Unmasking the Administrative State: The Crisis of American Politics in the Twenty-First Century

by John Marini, Ken Masugi (Editor)

The election of Donald J. Trump to the presidency shocked the political establishment, triggering a wave of hysteria among the bicoastal elite that may never subside. The biggest shockwaves of all, however, were felt not in the progressive parishes of Manhattan or San Francisco, but in the halls of the political elite’s cherished and oft-overlooked center of power—Washington, DC’s sprawling “administrative state”—for President Trump represented an existential threat to its denizens, who came to be known as “swamp creatures.”How did it come to pass that the “draining of the swamp” would become a core aim of the Trump administration, impacting everything from judicial appointments to the federal budget and regulatory policy? Marini’s unmasking of the administrative state goes beyond bureaucracy or legalism to its core in an intellectual elite whose consensus transcends whatever disagreements flare up. The universities, the media, and think-tanks that denounce Trump are its heart.The answer to this question and many more lies in the underappreciated but revolutionary scholarship of Professor John Marini, collected in his new book, Unmasking the Administrative State, which tells the critical missed story of the last century of political The ascendance of the theory behind and resultant growth of an administrative state that has supplanted limited constitutional government with the tyranny of unbounded anticonstitutional bureaucracy. Marini illustrates the existential threat of the administrative state to our republic, exposes the regressive philosophy from which it springs, and argues for the reassertion of the founding principles to restore self-government. The Trump administration may be the best chance to apply the lessons of Marini’s life’s work and seize this remarkable opportunity to restore power to its rightful the American people.

Genres: Politics, History

332 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 29, 2019

About the author

John Marini is a professor of political science at the University of Nevada, Reno and a senior fellow of the Claremont Institute. He previously served on the faculty of the University of Dallas and Ohio University.

He received a White House appointment during the Reagan Administration to work as a special assistant to the chairman of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in Washington, D.C. He has been associate editor of Political Communication: An International Journal.

Marini served as a director of the Legislative Intern Program in the Nevada State Legislature from 1989 to 1995. Since 1989, he has been a member of the Nevada Advisory Committee to the United States Civil Rights Commission.

He has written extensively in the areas of American politics and public administration, focusing on the separation of powers and bureaucratic politics.

Reviews

[Charles Haywood · Rating 5 out of 5]

Conservatives have long complained about the administrative state, the monster that swallowed America. Many complaints focus on the end result: how the administrative state is a tool of the Left, that accomplishes innumerable Left goals, all destructive. Other complaints, more technical, focus on how crucial elements of the American constitutional system, such as separation and enumeration of powers, have vanished, destroyed by the Blob-like growth and flailing tentacles of the administrative state. John Marini steps back even further, to show how the administrative state is utterly incompatible with the philosophical vision of America’s founding, and is rather the fruit of poisonous modern philosophies, deadly to any society based on natural right and reason.

True, all such complaints have been made for a century, yet have had no effect whatsoever on limiting the administrative state, and are confined to a relatively narrow segment of intellectuals who collectively have, over that century, exercised less real power than a mid-level EPA bureaucrat does in any given week. And I find that when talking to any person left of center, he completely fails to understand any complaint about the administrative state. After all, from his perspective, the administrative state is a wonder, magically transmuting his political desires into reality, without the pesky need to convince dull voters, or to get laws passed through Congress, or to submit to any form of judicial review other than a rubber stamp. What these two realities strongly suggest is that talk is of limited value, and force is needed. But having a philosophical grounding can’t hurt, and that Marini supplies in spades.

With the election of Donald Trump, who intermittently makes noises about the administrative state, and who briefly employed people dedicated to pruning it, the matter has at least reached a broader audience. Yes, the administrative state itself has always had a large audience of people—a forced audience of those it oppresses. They may not know the philosophy or background of the administrative state, but they do know they are serfs, which is all to the good as far as their masters are concerned. But no matter how wide that audience, those people are the deplorables; they have no political power, within either party. Still, with Trump, the administrative state, very briefly, seemed to be threatened. No more, though, since the administrative state, its enablers and its beneficiaries quickly united to protect their works from the attacks of the Lilliputians.

Even so, Marini’s work was the origin of key themes promulgated in 2016 by Michael Anton and the famous Journal of American Greatness, which helped get Donald Trump elected. But Marini has little apparent interest in retail politics. This book mentions Trump occasionally, but is mostly a book of political philosophy, consisting of writings across several decades. It is quite dense, and sometimes repetitive due to the same themes being sounded over the years, but it rewards close attention. The service of Marini’s book, therefore, is not to offer yet another program for dismantling the administrative state. As I say, that can only be done with dramatic and traumatic effort and change. Instead, his book is better viewed as a way to understanding why America is no longer, and never again will be, America. It is simply a country that has kept the same name and substituted a fundamentally tyrannical government for that of free men. The sonorous words of the Founding Fathers still echo in our heads, but like Dostoevsky’s Christ, if any of them showed up to complain, they would be quickly renditioned to a windowless room in Langley as a threat to what is now falsely called America.

The key word in this book is “nature.” Marini goes back to the beginning, and for political purposes, that is human nature. It is not so much human nature that Marini discusses, but what is derived from that, “natural right,” shown by “natural reason,” a key term for the Founders and one of great importance to Leo Strauss, of whom Marini appears to be a disciple. As I understand it (though Marini does not attempt to offer a complete background, leaving that to others) the primary point is that for Strauss, natural right is contrasted with positive right, that is, rights granted by specific law, first formally championed by August Comte. Natural right, whose main characteristic in administration is prudence, or practical reason, the application of natural reason in concrete circumstances, precedes law; it therefore is superior to positive right, and if the two conflict, should rule. It did in the original system of the Constitution, which is one reason why the Constitution was the supreme political achievement of all time, so far. But it no longer does—rather, the Progressives, with their Hegelian view of history tending toward the end of political conflict, have enthroned positive right and chained natural right in the dungeon.

Marini subscribes to a theory of government, and in particular, of the Constitution, where a sovereign people created the government. It is not a social compact between people and government, since the government is a created thing, not something that makes agreements. Not for Marini the idea that government is organic and necessary to all societies; the best societies are created by formal agreement among wholly free men. The Constitution, based on natural right, is an actual manifestation of such an agreement. It is not positive law itself; it supersedes all positive law and embodies natural right, and therefore its meaning, unless amended, is (or should be) fixed and unchanging for all time (though Marini buys into Harry Jaffa’s idea that the Constitution should be interpreted through the lens of the Declaration of Independence, with its emphasis on the supremacy of the people).

In contrast to this vision, G. W. F. Hegel is the man Marini points to as the origin of the modern administrative state, and the godfather of the American Progressives. He originated the concept of History as philosophy. His view of history as forward progress, which is appealing on the surface and wildly appealing to the Left, is the apple in the Garden. In Hegel’s words, “the general dividing line between constitutions is between those that are based on nature and those that are based on freedom of the will.” If a group arises that believes it is smarter than the people, but has their best interests at heart and accomplishing their supposed will as their goal, and that group believes that accelerating the inevitable procession of history is possible, it is certain to reject nature in favor of will, which means erasing limited government based on a vision of natural right and substituting technical administration toward the goal. Such a group was the Progressives, and their greatest handiwork, the golem of the modern age, was the administrative state.

The Progressives therefore viewed the Constitution as wholly mutable and requiring change with the times—the times as dictated by the philosophy of History. Certainly, the people were sovereign—and their new technocratic masters would help them implement their will, whether the people knew that was their will or not, and whether they liked it or not. The Progressives believed that “political life and religion must vanish to enable the perfecting of economic and social conditions through the establishment of the new social sciences, thereby opening up the possibility of complete freedom, or individual self-fulfillment. The coming into being of the rational or administrative state is possible, and necessary, only at the end of History, when the rule of the philosopher or statesman can be replaced by the rule of organized intelligence, or bureaucracy.” Progress is the goal, and it is possible, but only if the path illuminated by social science, which determines the necessary conditions of society and economy, is paved and lit. Those with knowledge, experts, supposedly neutral and technocratic, must be given all power necessary to this end. Structures which are a drag on their power must be thrown overboard.

A vision based on unchanging natural law, which underlay the Founding, is the opposite of the Progressive vision. “Nature and reason had established the theoretical and moral foundation of individual rights. Thus, freedom was necessarily subordinate to the moral law; rational limits on individual freedom were imposed by nature itself, by the natural human desire for happiness. As a result, the mind, human intelligence, and happiness were thought [by the Founders] to be the possession of individual human beings.” The Constitution embodied this vision. The Progressives, however, believed that right inheres in will and applied intelligence in groups; thus, to accomplish the goals of History, positive law suited to the modern world was the only touchstone possible. When History advanced far enough, there was no longer any need for the antiquated structures of the Constitution, which therefore was re-interpreted as infinitely malleable.

The administrative state takes the resulting power granted to it and, because the idea of the common good is anathema to technocrats informed by positivist social science and historicism, who see justice as being more precise than that, uses it to make rules that address private interests, not laws that address general interests. What this means in practice is that Congress has abdicated its obligation to make general laws for, and in consideration of, the common good, and merely passes enabling acts, delegating its power, for the administrative state, whose handmaiden it is. To the extent Congress passes laws that are not enabling acts, they are laws directed at private interests, not the general interest, since individual Congressmen no longer see their job as representing the general interest. This paradoxically erodes local institutions, whose relative power and importance declines.

The enabling laws passed by Congress are incomprehensibly complex and designed not to make rules that are generally applicable and generally understood, but to make straight the path for the bureaucracy to make the real laws. (Although Marini does not mention it, this attitude is most famously encapsulated in Nancy Pelosi’s cry that it was necessary to first pass Obamacare to find out what was in it. It was interpreted as an admission the law was too long and complex; in reality, it was an admission that the law was meaningless on its face, and there was no law until the real law had been created by bureaucrats.) The courts have similarly abdicated their powers to the bureaucracy, and the President has been forced, or sometimes chosen, to abdicate his powers as well. Rather than each branch interpreting and acting for the public good, as contemplated by the Constitution, they view determining what is good for the public, and how to accomplish it, as the role of the bureaucracy. Their role becomes “mobilizing and accommodating the various organized, political, economic, demographic, or social interests,” which then become supplicants to the administrative state. But the “electorate has no access to the centers of power of the administrative state,” which means that there is no real rule of law. The peons must merely trust, against the evidence of their five senses, that their masters are acting in their best interests, and ignore that the idea of the common good, that is, the people’s best interests as a whole, is laughable to their masters.

Marini, simultaneously channeling John Locke and Carl Schmitt, argues that the key role the legislature should play has been totally lost, not just in practice, but also in theory. He quotes Carl Schmitt in "The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy," “Only a universally applicable law, not a concrete [i.e., administrative] order, can unite truth and justice through the balance of negotiations and public discussion.” This “intellectual” function, resulting in general laws, should be the chief function of the legislature. Yes, this creates a tension between legislation and execution of the laws. In Marini’s view, the Constitution best addressed the inherent tension between the legislature and the executive (citing Schmitt, again, for the doctrine that “he is sovereign who decides the exception”), by creating a working separation of powers. But now, the separation of powers is destroyed, and (citing Schmitt yet again), “a dictatorship is not just an antithesis of democracy but also essentially the suspension of the division of powers . . . a suspension of the distinction between legislative and executive.” No prize for guessing who, or what, is the dictatorship today. And Strauss saw the essential role of a constitution as balancing wisdom and consent, and the primary evil (among many) of the destruction of the Constitution as the destruction of that balance, with the elevation of false wisdom and the erasure of consent.

The Progressive vision is seen in all its naked, rancid glory in the infamous words of a leading Progressive, Mary Parker Follett, in 1923, which Marini quotes several times. “We have seen that the free man is he who actualizes the will of the whole. I have no liberty except as an essential member of the group.” The administrative state sees itself as neutral, technocratic, and actualizing the supposed will of the supposed whole. I have written elsewhere how that benefits the Left, but that is not Marini’s point. (In fact, though no doubt Marini is on the political Right, people like Newt Gingrich and George W. Bush get equal time for beatings in this book.) Rather, it is that “unaccountable knowledge elites” run the country. Certainly, the bureaucracy is in no way neutral, as its creators believed it would be, but the advocacy on which Marini focuses is that in favor of its own continuation and growth, through, among other means, destroying antiquated views of the proper role and functioning of government, and substituting a unified will of supposedly neutral administration of a rational positive law, where the only role of politics is, preceding administration, to determine the supposed moral will of the people, which consists not of what they do want, but of what they should want, as determined scientifically by their masters.

Among other implications, Marini ties this to different views of what it takes to be a citizen, which implicates immigration policy. Unlike the Founders, or modern men like Calvin Coolidge, who viewed citizenship as possible for all who shared the common vision of the common good, the Progressives (stone cold racists all) agreed with John Calhoun that only some people, adequately advanced people, often determined on the basis of race, were fit for citizenship. But those who were admitted were no longer required to conform to the common good; rather, they were encouraged to get what they could, as groups, from the administrative state. They naturalized much more slowly, and often never really naturalized, leading to the immigration nightmare we have today.

Of course, if our government no longer sees its functions as addressing the common good, it is harder, or impossible, for politicians to appeal to the common good. The divisiveness inherent in the rulemaking of the administrative state thereby encourages politicians to appeal for votes to subsets of the population, or rather to subsets of elites, increasing the divides of the country, which the Constitution was created to bind. (This same effect is shown in demands for “more democracy” through such structural changes as eliminating or circumventing the Electoral College.) Marini sees Trump, or saw Trump in mid-2016, as interested in reviving the old system and perceptions; citing Machiavelli, that since he has refused to “walk on paths beaten by others, he has all those who benefit from the old orders as enemies, and he has lukewarm defenders in all those who might benefit from the new orders.”

Unlike many conservatives, Marini admires, but does not worship, Alexis de Tocqueville, viewing him instead through the lens of Strauss. True, he foresaw many of our problems, such as his famous insights into the “soft despotism” to which democracies are subject. But he did not see deep enough; blinded by, at root, the vision of History as forward progress and by a belief in the general will similar to Rousseau. Yes, Tocqueville wanted the general will exercised at a local, or parochial, level, which made individual interests compatible, or more compatible, with the interests of the community. He was not interested in the centralization of the administrative state. But this vision exalts will over nature; abstract reason substitutes for natural, or metaphysical, reason, and ultimately must collapse into the administrative state, regardless of intent.

Marini doesn’t sound real optimistic or offer any concrete solutions. “Any real change will likely come only if a president can mobilize an ongoing political constituency that can begin to effectively oppose the entrenched interests and their supporters in government. The administrative state has established tremendous power in Washington, but it has engendered considerable opposition in the country at large.” Marini glosses over that it is not only in Washington, but also in all the other power centers, from New York to Los Angeles, where those benefited by the administrative state have power, and that the “country at large” has very little power, which those in power are doing their best to strip from them. (He also makes a compelling case that Richard Nixon was brought down because he threatened the administrative state, which would seem a cautionary tale for any President so inclined to mobilize a political constituency.) None of this is very helpful, but I suppose that’s not Marini’s project.

Perhaps as an alternative to solutions, Marini says “It may be the case that modern government requires a centralized administrative state, although that is not self-evident. But, if that is the case, then the operation of the separation of powers, understood in terms of constitutional government, is no longer possible in a meaningful way.” This strikes me as a borderline astounding admission, in essence one of defeat, and surprising since Marini doesn’t seem defeatist elsewhere. He quotes Strauss, in discussion with Alexandre Kojève, “There will always be men who will revolt against a state which is destructive of humanity or in which there is no longer a possibility of noble action and of great deeds.” And he cites Strauss to the effect that Edmund Burke was wrong; we should resist to the end, no matter how powerful the currents against us. “[Burke] does not consider that, in a way which no man can foresee, resistance in a forlorn position to the enemies of mankind, ‘going down with guns blazing and flags flying,’ may contribute greatly toward keeping awake the recollection of the immense loss sustained by mankind, may inspire and strengthen the desire and the hope for its recovery, and may become a beacon for those who humbly carry on the works of humanity in a seemingly endless valley of darkness and destruction.” I think Marini is right, that modern government can’t be done the way we do it now. That just shows that our system is terrible, not that it can’t be done at all if we build a new system. The problem is our government, not the inherent needs of modern government.

[Review continues as first comment.]

[Drtaxsacto · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the mid 1970s Vincent Ostrom, who was a distinguished professor of Public Administration, wrote a book called the Intellectual Crisis in American Public Administration which argued that political science and public administration had chosen the wrong theory base to think about theory. He posited that there were two possible bases - Weberian (from Max Weber who influenced the basis of Bismarck's German State) and Madisonian. This book explores the development or extension of the Weberian model in the US.

Madison's conception of a Constitutional system argued that the ultimate sovereignty for a republic like ours was the people. Rights did not come from government and the people retained the opportunity to withdraw support for any system which exceeded their needs. Madison believed that humans were inherently flawed and that as he said in Federalist #51 - the first task is to control the governed and then ultimately to control the excesses of government. Hence the strong commitment in the Bill of Rights - to personal rights of speech, religion and to own handguns.

In the 1880s the Progressives of the era had a different assumption that was more Weberian - it posited that rather than being a contract the Constitution was mutable to the times; that with the right leaders (read elites) rights could be granted to the rest of us. As that theory elaborated with Wilson (as first a scholar and later as a President), TR, FDR - the administrative state began to exercise more and more authority over our every day lives.

John Marini argues that getting back to a more Madisonian system is going to be tough. Congress basically delegates its authority to the Courts and to the Bureaucrats. And the bureaucrats have little regard for the underlying rights structures in the Madisonian state. He also writes that there have been at least two serious attempts to reverse the trend. In 1972 he claims that Nixon ran the most ideological campaign in history - claiming to go back to more variation among states (hence things like revenue sharing). He also speculates that the "deep state" fought back and expanded a minor break in into a constitutional crisis. The second attempt was with Reagan. But the real challenge is coming from Trump - who has scaled back both the number of regulations and their depth.

I am very much convinced that a good deal, if not all of Washington, exists for itself and that basic tenets of our government are being undermined by those beliefs. So while I may not buy the perceptions about Nixon I think the argument is worth having.

What was disappointing about the book is a serious lack of focus on how to wrest control from the bureaucrats and their allies.

This is a complex book and so it took me a bit of time to take it in. But it is well worth delving into the arguments.

[The American Conservative]

John Marini, who writes for the Claremont Review of Books and is a professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, has devoted his newest book to the origins and growth of the American administrative state. Marini recognizes that he is dealing with a critical turning point in American government. To his credit, he refuses to examine it nonchalantly, as the natural development of a benevolent state that exists as an indispensable answer to our needs. According to Marini, rule by unelected administrators who are empowered to intervene in a wide range of human relations, to regulate the behavior of citizens and to enforce their own values, was not part of our original political design. It represents a dramatic departure from what our federal union was intended to be, and a deviant model that may already be beyond our control.

As someone who wrote a book on a related subject, I was eager to learn how Marini treated the growth of centralized public administration in the United States. It may be appropriate to divide his analysis into two sections—one that shows how our administrative behemoth has eaten into social, cultural, and commercial activities; and another that focuses on the ideological preconditions for that development. His book in my view addresses the first better than the second.

Read the rest: https://www.theamericanconservative.c...

[Dave Franklin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Professor John Marini’s “Unmasking the Administrative State: The Crisis of American Politics in the Twentieth-First Century,”contends that our modern administrative state, buttressed by social science, has usurped constitutionalism, transformed limited government, and effaced personal responsibility. The American experiment in constitutional government, based on a realistic understanding of man’s nature, is now considered quaint. Thus, the view of Madison proffered in “The Federalist Papers,” “If Men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary,” is derided by our elites . The administrative state has sought to replace those principles with a reliance on bureaucracy that is convinced that rational administration can more effectively govern the affairs of men. “Sovereignty of the people” is now viewed as an anachronism, and the process by which values are authoritatively allocated for a society are now entrusted to unelected bureaucrats acting without color of consent.

Marini traces the advent of the administrative state back to the New Deal, whose origins can be discovered in the Progressive movement. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “reinterpretation” of the Constitution, supported by Congress, launched the rise of modern managerialism. Progressive politicians and theorists abjured the notion of “natural law;” their new science of politics was to be value-free, and unconstrained by traditional norms.

The behavior of recent American political regimes bears out much of Marini’s analysis. The relationship between means and ends, which so concerned the Founders, has been turned on its head, and otherwise prudent people now celebrate government by administrative fiat. For instance, a friend of mine who is an educational administrator in Wyoming, has no compunction about authorizing executive agencies to undertake almost any economic, political or social policy. Hence, in her view, the executive can inflate the currency in the name of vague emergencies, open our borders without reference to existing statute, fight or finance foreign wars, and decree which types of energy can be consumed by American citizens. Naturally, her acceptance of such non-democratic measures, however lawless, is justified on the grounds of political expediency or virtue signaling.

Looking forward, Marini hints that there may be an exit ramp by which the “centralization of politics, economics, administration, and public opinion” might be subject to reversal. First federalism must be reinvigorated and restored. Moreover, Marini suggests the “ground of politics” is in need of restoration. Distinctions between means and ends, “the social and the political,” and the “public and the private,” are necessary for a healthy civil, social order. Whether our republic can survive remains an open question. Marini’s book is an important inquiry that should garner some attention.

[Roy Murry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Unmasking the Administrative State

JOHN MARINI with edit by KEN MASUGI

Review by Roy Murry, Author

I found this dissertation gripping with Mr. Marini's delving into the philosophy, psychology, and sociology of how the USA Government works. However, I have a college degree and have been trained in Psychological Warfare at the US Army's Special Force's JFK Center with an extensive, eclectic reading background.

That said: This thesis is not for the general reading public. The pleasure reader will not find enjoyment in reading this knowledgeable background explanation of the history of centralized operating governments.

Mr. Marini does not UNMASK names in the last twenty years of the US ADMINISTRATION, but he does give the reader a lot to think about as to how the government has interfered with ordinary American's lives over that time frame and more. One must be a reader of social and political history to enjoy this book.

I recommend it for want-to-be scholars and scholars. If you want an easy and fun read, check out other books I have reviewed.

[Jim Barrett]

A bit technical - but a very good effort.

[Joel Zartman · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of essays and articles. It argues that our constitutional government has been almost entirely replaced by an administrative state that bodes more totalitarianism for us than our traditional liberties. The separation of powers no longer applies when government agencies make the laws, determine penalties, and enforce them. The culprit is the progressive notion of history, which has introduced a utopian hope. Good alarms are sounded. A good evaluation of what the Trump election means: its opportunities and perils.

I wish it were more succinct.

[Gay]

The perfect companion to “The Political Theory of the American Founding” by Thomas G. West.