Prof. Fukuyama Defends the Deep State

For several years now, Prof. Fukuyama has defended the Deep State, or that part of government consisting of entrenched and unaccountable bureaucrats or civil servants. He even equates it with the Rule of Law, which is altogether strange, as if they were defenders of even-handed administration of justice, when what they actually do is carry out policy in detail, which gives them wide latitude to make up rules and regulations and to act within administrative agencies as legislator, executive and judge all combined. Prof. Fukuyama doesn’t understand the nature of government or American government. He seems to have an idealistic notion that replacing the spoils system by permanent untouchable bureaucrats was a good idea. It was a bad idea.

Going back to basics, the colonists in the 1770s who set about creating state governments were deeply concerned about making them responsive to their constituencies. They were very concerned about the number of representatives and that each citizen had more or less an equal voice in selecting them. The problem of controlling these agents (elected representatives) was a big one for them. This also was why they wanted separation of powers in forming state constitutions. The last thing they could have imagined was having their representatives set up administrative agencies with great powers delegated to them and oversight by these representatives. That would have meant another whole layer of control problems. One layer was enough! In fact, many colonists argued for first establishing bills of rights at the state level, before even considering a constitution. They well knew the difficulties of controlling representatives even with a constitution, but they feared anarchy and a state of nature even more.

Clearly, America drifted away and eventually veered sharply away from these healthy liberty-loving and liberty-controlling ideas of government structure. The spoils system was a very good system of controlling agents because a new administration could sweep out the bureaucrats of a previous administration, which was what voters wanted to accomplish in order to control their government and hold them responsible and responsive too. It was needed to alter policies.

Today we have the opposite, and Prof. Fukuyama even applauds it. He thinks this enables democracy! Strange as it may seem, he has it exactly backwards. If democracy means anything useful, it means consent of the governed. We the governed cannot transmit our consent through representatives who cannot control bureaucracies or who set up agencies that combine all the powers (legislative, executive and judicial) or who act independently no matter what top level officials are elected.

If people are in government jobs and know that they cannot be fired or turned out of their jobs even when leadership changes, they have no incentive to respond to what voters want them to do or not do. They have the incentive to become the hidden masters of the people. That’s what the Deep State entails, and Fukuyama has so misunderstood these basics that he thinks Deep State inertia and unresponsiveness to change is a plus for democracy and represents Rule of Law!

The colonists who fought for our freedom and understood the magnitude of their task in establishing new governments wouldn’t have comprehended Fukuyama. They would have thought at best that he was some sort of Tory advocating that the King’s agents remain to administer government as they signified stability and rule of law. But for the colonists a new broom was to sweep clean and disestablish the old government. And that too would be the job of periodic elections when people sought to control their representatives. The idea of a permanent class of government bureaucrats who would accumulate power by their longevity in their offices was entirely odious and foreign to the colonists. This is the idea that Fukuyama thinks is good.

Continuity in office is a very bad idea when it means that it’s an obstacle to changing bad policies, and that’s what we face. Our Deep State is what effectuates big government. The two are married to one another. What representatives are advised to do comes from the agencies and agents that they are supposed to be controlling and directing. The agents do the studies and write the reports. They control the statistics and information. They create the options and position papers. They become the effective powers, insulated from voters. They are a force beyond constitutional limits, insulated from workable control. There is very great difficulty in reforming a department of government. It would be better to revert to a spoils system in which the winners fire the losers and start with a clean slate.

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9:45 pm on December 22, 2019