Status Updates From Unmasking the Administrativ...

contemporary politics will continue to be dominated by an intellectual authority derived from the understanding of History, which has become legitimized by the rational empirical methodology of the social sciences. The doctrine of History has established the measure and meaning of Western man in the twentieth century

Progressivism, as a political movement, attempted to unify the sacred and secular (church and state), public and private (community and individual), or government and civil society, through the concept of the state. The state becomes the vehicle for the administration of progress.

Thus, Progressives (liberal and conservative) were united in their view, derived from Hegel, that the organic or rational state must replace the social compact, or constitutionalism. They were united in their view that rights and freedom were not natural or individual but social and dependent on historical development.

Progressive intellectuals had come to understand natural laws only in terms of science, not ethics or morality. It was for this reason that many Progressive intellectuals, including Woodrow Wilson, would insist that the American Founders had wrongly derived moral and political authority from what they (the Founders) had thought to be natural laws of science

as Theodore Lowi noted, such “government is almost impossible to limit. Liberalism tends to universalize the scope and responsibility of government, and science then makes the liberal argument almost unassailable.” This explains, Lowi observed, “why legislation has grown broader and broader in scope, has become more and more abstract in definition, and is more and more universal in its applicability.”

As Fiorina has observed, “Congress maintains a federal bureaucracy deliberately organized to make it permeable to congressional intervention—not only to the chamber as a whole, but to subgroups and even individuals. So long as an agency cooperates when members make specific requests, it is unlikely to suffer long-term losses no matter how poor its performance.”

within the legislatures, public deliberation and lawmaking has given way to delegation of authority to those administrative bodies capable of utilizing the expertise of those trained in the scientific method, or the technical rationality of the now authoritative social sciences, in solving the problems of modern society

The image that corresponds most closely to the democracy’s vision of society is a social atomism; the atoms themselves being simple and perfectly interchangeable are suitably governed by a few majestic generalities

..always suspect the allegation of special circumstances to be a cover for inequality, and they reject inequality in turn because it is the source of these complexities that impede the simple rule of law

Tocqueville’s opinion, the Economists or Physiocrats were forerunners of those socialist thinkers who called for “the unlimited rights of the State.” He believed that “socialism and centralization thrive on the same soil; they stand to each other as the cultivated to the wild species of a fruit.” Tocqueville’s theoretical analysis of the concept of centralization required bringing to light the development of the m

it has become clear in light of what occurred in the wake of the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 that the rights and duties of citizenship, and their enforcement in the courts and bureaucracies, could only be understood on the basis of the Progressive understanding of history and the acceptance of the moral authority of the administrative state.

The law … increasingly speaks of individual “rights,” the language of entitlement, rather than of their “interests,” the language of policy and accommodation. Moreover, the law increasingly emphasizes the values of equality, group interest, and nondiscrimination.… And it is welfare state membership, not citizenship, that increasingly counts. Political membership uniquely confers little more than the right to vote

both Kennedy and Johnson were well aware that as citizens of the administrative state, the new immigrants would be important as members of ethnic and racial groups. Thus, they must have known that the new immigrants, shaped by the expectations created by government, and not those of a free society, could become important constituencies for the perpetuation of the Democratic Party

the newer immigrants who had come to America after the 1880s settled largely in the big cities and urban areas. They were assimilated by the Democratic Party machines that had dominated politics and elections in those cities. Although most of the ethnic immigrants voted for Democrats in local elections, many of them voted for Republicans nationally, beginning in the 1890s and continuing into the early part of the 20t

Citizens can be excluded on the basis of race, religion, nationality, illiteracy, or many other reasons. That is because republican governments, unlike despotic regimes, must take into account the character of its potential citizens

The problem of immigration, therefore, is unintelligible in the absence of an understanding of what it is that constitutes the ground of unity or common identity. Any human association that considers itself as separate or distinct from other political societies—or, in modern times, one which considers itself sovereign—must make distinctions between those who are citizens and those who are not

once administrative centralization occurred, the connection between the parties, the electorate, and government was severed, and the electorate’s access to government was severely constrained. Because bureaucratic patronage has replaced party patronage, money flows to the states and localities from the center

it was not only constitutional politics that was an impediment to radical reform; the rule of law itself came to be seen as an impediment

the courts have become fundamental players in the political and policymaking process. In legitimizing the policies of the agencies, the unelected courts have protected the political branches from responsibility for policies that are derived almost exclusively from the administrative process. Even when they are deeply unpopular, the electorate has no access to the centers of power in the administrative state

the modern administrative state becomes intelligible only in light of a philosophy of History that establishes passion as the driving force of History and will as the foundation of morality and ground of legitimacy.

the Democratic and Republican Party defenders, and their defenders within the political institutions and the bureaucracy, are more likely to believe that the practical requirements of the administrative state confer legitimacy on administrative rule, which becomes for them the contemporary equivalent of constitutional authority

what is central to politics and elections is the elevation of the status of personal and group identity to something approaching a new kind of civil religion. Individual social behavior, once dependent on traditional morality and understood in terms of traditional virtues and vices, has become almost indefensible when judged in light of the authority established by positivism and historicism

Roosevelt’s view, the moral authority of government had come to replace the moral authority of the people’s compact, and the sovereignty of the State would come to replace the sovereignty of the people

Thomas Paine spoke for nearly all the Founding Fathers when he wrote: “A Constitution is a thing antecedent to a Government; and a Government is only the creature of a Constitution. The Constitution of a country is not the act of its Government, but of the people constituting a Government.”