The Spawn of Leviathan The Trump administration’s counterrevolution against the “treason of the agency clerks.” by Bruce Thornton
https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-spawn-of-leviathan/
For more than a century, our Constitutional rights and freedoms have been insidiously eroded by the progressives’ technocratic imperialism of government agencies. This virtual fourth branch of our government has usurped the powers of the other three legitimate ones that the Framers crafted to check and balance, and hold accountable the ambitions of nascent tyranny.
The dangers of regulatory hypertrophy have been recognized since Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835-40.
A century later, even the progressive Walter Lippman, in his 1937 book The Good Society, warned of the dangers of an expansive executive branch and its agencies unaccountable to the citizens: “It is evident that the more varied and comprehensive the regulation becomes, the more the state becomes a despotic power against the individual. For the fragment of control over the government which he exercises through his vote is in no effective sense proportionate to the authority exercised over him by the government.”
Pace Lippman, the return of Donald Trump to the presidency, and the growing resistance of the “forgotten citizens” exercising their right to vote, have put in the White House an administration that is leading a counterrevolution against the “treason of the agency clerks,” and their violations of our Constitutional rights. Trump and his aides are investigating agencies like the FBI and DOJ, along with other intrusive outfits such as the EEOC and EPA, and the corrupt globalist slush fund, the U.S. Agency for International Development––and demanding from them accountability to their new boss and we the people he serves.
Created in 1980, the Department of Education has been one of Leviathan’s most pernicious regulatory spawn, for the ordered liberty of a diverse free people depends on what Alan Bloom calls “education for freedom, particularly the freedom of the mind.”
So, it is important that Trump has also put on the chopping block the DOE, a particularly gross violator of the guardrails of federalism, state sovereignty, and the principles of localism, particularly important for K-12 schools, given the critical role of families, churches, and neighborhoods in education.
Moreover, the DOE has become ground zero for dubious pedagogical fads, and the politicizing of our schools, using taxpayer money to promote progressive and leftist ideological goals, while sacrificing its mission to teach the foundational skills necessary for creating informed citizens.
Targeting the DOE is not new for the GOP. In the Eighties and Nineties, the Republican Party made abolishing the DOE part of its platform. Ronald Reagan in his campaign pledged to achieve that goal, and included it in his 1982 State of the Union address, where he promised, “The budget plan I submit to you on Feb. 8 will realize major savings by dismantling the Department of Education.”
In the Nineties, Cato also reports, “the Republican party sought to abolish the Department of Education as an inappropriate intrusion into state, local and family affairs. The GOP platform that year was clear: ‘The Federal government has no constitutional authority to be involved in school curricula or to control jobs in the marketplace. This is why we will abolish the Department of Education.’”
George W. Bush, however, Cato continues, abandoned that goal, a reflection of how some establishment Republican conservatives have been, and still are, accommodating themselves to progressivism at the expense of Constitutional integrity. “In his State of the Union address . . ., the president touted huge federal education-spending increases — the largest under any president since Lyndon B. Johnson — as an accomplishment of his presidency.” Indeed, between 2002 and 2004, DOE funding increased nearly 70%.
Bush’s other surrender to this regulatory abomination is the No Child Left Behind Act in 2002, “a massive upheaval of K-12 schooling, fueled by the expectation that federal mandates governing testing, transparency, accountability, and remedies could ensure that children would no longer, well, get left behind,” as Cato describes it.
Despite spending billions of taxpayer dollars, few schools have improved outcomes for students, especially at-risk ones. Good intentions, such as rescuing students from failing schools, have not just failed, but worsened over the ensuing decades. More recently, the unscientific mitigation polices and protocols imposed during the Covid crisis have damaged millions of students’ educations and diminished their future economic opportunities
As Stephen Moore wrote recently in “America’s 21st-Century Sputnik Moment Has Arrived,” “The latest Nation’s Report Card test scores are dismal and heartbreaking. The crash that started with inexcusable COVID-19-era school closures has continued over a cliff in almost every state.
The top 25% of eighth graders have seen math scores rebound a little bit from 2022, but they’re still below 2019. The other 75% of kids’ scores have remained the same or dropped.
The reading scores were even worse. Johnny can’t read.”
The unionized educrats, of course, blamed tightwad taxpayers: “The teacher unions predictably called for more money. Per-pupil funding is up by more than 50% after adjusting for inflation in most states since 1980, yet test scores are flat or falling.
Former President Joe Biden added $175 billion in federal education spending, and look what we got for the money. Nothing.”
This shameful dynamic reflects what the Wall Street Journal calls the “iron rule of education politics. . . the more test scores decline, the more money the teachers unions demand.”
The big problem with Leviathan’s regulatory spawn, however, is their foundations on ideas contrary to the tragic realism about human nature upon which the Framers built our Constitution. Starting in the Enlightenment, the success of science in understanding the material world and creating new technologies of which our ancestors only dreamed, has led to the fallacious idea that human minds, behavior, character, and free will could be similarly understood and molded to create a utopia of universal peace and prosperity.
The most consequential, and dangerous, purveyor of this idea was Woodrow Wilson. His academic work guided his presidency, and birthed the progressive movement’s pursuit of technocracy controlled by “experts” and “science,” rather than the Constitution founded on common sense, faith, tradition, freedom, and unalienable rights. For progressives, those quaint anachronisms could not cope with the new technologies that were changing the world and, they claimed, refashioning human nature.
For example, Wilson wrote that economic life now demands a “steady widening to new conceptions of state duties.” The ultimate aim would be to “open for the public a bureau of skilled economic administration,” comprising the “hundreds who are wise” empowered to control and guide the masses who are “selfish, ignorant, timid, stubborn, or foolish” ––what today’s progressive cognitive elites call their political opponents: “bitter clingers to guns and religion,” a “basket of deplorables,” and “smelly Walmart shoppers.”
One hundred years later, Wilson’s vision has produced our regulatory behemoth that squanders trillions of dollars on fraud, waste, and corruption, while only rarely benefiting the citizens who foot the bill. Two flaws in the progressives’ thinking account for the failures of large-scale agencies and bureaucracies
First is the tendency for such agencies to fall prey to “professional deformation.” Particularly when agencies are not subject to the accountability of the voters or the market, the purpose of the agency changes from serving the lawful functions that benefit the citizens, to enhancing the power and privilege of the bureaucrats and the political party that funds and staffs them. Rather than looking outward to the valid needs of citizens, they turn inward to the concerns of the bureaucrats and the agency’s justifying institutional narratives, adherence to which determines hiring and advancement. They become parochial silos of petty tyrants and white-collar gangsters.
More dangerous is the questionable idea that humans, with their corruptible minds, flawed characters, and unpredictable free wills can be understood and improved by means of science. But what they call “science” is rather scientism: ideologies and philosophies cloaked in the forbidding jargon, research protocols, and quantitative data of real science. And they mimic genuine scientific disciplines, professional credentials, and titles in order to camouflage their political ideologies and self-serving aims. Thus, like Dr. Jill, they loudly proclaim the same right to be recognized as “experts” who are better able to govern the non-elite people with their quaint common sense, virtues, faiths, and traditions.
But such claims rest on begged questions and category errors that follow from applying one mode of investigation suitable for the material world and its laws, to human beings who are radically more complex and spontaneous. “For,” as philosopher Isaiah Berlin writes, “the particles are too minute, too heterogeneous, succeed each other too rapidly, occur in combinations of too great a complexity, are too much part and parcel of what we are and do, to be capable of submitting to the required degree of abstraction, that minimum of generalization and formalization––idealization––which any science must exact.”
Those same fallacies of technocracy are the essence of progressive politics and policies, and have created the Leviathan state that has serially failed both at home and abroad––and damaged the Constitutional guardrails protecting our political freedoms and rights, while bringing us closer to tyranny.
In just a few weeks, Donald Trump and his administration have begun reversing those dangerous trends, and restoring the Constitutional structures and ideals that made the U.S. the freest, greatest power in history. It’s our patriotic duty to support this administration efforts to restore the Constitution as the “the law of the land.”
Picture above from the cover of Thomas Hobbes‘ 1651 epic of political philosophy, Leviathan.
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