived the party: the voters, if not all of the leadership, are energized about reining in the federal bureaucracy and reimposing constitutional limits on the central government. All this is deeply concerning to the authors of Ungoverning: The Attack on the Administrative State and the Politics of Chaos.
In addition to the fact that the authors are professors at elite universities, the book is published by Princeton University Press, which means it is supposed to be a work of scholarship, not polemics, and maintain certain standards of evidence and intellectual integrity. In fact, the book is a hyper-partisan, slanderous screed, devoted to — what else? — demonizing Donald Trump, and defending the prerogatives of the permanent bureaucracy in Washington, D.C.
“Ungoverning” is the awkward neologism the authors contrived for what they claim is a new phenomenon: “animus toward government itself.” The book was published in October 2024, presumably as an in-kind contribution to the Kamala Harris campaign, to warn about the dangers of a possible second term by Donald Trump. His first term, we are warned, represented a “backward evolution.” His was the first-ever presidency that was “anti-administration.”
This was not just provocative talk. Procedures for decision-making were circumvented, experts were silenced or fired, and public purposes were abandoned, without any justification beyond thwarting “enemies” who opposed the president’s will. Ungoverning is the intentional disruption of regular order for reasons unrelated to public welfare.
The distinction between legitimate reform of the bureaucracy and “an attack on democratic essentials” never becomes fully coherent, even over the course of 200 pages. The authors are happy to endorse deregulation, so long as it is done by Democrats. Ted Kennedy pushing through airline deregulation in the 1970s: good. Ronald Reagan attempting to reform the EPA: bad. The main focus, however, is the period since 2016, and in that context it is no exaggeration to say that for Muirhead and Rosenblum, ungoverning — declaring “war on the machinery of government [to] exercise personal power” — is whatever Donald Trump does.
For their source material, Muirhead and Rosenblum rely to an astonishing degree on left-wing media outlets, including American Prospect, The Atlantic, Axios, Dissent, Huffington Post, The Intercept, GQ, Mother Jones, MSNBC, The Nation, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, and Vox. In addition, I counted no fewer than 13 different articles from Politico in the bibliography. We now know that Politico received millions of taxpayer dollars in the form of wildly inflated charges for niche subscription services. Eventually, I suspect DOGE will reveal that many or even most of the other publications listed above were also getting paid to spread regime propaganda.
As bad as this is, it gets worse. Ungoverning also leans heavily for its “facts” on claims made by a host of left-wing advocacy groups, some well-known (the ACLU, the Brennan Center for Justice, ProPublica, the Southern Poverty Law Center), others so obscure one wonders how hard the authors had to search the Internet to find something, anything, that would corroborate the point they wanted to make. How desperate were these elite university professors that they had to seek out such citadels of learning as Bright Line Watch, Equality Florida Action, and the Poverty & Race Research Action Council? Ungoverning doesn’t even hesitate to reference blog posts, including from such unimpeachable figures as Michael Cohen and Robert Reich.
It would be a mistake to judge the use of this source material by the standards of actual scholarship, since that is not what we have here. The revelations about USAID funding point to a vast network of government bureaucrats, media outlets, non-profits, and advocacy groups, operating in complex and interconnected ways to support the deep state. What Ungoverning demonstrates is that this network also includes professors at prestigious universities, whose function is to dress up the octopus of left-wing activism, or at least some of its arms, in respectable academic robes.
The book, therefore, is entirely, unrelentingly predictable. Non-academic readers may be surprised to learn that, from the authors’ and publisher’s point of view, this is not a failing at all; in fact, being entirely predictable is precisely the book’s purpose. It does not contain a single original or arresting thought, because it is not supposed to. It is a cog in a complex and multilayered process of…well, that’s hard to define. Thought control is too strong; Cass Sunstein’s nudging is too weak. Propaganda is part of it, but doesn’t capture the whole picture. Michel Foucault wrote that modern regimes determine the meaning of reality through “the production of truth.” Whatever we call this process of lending credibility to an official narrative, books like this are a part of it.
Ungoverning is a commodity, mass produced in an industrial process supplying intellectual narcotics. What Muirhead and Rosenblum have written is politically indistinguishable from hundreds or thousands of similar books produced over the last 20 or 30 years. It is lazy, partisan dreck. As part of the mass-production process, anonymous leftist referees sign off on the dreck; academic presses like Princeton publish the dreck; leftist journals review the dreck approvingly; and deans, provosts, and department heads accept the dreck as evidence of scholarly achievement.
While conservatives have long lamented the leftist stranglehold on academic publishing, this industrialized “scholarship” is so routine that it has become accepted as a fact of life (much like the administrative state itself was, until Donald Trump’s second term). Ideological scholarship was not considered worth the effort of resisting, or even noticing. Only in the present moment — when the creaky edifice of the administrative state is rapidly being delegitimized and the old order seems to be passing away — is it possible to appreciate with fresh eyes just how shabby and sophomoric the whole business really is.
Every conceit about the objectivity of bureaucratic expertise is taken at face value; every self-congratulatory myth about professional, high-minded public servants is repeated with childlike naiveté. Sure, the authors cheerily proclaim, the process can get gummed up with red tape sometimes. And a few low-level functionaries here and there may treat citizens with surly indifference. But — Muirhead and Rosenblum assure us — these are simply glitches, easily remedied and certainly inconsequential in light of the incomparable benefits the administrative state bestows on a (mostly) grateful citizenry.
No ripple of intellectual curiosity disturbs the placid surface of these inert minds; no unpleasant reality intrudes on the pleasing narrative. Thus we are told that even the founders supported the administrative state, which is really a wonderful idea that no reasonable person can object to. Muirhead and Rosenblum write:
Then and still, citizens expect government to step in where there is a need. They expect their government to protect them from buying meatloaf that has been cut with sawdust. Or from public water supplies poisoned with lead. Or from the risk of losing a leg in an easily avoided workplace accident. Or from being denied an apartment because of their race. This requires not only a government that can legislate, but a government that can design policies and implement them — an administrative state.
What a nice thought. And what a stupendous lie. Every inconvenient fact is simply ignored. As far as Ungoverning is concerned, there is no crisis of competence, America’s infrastructure is not falling apart, there have been no train derailments, no collapsing bridges, no airplane crashes, no Covid lockdowns, and the Pentagon did not leave $7 billion worth of equipment in Afghanistan. Had the book been published a bit later, the authors would surely have ignored as well the Los Angeles fires, which revealed how the world’s most expensive and “enlightened” gold-plated government utterly failed to provide even the most basic protections of life and property.
Ungoverning, and the self-satisfied, self-serving liberal network in which it is embedded, are examples of what happens when people have been in power for too long, and have not had their prejudices seriously challenged perhaps since college, and probably not even then. Conventional academics like Muirhead and Rosenblum have been scribbling away in their political bubbles for so long they aren’t even trying any more. Add to this the vague progressive conviction about being “on the right side of history,” and it is almost inevitable that shallow bromides are all that such writers are capable of. They’ve been repeating the same slogans for so long, they simply don’t know how to say anything else: Republicans are cigar-chomping plutocrats, while Democrats are the champions of the working class; right-wingers control “the establishment,” including big corporations and the military; the Left stands for compassion, tolerance, and free speech. Every one of these cliches has been false for a long time now.
Ungoverning does make a few perfunctory attempts to look like scholarship by mentioning some opposing viewpoints. The eminent scholars Philip Hamburger and John Marini — who have both published dozens of insightful essays critiquing the administrative state, on legal as well as philosophical grounds — get a single mention each. Ungoverning acknowledges that Hamburger, Marini, and others have thoughtful and well-developed arguments: “The most comprehensive objections to the administrative state see it as not merely running afoul of an arcane corner of law, but as violating the very heart of the Constitution.”
A serious book would extensively and fairly elaborate these arguments, and then painstakingly respond with contrary evidence and logical refutations. But Muirhead and Rosenblum don’t bother with any of that: the whole subject is dispensed with in a few pages.
It might be most useful to treat this book as something like a last, desperate gasp on behalf of a bizarre superstition that is no longer believable, and now deserves nothing but mockery. By the late 17th century, the doctrine of divine right of kings had become increasingly untenable. Thinkers such as John Locke were developing new theories of government based on natural rights and the consent of the governed. Yet the old ways still had their defenders.
Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha argued for the idea (regarded by many as incredible even then) that Adam was the first king, and that monarchical authority descended in a straight line from Adam to the current king of England. Locke called this “so much glib nonsense.”
This controversy came up a century later, in response to England’s claim that its absolute authority over the American colonists was granted by God. In a 1775 petition to Great Britain titled, “On the Causes and Necessity of Taking up Arms,” Thomas Jefferson and John Dickinson wrote:
If it was possible for men who exercise their reason to believe, that the divine Author of our existence intended a part of the human race to hold an absolute property in, and an unbounded power over others…the inhabitants of these colonies might at least require from the parliament of Great Britain some evidence, that this dreadful authority over them, has been granted to that body.
Harry Jaffa memorably remarked, “Did ever a great revolution in human affairs begin with such sarcasm?” It turns out that Trump’s “mean tweets” are not so unprecedented after all. Mockery in the face of illegitimate authority is an old American tradition — a tradition now making a long overdue comeback. The old order seems to be passing away again. Ungoverning’s lame, smug defense of the administrative state belongs on the same ash heap of discredited apologies for unjust despotism as Filmer’s Patriarcha.
Make America Great Again.