The Fight Is Just Beginning
Editor's Note
Donald Trump’s impending return to the White House is a major victory for those who would defend the American way of life against the revolutionary ambitions of the destructive Left. But that victory requires follow-through, especially in Congress, where a bolstered Republican majority and a rediscovery of legislative responsibility will be vital to the long-term success or failure of the movement Trump represents. Trump’s supporters, John Marini and Glenn Ellmers argue, seem to grasp the danger expert tyranny poses to America; whether Republican leaders are courageous and shrewd enough to face that danger and restore our constitutional order remains to be seen.
This essay is part of an occasional series of observations compiled by Ellmers from conversations with Marini, the most insightful living scholar of the administrative state. Marini studied with Harry Jaffa—the intellectual godfather of the Claremont Institute—and applied Jaffa’s interest in the philosophical study of America to the particular problem of bureaucratic “rationality” and centralized government.
With the election of Donald Trump, the old spirit of America returned… somewhat. But this fighting spirit must be strengthened and expanded if we are to recover republican self-government.
In some respects, the Supreme Court has been moving in the right direction, but if any vacancies arise in the next four years, Trump must do a better job this time of appointing principled and stalwart defenders of constitutional originalism. More importantly, the energy and resources of the MAGA movement must be directed to taking decisive control of Congress. The war on behalf of individual liberty and natural rights will not be won in the next four years. To prepare Vice President-elect JD Vance to carry on the fight in 2028 and beyond, Trump and his supporters must move heaven and earth to drag Congress — the first branch of government — back toward its proper constitutional functions and powers. That will mean substantially enlarging the current Republican majorities, to overcome the reliance on a handful of weak sisters.
Trump’s re-election was remarkable in many respects. At the deepest level, Trump did well because people were getting a sense of what tyranny is, and they didn’t like it. One poll indicated 79% of Americans thought the country was going in the wrong direction. Despite Kamala Harris’s attempt to run as a moderate — even defending the border wall she had repeatedly mocked — she could not escape the general impression that the Democratic Party has been taken over by hard-left ideologues with an aggressive agenda of anti-American globalism and radical sexual liberation. Many working people felt that their sense of moral decency was under assault by a nationwide re-education campaign that included propaganda, intimidation, and censorship.
Partly for this reason, faith in God was a more significant factor than at any time since Ronald Reagan’s first election in 1980. Turnout for Trump was especially strong among the religiously observant, including Amish, Muslim, and Orthodox Jewish voters. The multiple unsuccessful assassination attempts — particularly the dramatic near-miss in Butler, Pennsylvania on July 13 — brought a renewed public awareness that God still plays a role in American public life.
Those attempts on Trump’s life demonstrated how much of the hatred against him was manufactured by the intellectual class and its allies in the media. For many Americans, Trump took on a new character and came to represent something different and more serious. Though not generally considered a religious man, Trump seemed sincere to many voters when he remarked after the July shooting, “people have told me that God spared my life for a reason. And that reason was to save our country and to restore America to greatness. And now we are going to fulfill that mission together.”
On a philosophical level, it seemed possible to believe that Progress had not yet defeated Providence. The modern administrative state emerged when the American founders’ faith in “the laws of nature and of nature’s God” came to be replaced by a belief in historical progress and the rule of a scientifically trained expert class. These self-appointed elites now control both the federal bureaucracy and the vast public-private network of nonprofits, contractors, lobbyists, and interest groups. Although the president has formal or legal authority over the executive branch, Trump’s first term showed that he cannot exercise political control without the unambivalent support of Congress.
As Marini has written,
the delegation of power to the executive branch bureaucracy has transformed the character of rule, from one that presupposes political control of government by the constitutional branches, to rational, or centralized, administrative rule. We know what theories justify constitutional government. What theory justifies rational authority? This kind of authority rests on the alleged necessity of establishing social intelligence, or organized knowledge, as essential to social and political progress. The administrative power of government must be unlimited, because use of the scientific method is considered central to the cultivation of useful knowledge on behalf of the ongoing resolution of social and economic problems.
Science and social science have in this way become essential to the continuous transformation of economic and social life. The modern bureaucracy is the rational structure designed for the administration of progress. Consequently, the administrative realm becomes more important than the political in terms of establishing the priorities and purposes of government, and unifying, as well as determining the details of policies through rulemaking and regulation.
Rescuing America from the illegitimate authority of these elites can’t be achieved by the president alone. The ideology of the “rational expert” has not only distorted the way Congress operates; it also deforms many bureaucracies in the corporate world, which is why the emergence of Elon Musk as an influential and thoughtful supporter of Trump may prove especially important. In his acquisition of Twitter (now X), Musk showed that he understood the threat of wokeness, and the rule of scientific elites, as an attempt to control the definition of knowledge and regulate “acceptable” opinion. Though Musk is not an academic, he seems to know that political freedom depends on freedom of the mind. His defense of free speech has helped to expose the threat of intellectual postmodernism, which holds that all knowledge is a function of power. Trump and Musk represent an attempt to recover an understanding of reality based on common sense. The question now is whether this understanding can be made politically effective.
One step in the right direction would be for the Trump administration to be more clear in its language. Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy will be heading up a new Department of Government Efficiency; but this title already indicates a potential concern. Trump, Musk, and Ramaswamy — and even more importantly, the American people — must understand that the primary focus of draining the swamp is not “efficiency.” This is an error that businessmen like Elon and Vivek are especially prone to make. We do not want a leaner, more efficient administrative state. Tyranny is not more welcome for coming on the cheap. The bureaucratic/regulatory state must be undone because it undermines self-government and offends our natural rights.
The elites in the deep state will certainly resist any attempt by Trump to restore constitutional republicanism. For one thing, they fear the legal prosecution that will result from a return to the rule of law. They defended “their democracy” because it meant defending their privileges. Before Trump, the administrative state had managed to obscure the fact that it was, in fact, a form of tyranny. The recent election indicates that the American people may be waking up. But that only means that the real war is now beginning.