A feature of modern society is the vast administrative state that manages every aspect of modern life. Modern people take it for granted, as they have never known any other way to live, other than being guided by massive bureaucracies. No one alive today remembers a time when there was not a bureaucrat behind every bush ready to shout instructions or warnings. A big part of what the paleocons call “managerialism” is the vast system of administration that runs society.
It is tempting to say that the Romans had a big administrative state. Diocletian expanded the empire’s civil and military administration. He established administrative centers around the empire, especially near the borders, in order to extend control from Rome to all areas of the empire. He is often referred to as the father of bureaucracy and what we think of as civil administration. People may also point to Byzantium, which expanded this concept into a complex form of rule.
There are two big differences between these older forms of government bureaucracy and what we live under today. One is the old system was not built around an ideology like we see now. Our administrative state is built around the idea that society can be managed scientifically by an army of experts. The other difference is the modern administrative state is about training the citizen to achieve his fullest potential within the liberal democratic order, to be a good liberal democrat.
Interestingly, the administrative state in modern liberal democracies looks and acts much like the bureaucracy that evolved with the Soviet system. Both were driven by ideology and both were designed to micromanage the life of the people. The fascist systems that sprung up in the interwar years showed the signs of developing an administrative state as well. Like communism and liberal democracy, fascism embraced the rational management of society.
The other not so obvious similarity between liberal democracy and communism is their respective administrative states evolved as a response to democracy. Running a country where everyone has a say can only be done if the overwhelming majority are saying the same thing. Therefore, a primary duty of the state is to train people to hold the same beliefs, to share the same common sense. The administrative state is as much about promoting ideology as administration.
Something else that is unique to the modern age is the scale and reach of the state in terms of its ability to control activity. Those old forms of imperial bureaucracy were mostly built around protecting the interests if private rulers. Vast swaths of life were left to the people to sort for themselves. In modern systems, the state protects the interest of everyone, so the activity of everyone is heavily regulated. 19th century prisons offered more freedom than the modern Western democracy.
When he was inaugurated, Ronald Reagan said, “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. From time to time, we’ve been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people.” Those words were rooted in Reagan’s reading of people we now call paleo-conservatives, who were early critics of managerialism.
Fast forward to now and what is called conservatism is a celebration of the administrative state. In the Bush years, they were pushing what they called “big government conservatism” which was an explicit endorsement of scientific management of society. Their claim was that they could harness the power of the administrative state to achieve what they claimed were conservative ends. Green eyeshade conservatism had given way to administrative conservatism.
Covid has revealed that the overwhelming majority of people in modern Western democracies just accept that their fate is in the hands of the state. The proper response to Covid was to redirect resources to hospitals to treat sick people, but otherwise let nature take its course. In the administrative state, no aspect of life is left unmanaged, so an army of experts was unleashed to put nature back in her bottle. The crisis of Covid is that nature won and the administrative state failed.
The crisis of the administrative state began to form up on the horizon at the end of last year as the economy began to do weird things. Prices for consumer goods started to spike and the supply chain began to break down. It was assumed that modern monetary management had made inflation a relic of the past. An army of experts trained in our best universities managed the supply chain, so goods and services could be efficiently managed in response to economic conditions.
Even more bizarrely, the labor markets no longer make any sense, according to the rules of the economic elites. Millions of people have left the workforce despite millions of unfilled jobs. Wages have started to creep up, but that has not had any impact on the employment situation. Of course, rising wages and rising retail prices is exactly what modern economic planners said was no longer possible. As with Covid, nature seems to be resisting the efforts of our experts.
The reason that the vast administrative state has been accepted by people is it looked like it was working as promised. The various financial crisis did not result in bread lines like they did in the past. Instead, men in suits pulled levers in the Federal Reserve and Treasury to navigate around the crisis. The retail economy was brimming with new products and services, making life more comfortable. Managerialism has been accepted because it seemed to be working.
The question that has never been tested is whether the administrative state can withstand an internal crisis. Managing through a natural disaster is a very different thing than managing an irreconcilable contradiction within the system itself. This is what the administrative state is now facing. If the problem of this age is the system, there is no systemic solution. In fact, every effort by the system to address the crisis is seen as contributing to the crisis.
This is what brought down the Soviet system. All systems become sclerotic over time, as any software engineer will tell you. The social software of the Soviet empire became so burdened with patches and workarounds that it eventually crashed. The software of a society is the internal logic of it. When those rules begin to fail everyone questions the system itself. This sets of a dynamic where the system fails, a patch is made and confidence declines until eventually no one trusts the system at all.
We may be seeing something similar with liberal democracy. In order to justify itself, it looks for crises to manage, often creating them, but lurching from crisis to crisis is making it less competent at the basics. As people begin to lose trust in the software of liberal democracy, the system administrators are releasing poorly thought out updates and lecturing the users about their conduct. The result is a spiral of increasing incompetence and decreasing trust in the system.
At the heart of the current crisis is a question never asked. That is, can the administrative state survive its own failures. A bad king in a monarchy can be replaced by the next in line. The bad office holder in a republic can voted out of office in favor of someone new. What happens when vast swaths of the administrative state have become gangrenous? How is that addressed. How are the rotten bits removed and who is given the authority to remove them?
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Just got the weekly mass email from my boss about wearing the face muzzle and stopping “this omnicron” death wave. What’s funny is the message had the typical idiotic language that is now normal: “it’s spreading among the vaccinated too.” followed up by: “if your unvaccinated, we encourage you to consider getting it, and make sure you’re getting tested twice a week.”
Clown world just keeps giving.
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““if your unvaccinated, … .”
Q.E.D.
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All I can say is I’m glad I packed it in last March. I would not be able to take this covid BS while working. It’s bad enough as it is. Best of luck to those still dealing with the corporate world and now this.
“The bad office holder in a republic can voted out of office in favor of someone new.”
Whaaaaat??
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also contributing to the decay is the system no longer performs its actual mission. imagine a word processing program that does 100’s of other things (poorly) but cannot actually be used for writing. that is the administrative world, especially on the government side.
unmentioned in the article is the main driver of this decline in system competence. affirmative action. the pre-AA IRS could write massive mainframe software systems (that are still running). now they have to job all of that out to consulting companies like oracle and kpmg.
but this is all to the good. i am supremely relieved that the level of incompetence is already high enough to preclude full systemic capture of society.
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State and Federal governments are incredibly dependent on outside contractors for basic functions now, and the contractors are learning to graft the government for every penny.
One can look at the I-95 debacle, where people were trapped for 24+ hours in a relatively mild snowstorm for an example. The fact this isn’t that close to the imperial capital shows the collapse of competence up close.
Roman empire!? We’ve been dealing with careless and cold hand of bureaucracy since the Bronze Age!
https://youtu.be/nyu4u3VZYaQ
The admin state has been gangrenous for a long time. But now, we’ve most likely reached a critical stage where the limb has to go or the organism dies. However, the admin state doesn’t see it that way – they don’t think they’ve lost to mother nature as we can see with the continuing covid kabuki theater. Now a new potentially scary strain from Cameroon. A supposed scarier combination of flu and covid in Israel. Macron says the unvaxxed now aren’t French (though admittedly this may be true in many cases). This s*** just never ends. I profoundly wish the admin state would soon begin failing like our supply chain system is. It’s so worthless and inefficient, it has to at some point, but against all odds it keeps shambling along.
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Gangrene or cancer, both are slow and painful deaths. I wish there were a way to hurry this up.
“The crisis of Covid is that nature won and the administrative state failed.”
Chernobyl, essentially.
The parallels between the United States and the late Soviet Union are eerie. This sometimes gets pushback, but it is nonetheless true: the Soviets did not hate its subjects anywhere near as bad as the United States hates its citizens. The managerial state operates under the delusion that The Great Replacement will allow the system to operate because the new folks will have no clue what life was like the old regime. Fat chance. Even constant surveillance and police state tactics, all common now, will not save them because the administrative state cannot provide endless goods and services even before it stripmines the last wealth from Whites.
The USSR broke apart quite peacefully. Just as the United States gracelessly fled Afghanistan in contrast to the orderly Soviet departure from there, it also will be far more nasty and brutish in its dissolution–because the Red Army did not hate Russians, and the Tranny Corps have been whipped into a frenzy to murder Whites.
The administrative state failed long ago. Those it hated kept it operational, and now those people are targeted by it for genocide. Brilliant plan, that.
I have to disagree about the breakdown and steady decline of the administrative state and infrastructure. They are a managing the I-95 shutdown supremely well. In another day this terrible tragedy will be over.
Who would of thunk it, modern day Donner parties on American freeways.
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A friend’s wife was tearful, she told me over the phone that I probably shouldn’t come visit since she had a “start of a sore throat” and “didn’t want to kill me” with the Omicron Variant. Apparently I’m at even higher risk of dying from it than the triple vaxxed like her.
I told her that she was over reacting and that both of us would be fine, and went to visit anyways. None of us even got a cold and I guess her hypochondriac “sore throat” went away too.
It sounds like a made up story but it’s unfortunately something that really did happen. Hard to know what it’s like being in that head space, but yeah it seems highly probably that we won’t be able to co-exist with such lunatics forever. It’s getting much worse too because she was relatively normal until the woke stuff started ramping up around 2016. Very susceptible to the state/MIC brainwashing (that’s what it is) campaigns.
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There are two more important dynamics to consider here:
1) Regulatory Capture
2) Arsonist/Fire Department administrative State (which Zman touched upon only briefly)
Who runs the FDA? Pfizer. Who runs the SEC and the FDIC? Wall Street. Who runs foreign policy? The MIC and certain (others). Etc etc….The larger and more powerful the Administrative State, the greater the tendency toward regulatory capture.
We see it all the time, as lobbyists write half the legislation that passes Congress and regulators are just paid off by corporate interests. Meanwhile, by day the Pentagon tries to fight conflicts the CIA and State Dept. start at night. Of course, they take 20% off the top for all the Oligarchs and Politicos.
This is the Arsonist/Fire Dept. model of government we now have. The COVID thing is a great example: fund a lab in China, an accident happens, experts come to the rescue, financial bailouts, Pfizer makes money, Pentagon justifies more money for weapons, etc. It’s just insane.
Think of how rich we would be as a nation if we didn’t have total criminals in charge.