The soft coup of an entrenched bureaucracy

Calling it the "Deep State" actually minimizes the problem

According to the Constitution of the United States, the President is intended to preside over the Federal government and set foreign policy, while executing the laws passed by Congress.

Note: he does not set domestic policy. That’s set by law. But he is responsible for carrying out that policy as he determines. Priorities and strategies for carrying out the laws are part of his purview. His ability to set foreign policy is also dependant upon the laws.

The Constitution gives him executive departments and officers (what we call Secretaries) to lead them. Those departments exist for the purpose of carrying out the law according to the President’s direction.

What this means is that the president has to rely on other people to carry out his decisions. And if a president changes direction or emphasis, those people have to conform to his decisions.

Unfortunately, over the centuries, the unelected and unconfirmed bureaucrats in the Federal government have solidified into a number of sub-governments, with policy positions of their own. Positions that do not always match those of the president.

Republican presidents are very averse to firing such people, because they are afraid to be called incipient fascists or tyrants. Democrat presidents have no such limitations, and happily purge away, in order to ensure that their intent is carried out.

This difference between Republican and Democrat presidents and their administrations is observably true. And over a period of mere decades, let alone centuries, it has the effect of solidifying a Democrat oriented bureaucracy, which is determined to carry out the will of the Democrats regardless of what some benighted Republican president might want.

This, unfortunately, is something that the founders did not even consider when they created the Constitution. And it has been causing problems for longer than most of us have been alive:

The Rogers Act

In 1924, Congress passed the Rogers Act, which created a professional bureaucracy throughout the executive branch. The following year, the Foreign Service School was created for State Department bureaucrats. All of this served to raise up and create a cadre of bureaucrats who saw themselves as the people doing the hard work and making policy recommendations that they expected would be followed by their nominal bosses.

This relationship wasn’t always harmonious. The war between J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI and President John F. Kennedy was legendary, for example. But while great internal conflicts of that sort seemed to be rare, the gradual replacement of bureaucrats by Democrats served to create an increasingly radical element in the Federal bureaucracy.

Systemic shock

And then came Donald Trump. Until Trump, candidates for President of the United States knew, even if they didn’t say anything about it on the campaign trail, that they would have to make accomodations with the powerful Federal bureaucracy. Because they were part of the political system, having come up through that system, they were fully aware of the power of the bureaucracy.

But Trump was an outsider. The first real outsider to attain the presidency in ages. Woodrow Wilson only had two years of government service before attaining the presidency. Grover Cleveland had four, and Andrew Jackson had five.

Cleveland fought political corruption, and was labeled as immoral — and even a rapist — by his opponent. Sound familiar? He was steadfastly against overseas wars. He was the only president before Trump to serve two non-sequential terms.

Wilson, by contrast, essentially created the bureaucracy that we have today. He presided over what was nothing less than a revolution by overseeing three systemic changes to the United States, all in the year 1913. The Federal Reserve Act created a permanent central bank, allowing the government free reign to spend without limit, the 16th Amendment permitted an income tax, which was literally forbidden by the Constitution up until that point, and the 17th Amendment turned the US from a union of states, each having representatives in Congress, into a single imperial government, by having Senators elected by the public, rather than appointed by the states. And it was Woodrow Wilson who decided that the United States would enter World War I, a war that did not involve the United States in any way.

The creation of the Federal Bank was the huge fight of Jackson’s presidency. His face on the $20 bill is not there to honor him. It’s there to mock him. It’s a petty act of revenge, saying, “You lost in the end.”

But I digress. The bottom line was that Trump was an utter outsider. No military service, no government service. He was a representative of the people whose government was supposed to represent them, but the entrenched bureaucracy considered those people to be ignorant serfs who needed to be led by their wiser and better bureaucratic masters.

Jeffrey Tucker posted this on Facebook today:

He isn’t exaggerating. To people who have become accustomed to holding the controls of a country, trying to pry it out of their hands feels like a coup. It really does. The United States has been moving in the direction of a permanent political class, ruled in secret by a permanent bureaucracy, ever since the late 1800s. We saw the massive systemic shock when Trump was elected in 2016. The utter hysteria at the prospect of the smooth movement towards permanent rule of the elite being disrupted, or even reversed, made the nuking of two Japanese cities seem like setting off firecrackers by comparison.

And now Trump is back. Worse, he has the richest man in the world helping him dig into the bureaucracy and peel away as much of the dross as possible.

I don’t believe that it’s possible for the entire Soft Coup to be reversed in a mere four years. And I don’t know whether the work will continue after Trump’s term ends. But I hope that it does. I hope that it demonstrates to the people that the foes of self-rule, led by those who call themselves “Democrats” (much as a bald person might be nicknamed “Curly”) can be beaten.