[In the first Part of this series, we looked at how the administrative state grew from its ideological beginnings under Woodrow Wilson to the massive collection of government agencies today with millions of staff and trillions of budgetary dollars under Joe Biden. We also recognized that the power of this unelected bureaucracy has kept pace with its size and budget over all these years, and now operates in many cases to displace the basic moral principles and constitutional rights of the American people. How has this happened? And how does it continue to happen in the Biden state today?]

How the Administrative State Gains and Expands Its Power

How has the administrative state been so successful in expanding its control and consolidating its power? In an early chapter of his 1996 book, The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Public Policy, Thomas Sowell describes the methodology by which the administrative state has for many decades successfully consolidated its own power and wealth. Sowell’s reference to the “anointed” in his title corresponds of course to the “experts” of Woodrow Wilson’s and Frank Goodnow’s now 100-year-old “progressive” project, and to what others today describe as the “elite unelected oligarchy” of our massive federal agencies currently led by Joe Biden.[i] 

Sowell’s analysis identifies four steps that are typical of the administrative state’s methodology: 1) Identify a social problem that needs improvement (such as racial disparities in housing, education, or income). 2) Propose a government program as the solution. 3) Ignore statistics that show how the program has failed (usually because it misconstrues both the causes and the solution), in order 4) to increase funding for the program in the next year’s federal budget. The remainder of Sowell’s book, chapter by chapter, examines various programs of the welfare state since the late 1960s (for example, housing, education, teen pregnancy, and single-parent welfare programs) that amply demonstrate the steps of this failed methodology.[ii] In keeping with his own distinguished career—as an economist, statistician, mathematician, and sociologist—Sowell backs up his conclusions with in-depth statistical analysis at every point. 

This method of garnering power through misconstrued or even fabricated crises is very much alive in the current administrative state of Joe Biden. The bell weather example in recent memory is, of course, the great harm caused by the government’s handling of the COVID fiasco.[iii] The best analyses now pouring forth from various investigative sources both in Congress and in the wider world show that our government’s declaration of emergency powers was part of a very successful corporate/government campaign (Big Pharma plus the captured elites in the FDA, NIH, NIAID, CDC, etc.) to consolidate both wealth and power into their own hands. It worked to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars. And all of this was accomplished, moreover, with the cooperation of corporate and social media and of our federal justice and security agencies (FBI, DOJ, CIA) to censor and silence independent voices of responsible science (such as The Great Barrington Declaration) who tried to expose the scheme.[iv] All of this has had the distinct aroma, it should be well noted, of that coercive alliance between government and corporate power known as fascism. 

The pattern of falsely defined issues, based on poorly designed research, that demand government action to avert a misconstrued crisis, is evident in nearly every policy and program of the Biden administrative state. The Biden state tells us, for example, that we have a climate crisis that requires the government to take direct command and control of our energy resources and our economy. And yet responsible scientists such as Stephen Koonin (former Obama EPA lead scientist) in his book Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters, tells us that the so-called crisis is based on an abuse by activist officials (including Obama) of raw data from the members of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the IPCC of the UN). The data, properly evaluated, however, do not support the claim of a climate crisis at all.[v] Indeed, if we follow the Biden state’s mandates for green energy and electric vehicles, we will do nothing to improve the climate, while making an absolute wreck of our own economy, as well as making ourselves dependent on other hostile economies around the world—in particular, China. This kind of miscalculation, as Sowell has observed, is a typical outcome of the command-and-control style of the administrative state.

Similarly, the Biden state tells us that we are in a racial crisis caused by systemic racism, and that this requires the government to impose programs such as DEI, CRT, ESG, and SEL in our schools, businesses, and corporate offices, if they are to lead the nation out of the legacy of slavery. And yet, responsible black leaders from the civil rights era, who currently lead successful programs of racial uplift and dignity in some of our worst inner cities, tell us that these government programs are more inwardly debilitating for American blacks and for society as a whole than the old ugly and unjust outward legacy of overt racism in the south.[vi] Indeed, if we keep following the lead of the Biden administrative state (“If you don’t vote for me, you ain’t black”) we can only expect the now fifty-year-old legacy of the dysfunctional welfare state in Democrat-led inner cities like Chicago, Baltimore, and Washington DC to become more violent and destructive.[vii] The progressive state usually makes worse the very “crises” it claims to improve.

Likewise, the Biden state tells us that we have a gender and sexual orientation crisis that requires teaching our children, against their own parents’ moral guidance, that boys can be girls, that males should compete in women’s sports, and that the practices of sex in the LGBTQ movement are just as normal and natural as the traditional moral vision of the Bible regarding the sanctity of marriage and the command to be fruitful and multiply. And yet, responsible scientists and counselors tell us that the gender and sexual experiments of the Biden state are not consistent with mental and social health, nor can they be promoted except by imposing the power of the state to undermine the role of the family and of religion in American life and culture.[viii] Even more concerning, this programmatic attack on religion, the middle class, and the traditional family clearly demonstrates the affinity of the Biden state for the subversive strategies of cultural-Marxism.[ix]

Bundling all of these “crises” together, there is at least one more crisis that is being fabricated and promoted by the Biden state, and that is the so-called crisis of democracy. According to Biden and his supporters, if we do not submit to their doubtful agenda for government programs and mandates to solve the various faux crises of public health, climate alarm, systemic racism, sexual orientation, gender identity, and others, then the health of our democracy is at stake. In other words, if we insist on following the rule of law, the separation of powers, and the free market policies of Donald Trump and others in the conservative movement, then we will fall into an authoritarian state that forces us to accept rules and a way of life that we do not freely choose based on our own values and consciences. Talk about bait-and-switch!   

In reality, it is not the conservative tradition that has censored free speech and cancelled genuine open scientific debate about these issues, or shut down our schools and businesses in the name of a false COVID emergency. And it is not the conservative movement that threatens to remove children from the moral guidance of their parents in order to promote a strange and ill-founded sexual and gender ideology. Indeed, if we follow the best principles of the conservative tradition, we shall find just the opposite. There will be room for public debate, for traditional moral principles, and for dissent. And there already is a big-tent tradition of American enterprise and innovation that is open to all, regardless of race, gender, or ethnicity. It is to the legacy of this positive vision of our American heritage that we now turn. What would it mean, in response to the cultural disintegration now churning within the Biden state, to recover the principles and traditions of our historic founding?

Looking ahead to Part 3

In the next post, “Part 3: The Anglo-American Conservative Tradition,” we will look at the tradition of religious, moral, and constitutional principles that our founders followed in designing our own constitution and cultural heritage. This is the legacy of the “Anglo-American Conservative Tradition” as explored by Yoram Hazony in his important book, Conservatism: A Rediscovery. And it is the tradition now largely defamed and dismantled within the Biden administrative state. The aim of Part 3 will be to consider what it would mean to recover the founder’s vision in our time? As you think about today’s post, and anticipate the next, consider the following questions: 1) How might a recovery of constitutional checks and balances between the branches of government correct and improve the activity of the administrative state with respect to how so-called “crises” are identified and how rules and laws are imposed on society? and 2) How might the recovery of the original biblical, religious, and moral traditions of our founding redefine and reconfigure the various “crises” that currently drive and dominate the Biden state? How would this recovery be accomplished?

Endnotes

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[i] These themes are developed extensively in Thomas Sowell, The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Public Policy, (Basic Books, 1996), and in his Social Justice Fallacies (Basic Books, 2023). In the latter, for example, Sowell describes the “knowledge fallacies” by which surrogate decision-makers in the government (that is, “experts”) think in terms of abstract mechanisms that do not comprehend the complex relationships of human life and economic activity (pp. 71-81).

[ii] On the issue of teen pregnancy, for example, Sowell observes that unwed pregnancies among black teens have soared in the post 60s era of the welfare state (68%) due to the increased benefits made available to single-parent families, and the subsequent breakdown of the black family in America. By contrast, during the unjust era of Jim Crow laws and segregation, when the black family was nonetheless still intact, unwed pregnancies averaged fewer than 17 percent. Sowell’s research thus reveals the serious and often tragic results of government programs for which the state is usually not held to account. See Social Justice Fallacies, pages 127-129.

[iii] It should be acknowledged, of course, that Donald Trump was also involved in the early stages of the COVID tragedy, along with Anthony Fauci and others in the NIAID, FDA and CDC, not to mention China’s Wuhan Lab. Based on grossly overestimated rates of infection and death, the Fauci team called for unprecedented and harmful restrictions on the constitutional rights of American citizens such as freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, and freedom to protest. Government censorship of so-called “misinformation” ran rampant on social media and in society at large. In 2021, Biden doubled down on these restrictions when he came into office. Trump, by contrast, had often advocated for things that would have helped (such as early treatments) but these went against the well-planned narrative of the Fauci cohort. And Trump, like others in Congress without a science background, was at a disadvantage to offer real-time criticism of Fauci’s authoritarian declarations. Nevertheless, Trump would do well, in my opinion, to revisit his account of those events and to acknowledge that he was over his head and made some serious mistakes by deferring to Fauci’s often pseudo-scientific leadership.

[iv] See, for example, Aaron Kheriaty, The New Abnormal: The Rise of the Biomedical Security State (Regnery, 2022), and Ramesh Thakur, Our Enemy, the Government: How COVID Enabled the Expansion and Abuse of State Power (Brownstone Institute, 2023). See also, Rand Paul, “Lessons from the Great Covid Cover-Up,” Imprimis, Vol. 52, No. 12, December 2023.

[v] Stephen Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters (BenBella Books, 2024). See also, Michael Schellenberger, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All. Also noteworthy in this regard are the recent comments of Noble Laureate John Clausner on the great climate “hoax.”

[vi] Corey Brooks, “America Works: DEI Doesn’t,” Tablet Magazine, January 16, 2024. Robert L. Woodson, Sr., Lessons from the Least of These, 2020. 

[vii] Shelby Steele and Eli Steele, What Killed Michael Brown (Man of Steele Productions, 2020): an historic documentary film about the fallacies of systemic racism as demonstrated in the 2014 case of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.

[viii] Mariam Grossman, You’re Teaching My Child What? A Physician Exposes the Lies of Sex Education and How they Harm Your Child, (Regenery, 2023). Liz Wheeler, Hide Your Children, (Regenery, 2023). Dr. Jay Richards, Fight the Good Fight: How an Alliance of Faith and Reason Can Win the Culture War (Salem Books, 2024).  

[ix] See “Groomer Schools 1: The Long Cultural Marxist History of Sex Education,” New Discourses Podcast, Episode 54, November 19, 2021. This audio discussion examines the influence of Marxist activists such as Georg Lukacs and Herbert Marcuse (Repressive Tolerance, 1965) on our American educational system. See also, Dr. Ben Carson, The Perilous Fight: Overcoming Our Culture’s War on the American Family (Zondervan, 2024).