From:
The Heritage Foundation
By Matthew Spalding, Ph.D.
Our federal government, once limited to certain core functions, now
dominates virtually every area of American life. Its authority is all
but unquestioned, seemingly restricted only by expediency and the
occasional budget constraint.
Congress passes massive pieces of
legislation with little serious deliberation, bills that are written in
secret and generally unread before the vote. The national legislature is
increasingly a supervisory body overseeing a vast array of
administrative policymakers and rulemaking agencies. Although the
Constitution vests legislative powers in Congress, the majority of
“laws” are promulgated in the guise of “regulations” by bureaucrats who
are mostly unaccountable and invisible to the public.
Americans
are wrapped in an intricate web of government policies and procedures.
States, localities, and private institutions are submerged by national
programs. The states, which increasingly administer policies emanating
from Washington, act like supplicants seeking relief from the federal
government. Growing streams of money flow from Washington to every
congressional district and municipality, as well as to businesses,
organizations, and individuals that are subject to escalating federal
regulations.
This bureaucracy has become so overwhelming that
it’s not clear how modern presidents can fulfill their constitutional
obligation to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”
President Obama, like his recent predecessors, has appointed a swarm of
policy “czars” — über-bureaucrats operating outside the cabinet
structure and perhaps the Constitution — to promote political objectives
in an administration supposedly under executive control.
Is this the outcome of the greatest experiment in self-government mankind ever has attempted?
We
can trace the concept of the modern state back to the theories of
Thomas Hobbes, who wanted to replace the old order with an all-powerful
“Leviathan” that would impose a new order, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
who, to achieve absolute equality, favored an absolute state that would
rule over the people through a vaguely defined concept called the
“general will.” It was Alexis de Tocqueville who first pointed out the
potential for a new form of despotism in such a centralized, egalitarian
state: It might not tyrannize, but it would enervate and extinguish
liberty by reducing self-governing people “to being nothing more than a
herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the
shepherd.”
The Americanized version of the modern state was born
in the early 20th century. American “progressives,” under the spell of
German thinkers, decided that advances in science and history had opened
the possibility of a new, more efficient form of democratic government,
which they called the “administrative state.” Thus began the most
revolutionary change of the last hundred years: the massive shift of
power from institutions of constitutional government to a labyrinthine
network of unelected, unaccountable experts who would rule in the name
of the people.
The great challenge of democracy, as the Founders
understood it, was to restrict and structure the government to secure
the rights articulated in the Declaration of Independence — preventing
tyranny while preserving liberty. The solution was to create a strong,
energetic government of limited authority. Its powers were enumerated in
a written constitution, separated into functions and responsibilities
and further divided between national and state governments in a system
of federalism. The result was a framework of limited government and a
vast sphere of freedom, leaving ample room for republican
self-government.
Progressives viewed the Constitution as a dusty
18th-century plan unsuited for the modern day. Its basic mechanisms
were obsolete and inefficient; it was a reactionary document, designed
to stifle change. They believed that just as science and reason had
brought technological changes and new methods of study to the physical
world, they would also bring great improvements to politics and society.
For this to be possible, however, government could not be restricted to
securing a few natural rights or exercising certain limited powers.
Instead, government must become dynamic, constantly changing and growing
to pursue the ceaseless objective of progress.
The
progressive movement — under a Republican president, Theodore Roosevelt,
and then a Democratic one, Woodrow Wilson — set forth a platform for
modern liberalism to refound America according to ideas that were alien
to the original Founders. “Some citizens of this country have never got
beyond the Declaration of Independence,” Wilson wrote in 1912. “All that
progressives ask or desire is permission — in an era when
‘development,’ ‘evolution,’ is the scientific word — to interpret the
Constitution according to the Darwinian principle; all they ask is
recognition of the fact that a nation is a living thing and not a
machine.”
While the Founders went to great lengths to moderate
democracy and limit government, the progressives believed that barriers
to change had to be removed or circumvented, and government expanded. To
encourage democratic change while directing and controlling it, the
progressives posited a sharp distinction between politics and what they
called “administration.” Politics would remain the realm of expressing
opinions, but the real decisions and details of governing would be
handled by administrators, separate and immune from the influence of
politics.
This permanent class of bureaucrats would address the
particulars of accomplishing the broad objectives of reform, making
decisions, most of them unseen and beyond public scrutiny, on the basis
of scientific facts and statistical data rather than political opinions.
The ruling class would reside in the recesses of a host of alphabet
agencies such as the FTC (the Federal Trade Commission, created in 1914)
and the SEC (the Securities and Exchange Commission, created in 1934).
As “objective” and “neutral” experts, the theory went, these
administrators would act above petty partisanship and faction.
The progressives emphasized not a separation of powers, which divided and checked the government, but rather a combination
of powers, which would concentrate its authority and direct its
actions. While seeming to advocate more democracy, the progressives of a
century ago, like their descendants today, actually wanted the
opposite: more centralized government control.
So it is
that today, many policy decisions that were previously the
constitutional responsibility of elected legislators are delegated to
faceless bureaucrats whose “rules” have the full force and effect of
laws passed by Congress. In writing legislation, Congress uses broad
language that essentially hands legislative power over to agencies,
along with the authority to execute rules and adjudicate violations.
The
objective of progressive thinking, which remains a major force in
modern-day liberalism, was to transform America from a decentralized,
self-governing society into a centralized, progressive society focused
on national ideals and the achievement of “social justice.”
Sociological conditions would be changed through government regulation
of society and the economy; socioeconomic problems would be solved by
redistributing wealth and benefits.
Liberty no longer would be a
condition based on human nature and the exercise of God-given natural
rights, but a changing concept whose evolution was guided by government.
And since the progressives could not get rid of the “old” Constitution —
this was seen as neither desirable nor possible, given its elevated
status and historic significance in American political life — they
invented the idea of a “living” Constitution that would be flexible and
pliable, capable of “growth” and adaptation in changing times.
In
this view, government must be ever more actively involved in day-to-day
American life. Given the goal of boundless social progress, government
by definition must itself be boundless. “It is denied that any limit can
be set to governmental activity,” prominent scholar (and later FDR
adviser) Charles Merriam wrote, summarizing the views of his fellow
progressive theorists. “The modern idea as to what is the purpose of the
state has radically changed since the days of the ‘Fathers,’” he
continued, because
the exigencies of modern
industrial and urban life have forced the state to intervene at so many
points where an immediate individual interest is difficult to show, that
the old doctrine has been given up for the theory that the state acts
for the general welfare. It is not admitted that there are no limits to
the action of the state, but on the other hand it is fully conceded that
there are no ‘natural rights’ which bar the way. The question is now
one of expediency rather than of principle.
This
intellectual construct began to attain political expression with
targeted legislation, such as the Pure Food and Drug Act under TR and
the Clayton Anti-Trust Act under President Wilson. These efforts were
augmented by constitutional amendments that allowed the collection of a
federal income tax to fund the national government and required the
direct election of senators (thus undermining the federal character of
the national legislature).
The trend continued under the New
Deal. “The day of the great promoter or the financial Titan, to whom we
granted everything if only he would build, or develop, is over,”
Franklin D. Roosevelt pronounced in 1932. “The day of enlightened
administration has come.” Although most of FDR’s programs were temporary
and experimental, they represented an expansion of government
unprecedented in American society — as did the Supreme Court’s
late-1930s endorsement of the new “living” Constitution.
It was
FDR who called for a “Second Bill of Rights” that would “assure us
equality in the pursuit of happiness.” Roosevelt held that the primary
task of modern government is to alleviate citizens’ want by guaranteeing
their economic security. The implications of this redefinition are
incalculable, since the list of economic “rights” is unlimited. It
requires more and more government programs and regulation of the economy
— hence the welfare state — to achieve higher and higher levels of
happiness and well-being.
The administrative state took off in
the mid-1960s with Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. By creating a truly
national bureaucracy of open-ended social programs in housing,
education, the environment, and urban renewal (most of which, such as
the “War on Poverty,” failed to achieve their goals), the Great Society
and its progeny effected the greatest expansion of the administrative
state in American history.
The Great Society also took the
progressive argument one step farther, by asserting that the purpose of
government no longer was “to secure these rights,” as the Declaration of
Independence says, but “to fulfill these rights.” That was the title of
Johnson’s 1965 commencement address at Howard University, in which he
laid out the shift from securing equality of opportunity to guaranteeing
equality of outcome.
“It is not enough just to open the gates
of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through
those gates,” Johnson proclaimed. “We seek not just freedom but
opportunity. We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just
equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a
result.”
And now progressive reformism is back. We’re
witnessing huge increases in government spending, regulations, and
programs. And as the national government becomes more centralized and
bureaucratic, it will also become less democratic, and more despotic,
than ever.
The tangled legislation supposedly intended to
“reform” health care is a perfect example. It would regulate a
significant segment of society that has been in progressives’ crosshairs
for over a hundred years. Nationalized health care was first proposed
in 1904, modeled on German social insurance. It was in the Progressive
party’s platform of 1912. It came back under FDR and Truman, then
Johnson, then Clinton, and now Obama. And the goal all along has had
little to do with the quality of health care. The objective is rather to
remove about a sixth of the economy from private control and bring it
under the thumb of the state, whose “experts” will choose and ration its
goods and services.
President Obama and the Democratic
leadership prescribe a government-run health plan, burdensome mandates
on employers, and massive new regulatory authority over health-care
markets. Their requirement for individuals to buy insurance is
unprecedented and unconstitutional: If the Commerce Clause can be used
to regulate inactivity, then the government is truly without limit. They
would transfer most decision-making to a collection of federal
agencies, bureaus, and commissions such as the ominous-sounding “Health
Choices Administration.” And their legislation is packed with enough
pork projects and corrupt deals to make even the hardest Tammany Hall
operative blush.
It would be easier, of course, just to skip the
legislative process, and when it comes to climate change that’s exactly
what the progressives are doing. In declaring carbon dioxide to be a
dangerous pollutant, the Environmental Protection Agency essentially
granted itself authority to regulate every aspect of American life —
without any accountability to those pesky voters.
The Left has
long maintained that the administrative state is inevitable, permanent,
and ever-expanding — the final form of “democratic” governance. The rise
of progressive liberalism, they say, has finally gotten us over our
love affair with the Founding and its archaic canons of natural rights
and limited constitutionalism. The New Deal and the fruits of
centralized authority brought most Democrats around to this view, and
over time, many Republicans came to accept the progressive argument as
well. Seeing responsible stewardship of the modern state and incremental
reforms around its edges as the only viable option, these Republicans
tried to make government more efficient, more frugal, and more
compassionate — but never questioned its direction.
As a result,
politics came to be seen as the ebb and flow between periods of
“progress” and “change,” on one hand, and brief interregnums to defend
and consolidate the status quo, on the other. Other than the aberration
of Ronald Reagan and a few unruly conservatives, there seemed to be no
real challenge to the liberal project itself, so all the Democrats
thought they had to do was wait for the bursting forth of the next great
era of reformism. Was it to be launched by Jimmy Carter? Bill Clinton?
At long last came the watershed election of Barack Obama.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the next revolution.
The
Left’s over-reading of the 2008 election gave rise to a vastly
overreaching agenda that is deeply unpopular. Large numbers of citizens,
many never before engaged in politics, are protesting in the streets
and challenging their elected officials in town-hall meetings and on
talk-radio shows. Forty percent of Americans now self-identify as
conservatives — double the amount of liberals — largely because
independents are beginning to take sides. Almost 60 percent believe the
nation is on the wrong track.
Voters are deeply impassioned
about a new cluster of issues — spending, debt, the role of government,
the loss of liberty — that heretofore lacked a focal point to
concentrate the public’s anger. The
Washington Post reports that
“by 58 percent to 38 percent, Americans prefer smaller government and
fewer services to larger government with more services. In the last year
and a half, the margin between those favoring smaller over larger
government has moved from five points to 20 points.” Is it possible that
Americans are waking up to the modern state’s long train of abuses and
usurpations?
There is something about a nation founded on
principles, something unique in its politics that often gets shoved to
the background but never disappears. Most of the time, American politics
is about local issues and the small handful of policy questions that
top the national agenda. But once in a while, it is instead about
voters’ stepping back and taking a longer view as they evaluate the
present in the light of our founding principles. That is why all the
great turning-point elections in U.S. history ultimately came down to a
debate about the meaning and trajectory of America.
In our era
of big government and the administrative state, the conventional wisdom
has been that serious political realignment — bringing politics and
government back into harmony with the principles of the Declaration of
Independence and the Constitution — is no longer possible. Yet we are
seeing early indications that we may be entering a period of just such
realignment. Perhaps the progressive transformation is incomplete, and
the form of the modern state not yet settled — at least not by the
American people.
This creates a historic opening for conservatives.
Growing
opposition to runaway spending and debt, and to a looming government
takeover of health care, doesn’t necessarily mean that voters want to
scrap Social Security or close down the Department of Education. But it
may mean that they are ready to reembrace clear, enforceable limits on
the state. The opportunity and the challenge for those who seek to
conserve America’s liberating principles is to turn the healthy public
sentiment of the moment, which stands against a partisan agenda to
revive an activist state, into a settled and enduring political opinion
about the nature and purpose of constitutional government.
To do
that, conservatives must make a compelling argument that shifts the
narrative of American politics and defines a new direction for the
country. We must present a clear choice: stay the course of progressive
liberalism, which moves away from popular consent, the rule of law, and
constitutional government, and toward a failed, undemocratic, and
illiberal form of statism; or correct course in an effort to restore the
conditions of liberty and renew the bedrock principles and
constitutional wisdom that are the roots of America’s continuing
greatness.
The American people are poised to make the right
decision. The strength and clarity of the Founders’ argument, if given
contemporary expression and brought to a decision, might well establish a
governing conservative consensus and undermine the very foundation of
the unlimited administrative state. It would be a monumental step on the
long path back to republican self-government.
God bess,
JohnnyD
