Most of us would agree, I think, that the people of the United States in 2024 are engaged in a major cultural battle, and that this battle has to do with both our political order and with our most deeply held spiritual values. The battle is often so fierce and complicated, however, that we have difficulty defining it or even describing it in a way that makes broad sense to everyone concerned. And perhaps we should expect this to be the case, since those most visibly engaged are now aligned into two political camps that directly oppose each other, both in how they define key terms (such as “democracy,” “nationalism,” and “freedom”) and even in how they define themselves—with terms such as Democrat and Republican or Liberal and Conservative. Is “nationalism” a good thing or a bad thing? What conception of “freedom” is assumed in our Constitution? Which of the major parties is truly the protector of “democracy”? We are at war even about these basic concepts.

What follows is my attempt to clarify what I think is going on in this conflict. How are the political parties now defining themselves, and why have they drawn the lines of battle where they have? What is the basic problem at work in it all? And what constitutes at least the direction of a solution? I will begin with a description of what has widely been called the “administrative state” as this currently exists in the administration of President Joe Biden, though this state has been expanding in every administration for at least a century. Thus, we begin with a major matrix of what I consider to be the problem.

The Administrative State

The roots of the administrative state in America can be traced rather clearly back at least to the early twentieth century and the administration of Woodrow Wilson. Wilson believed that the founding principles of the US Constitution—such as having three branches of government (legislative, executive, and judicial), each of which affords checks and balances on the others so that no faction can rise to absolute power—had become too slow and ponderous to manage the affairs of an increasingly complex society with large urban centers in a post-industrial world.[i] Therefore, with help from other so-called “Progressives,” such as John Dewey in education and Frank Goodnow in political philosophy, he promoted a scheme to deploy “experts” who were not “politicians” to administer and manage the business of the country. This is, in fact, the main theme of Goodnow’s book, Politics and Administration first published in 1900.

Today, the administrative state in the US has grown to a massive array of 430 different agencies—such as the IRS, the EPA, the FDA and CDC, the Department of Education, the Department of Defense, the Department of Interior, and the SEC, etc. These agencies have a total of 2.95 million federal employees, with an annual budget in 2023 (that grows and expands every year) of about 1.7 trillion dollars just to run the agencies. (This does not include another 4+ trillion in the federal budget to pay for benefits such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.) And these agencies have taken to heart Wilson’s original vision that they (not our elected officials in the legislative branch of government) should be in charge of making the laws by which the whole country, its businesses and citizens, should be governed. Some of the agencies, such as the EPA, have even created their own “judicial” officers to settle disputes with citizens and businesses as these arise. So much for checks and balances between the branches of government!

The problem with all of this, besides the sheer impossibility of trying to keep track of or hold accountable such a massive bureaucracy, is that the administrative state now operates independently of the wise form of governance which our founders bequeathed to us. This has made it possible today for the administrative state to function as an unelected faction whose ideology serves special interests. As such, the state now routinely sponsors policies and issues mandates that a majority of US citizens have never voted for and do not support (such as DEI, CRT, radical gender ideology, climate crisis, COVID lockdowns, open borders, student loan “forgiveness,” and the Green New Deal). The recent (July 1, 2024) Supreme Court decision to overturn the so-called “Chevron” doctrine (1984) demonstrates a growing awareness that the laws and policies of our country, especially those that affect major questions where billions of dollars are at stake, should be decided by our elected representatives, who are, after all, accountable to voters in each state for the decisions they make, not by the unelected career bureaucrats of the administrative state whose job security is independent of their policy decisions and their results. 

The basic problem, therefore, in our current cultural battles, as I (and many others) see it, can be traced to the matrix of the administrative state, which has expanded and imposed its powers more than ever before in our history during the first three years of the Biden administration.[ii] It is important to note in this regard, that it is Biden himself and his agencies that have been behaving in a unilateral, authoritarian, and dictatorial fashion, though they keep warning us that Donald Trump will be a Hitlerian style dictator if he is re-elected later this year.

Thus, it is Joe Biden who refuses to stop his attempt to buy votes by cancelling billions of dollars’ worth of student loans, even though the Supreme Court has already declared that he does not have the authority to do this without congressional approval. And it is Biden, or his agencies, that demonstrates contempt for our legislative process by using mandates and executive orders to coerce “green” energy, to mandate harmful public health policies and vaccines, to restrict what kinds of household appliances or automobiles our citizens will be allowed to purchase, to leave our borders open to invasion, and to enforce gender and racial ideologies in public schools that separate children from the moral guidance of their parents. This is, quite simply, the behavior of an authoritarian state, not that of a government of, by, and for the people.

Looking ahead to Part 2

In the next post, “Part 2: The Expansion of the Administrative State Under Joe Biden,” we will look at a number of recent Biden policies (for example: public health, climate, race, gender) along with some of the opposing political and cultural voices (often censored by the pro-Biden press) who warn of grave consequences already occurring as the Biden mandates are followed. As you think about today’s post, and anticipate the next, consider the following two questions: 1) To what extent, in real terms, have the results of Biden’s policies been either helpful or harmful for our people and in our society (for example, at the border, in the economy, or in dealing with inner city crime)? and 2) To what extent has the Biden administration pushed its policies without due regard for the legislative process of checks and balances?

Endnotes

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[i] Woodrow Wilson, Congressional Government: A Study in American Politics. This book was based on Wilson’s 1885 PhD thesis at Johns Hopkins University and argued for a more limited discursive role for Congress, while the executive branch became more powerful in the actual administration of society. See also, R. J. Pestritto, Woodrow Wilson and the Roots of Modern Liberalism (Rowman and Littlefield, 2005).

[ii] See, for example, Larry P. Arnn, “The Way Out,” Imprimis (November 2021, Vol. 50, No. 11); and “Education as a Battleground,” Imprimis (November 2022, Vol. 51, No. 11). In addition to these two short articles (available online), the dozens of other sources cited in the endnotes for this seven-part series will reveal numerous overlapping problems of major consequence now piling up in our society and in our economy as a result of the policies unilaterally imposed by the Biden administrative state.