Ubiquitous
2025-01-08 09:59:32 UTC
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Permalink: at a Hillsdale College reception in San Diego, California.
The recent election is the product of a decades-long struggle in American
politics that has intensified since 2016. The election produced a victory for
the man who caused the intensification, Donald Trump. He caused it by
convincing a people, jaded from broken promises, that he would drain the
swamp.
He also convinced the people who inhabit the swamp, and they have scorched
the earth to stop him. He has been canceled, derided, slandered, libeled,
investigated, searched, impeached, arrested, prosecuted, tried, convicted,
shot, and yet reelected!
Now the battle will begin anew. What will it be like? There are so many
problems. The border. Crime. Inflation. Education. War. Ukraine. China.
Hamas/Hezbollah/Iran. Debt stacked to the far reaches of a SpaceX mission.
Which matters most?
Last February, I paid a visit to Speaker of the House Mike Johnson. He might
be, I told him, on the threshold of a historic opportunity. It may become
possible to restore constitutional government in place of the administrative
or bureaucratic state that has almost overtaken it. He replied that he prayed
about that every day.
That is the issue that matters the most. The worst evils stem from it. The
strongest resistance guards its entrenchment.
It is not only the 23 million who work in the administrative state, many of
them fine people. It is the universities who inspire and guide it while
enjoying its emoluments. It is the corporations it regulates, protects, and
subsidizes. It is the press that keeps its secrets and tells its fibs. It is
the education bureaucracy that outnumbers the teachers with whom it
interferes. It is the half of the American economy it occupies. It is the
regulations it gushes, the prosecutions it wages, the verdicts it renders. It
is the influence on elections it peddles in the grandest conflict of interest
of all.
The administrative state is a different kind of thing from constitutional and
representative government. It is a vastness, an idea whose time ought never
to have come. It has gone from strength to strength here and over other parts
of the West since its birth more than a century ago. It is embodied in the
European Union and in socialist Britain, France, and Germany. It is seen as
well in communist China, where its iron fist operates without a glove. The
administrative state is marked by the eclipse of elected legislatures and
executives by tenured civil servants, making laws in uncountable profusion
and pretending to be above politics. As Winston Churchill characterized them:
no longer servants and no longer civil.
Look what it has done to America since the swamp began to fill in the 1930s,
and especially since the 1960s.
In 1930, government consumed twelve percent of the gross domestic product of
the nation. That was about how it had been from the beginning. Today,
government handles a little over 50 percent of the nations wealth. This is a
gigantic transfer of resources from the private to the public sector, which
defies the meaning of a free society. To quote again Churchill, a champion of
the free society, money should fructify [bear fruit] in the pockets of the
people.
Here in the United States, between the presidencies of George Washington and
Abraham Lincoln, the government owned the biggest asset any government ever
owned: the western lands, most of the area of the country. The Homestead Act,
signed by Lincoln in 1862, gave away ten percent of the land of the United
States to anyone who would live on it and work it. That is the spirit of free
government at its best.
Over the past century, the transfer of assets has been moving the other way.
Somehow, we have come to think that the fruited plains bear more fruit when
the government owns them. Certainly, we should have national and state parks
and open expanses. But to enjoy them, we must make a living. We must farm,
mine, travel, and work as we please. We must act on our own initiative and by
our own efforts. We need resources to live on and use, readily available to
anyone who wants to work. That is the spirit of a free people.
Another significant change has been the centralization of government. In
1930, more than 60 percent of the money in government was raised and spent in
counties, cities, and towns. The public money was held near the people who
contributed it. The federal government controlled less than 20 percent. Now
those numbers are reversed. Through a long and steady process, we have moved
money out of the pockets of the people and into a treasury far, far away. We
have converted America from a bottom-up to a top-down country. Rules
proliferate. Expense piles up. Anything dependent upon the government moves
like molasses on a winter day, except when an interest of the government is
at stake.
How we allowed this to happen is a very long story. Early progressive
policies were presented as common-sense adjustments to a government that
needed not revolution, but reform. Increasingly, problems were presented as
emergencies that had to be fixed no matter what. Then the news was
orchestrated to produce new emergencies, requiring new regulations to solve
them and new agencies to manage and enforce the regulations. Each step
increased the size and reach of government.
During the George W. Bush administration, I told a senior presidential
advisor that the No Child Left Behind Act would not do much good. Yes, our
K-12 schools are struggling to teach children to read. Adding more
regulations and bureaucratsand enabling them to write high stakes testing to
drive curriculais only more of the same. He asked, How can parents know if
their children are learning if we dont test? I replied, They live with the
children, and it is not hard to tell if a child can read. Also, they love
them and raise them. That is the system of real accountability. To fix what
is wrong in K-12 education, make it less top-heavy. Decentralize authority to
local districts and schools, put parents first, and address the problem that
more than half the employees in public education are administrators, not
teachers.
Today, after more than 100 years of trying, the weakness of the progressive
regime becomes apparent. At its core, it undermines the principle of consent
of the governed. It vaunts expertise and professionalism over politics and
the principle of representation. Over time it has become unable to hide its
contempt for American citizens. Its leaders have called them deplorables and
worse. It seeks to take children from their parents and prosecutes parents if
they complain. It seeks to restrict speech to assertions that enjoy its
sanction.
These policies stifle the native strength of our country, which is the source
of American greatness. Take an example from the progressive attempt to disarm
Americans. Hillsdale College is a sponsor of the U.S. Olympic shooting teams,
who train at our Halter Shooting Sports Education Center. One of the best
shotgun shooters in the world is Vincent Hancock, who just won his fourth
gold medal in Paris. He recently gave a talk on our campus in which he noted
that in the competition for shooting medals, China is ahead. It wins about
ten medals every Olympics, and the U.S. wins about five. Of course, he
continued, there are so many more Chinese than there are Americansbut
whereas in China no one is allowed to own or fire a weapon except with
official sanction, any American can own guns and become proficient with them.
America has more great shooters than any countrypeople who have trained by
their own efforts and for the love of it, and who could no doubt dominate at
the Olympics. But of course, we dont conscript Olympic athletes as China
does.
Alexis de Tocqueville writes that in America every community and every person
is the best judge of the things that concern mainly itself and himself. The
army of America is the population of America. So too the workforce. No
public-sector army or workforce should be allowed to become dominant. The key
to restoring our political and social institutions is to understand that we
need strong government, but it must be limited. This is possible only if we
govern ourselves in most things.
What does President Trump propose to do? Since his election, appointments and
announcements have come rapid fire. My favorite directly addresses the
problem of the administrative state. It is the creation of a Department of
Government Efficiency, or DOGE, headed by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. Musk
introduced certain efficiencies at Twitter. He eliminated six of the seven
letters in its name to call it X. He eliminated 6,500 of its 8,500 employees,
which comes to 76 percent. He fired most of the moderators, the people who
prevent users of the platform from saying things. Doesnt this suggest a
pattern for government? Ramaswamy came to national prominence protesting
companies who forgot about their customers in favor of a woke agenda. He had
made a lot of money remembering his customers. Doesnt this also suggest a
pattern for government?
The DOGE will work as an advisory group outside the government to find a
cheaper and better way to do thingsor not to do things! It will work with
the Office of Management and Budget, the office in the White House that has
final approval over regulations. It can do a lot, but fundamental change
rightly requires legislation.
Trumps party controls both houses of Congress by narrow margins. Will they
pass legislation to abolish a department? To alter the tenure rules for
bureaucrats? Or even to confirm Trumps appointments? If not, achievements by
executive order can disappear in a day in the next administration. The recent
history of Congress, which created and has been operating alongside the
administrative state for decades, does not encourage optimism. It will help
that Trump won the popular vote, a moral victory, and that the politics of
Trump have been changing the party. But will it be enough?
To expect the unexpected is a logical contradiction that contains a truth:
we do not know what will happen. We sail where we have not been. No president
has ever staked his administration on overcoming the administrative state.
Reagan, the best of Trumps modern predecessors, was hindered by having the
priority of dealing with the Soviet Union, and his party never controlled the
House. Others who talked about reducing bureaucracy never attempted to do so
in a fundamental way.
***
If politics and policy at home will be an unpredictable battle, there may be
literal battles abroad. We are subject to direct and sudden attack by nations
that are more numerous than we. The Chinese navy is larger than ours and
gaining every month. Our defense industry is calcified, and military
recruitment is down. We have spent trillions attempting to build democracy in
nations that had never known itand still do not. Our national debt piles to
the moon.
We will need the wisdom of Winston Churchill, born 150 years ago this month,
on these matters. He has been ill understood by Republicans in recent years.
Some thought they were following Churchills example, for instance, in
attempting over many years to build a democracy in Iraq. Indeed, Churchill
ruled that country as colonial secretary for 20 months after Britain
inherited the problem of Iraq following World War I. But his policy, unlike
ours, was to leave as soon as practically possible and meanwhile cut the
cost.
Different Republicans have suggested that Churchill caused World War II. In
fact, he struggled for almost a decade to avoid it by calling for weapons
production to deter Hitler. He had warned of the dangers of modern war
throughout his life. That danger was not only physical destruction and death,
but also the conscription of national life at the expense of freedom. For
Churchill, as it seems for Trump, war is something to be avoided and, when it
must be fought, fought fiercely to a rapid conclusion. He called World War
II, in which he won his glory, the unnecessary war. Whatever their
differences, Trump has these ideas in common with Churchill.
Our great advantage is the same that Britain has enjoyed: bodies of water
between us and our worst enemies. But the oceans, like the English Channel,
are not as wide as they used to be. To a greater extent we must be protected
by diplomacy and weapons. In his first administration, Trump built weapons,
and his diplomacy was highly successful. It may be harder this time.
***
Despite the trials we face and those to come, we would be wrong not to expect
success. It is necessary. To remain free, we must have a government
accountable to us. That is the first precept of constitutionalism. That is
what must be restored.
We are made for freedom. Its beauty calls to us as much as goodness and
knowledge call to us, and for the same reason. This is apparent every day in
the operation of Hillsdale College. Everyone here is a volunteer. No one
comes to Hillsdale without understanding what it is and without promising to
help it thrive according to its 180-year-old mission. That is why we are able
to cooperate, to think freely, to argue all we want, and to remain civil to
each other. That is why we have few rules: goals freely adopted are better
than rules and enforcement. We are able to have what the word college means:
a partnership.
The country is the same. Founded with a beautiful Declaration that makes its
mission clear, governed under the longest surviving written constitution in
history, Americans built a society, a culture, and an economy of freedom from
the ground up, under the shelter of political institutions that we made for
this purpose and with the help of Providence.
The 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence will fall under
President Trumps second administration. I know from my service on the 1776
Commission, during his first administration, that he will wish to celebrate
it with a loud voice and a full throat. May we all go from strength to
strength in recovering the meaning of that document and restoring the
Constitution that enabled us to make America great in the first place.
--
Don't jmump!