Saving Politics
Trump’s threat to the liberal ‘deep state’
ONE of the best books on American history, Arthur Schlesinger’s “The Age of Jackson,” began with Jackson’s inauguration, when the rowdy backwoodsmen who came to celebrate their hero’s triumph frightened the horses and shocked the locals. As in 1829, today’s locals have been warned of another inauguration mob, this time coming to protest the new president. Plus ça change, it’s politics all over again.
And that’s what the 2016 election means, more than anything. The return of politics.
Trump’s victory, over Hillary Clinton and the other Republican candidates, was one of politics over machinery, of a few simple political policies over the belief that elections are a matter of big-dollar donors, data-driven analytics and killer TV ads.
Hillary had the ground game, Jeb had Karl Rove, what else did they need? Well, the voters thought things needed fixing in Washington and weren’t fooled by slick machinery.
There’s another way in which the election was a return to politics. Trump’s victory was a defeat of the progressive’s conceit that he was above politics. He had thought himself in possession of spotless truth, that the arc of history bent only his way, and for such people there’s no room for compromise and no space for politics. He saw his opponents as benighted fools, and thought he’d only muddy himself if he treated them with anything more than disdain.
That’s how President Obama conducted himself in office and that’s how many Democrats see Republicans, and that’s why they’re not emotionally able to accept their defeat. Trump showed them that they were self-deceived, that they weren’t in sole possession of the right and the good, and that’s a deep psychic wound.
There’s one last way in which Trump’s inauguration represents a return to politics, and that’s as a repudiation of the ideal of a politically neutral administrative state, run by a government of experts whose rules anonymous bureaucrats faithfully follow.
There were echoes of that in Andrew Jackson’s victory, for the unruly mob that had descended on Washington in 1829 was composed of office-seekers who had been promised patronage jobs in the new administration. And many of them got what they wanted, for Jackson introduced the “spoils system” in which career civil servants were replaced by political appointees.
Civil-service reform, beginning with the 1883 Pendleton Act, was supposed to protect us from Jacksonian politics, creating a merit system that tied the president’s hands in patronage appointments. That was meant to give us an efficient government, free of corruption, with rule by scientific experts.
Instead, we got rule by stale ideologues. Today, when the “deep state” of federal workers is so wholly opposed to Trump, and is so partisan in its opposition, when they’ll do whatever they can to frustrate Trump’s policies, there’s an argument to be made for a return to politics and an abandonment of our faith in rule by politically neutral experts.
For examples of the deep state at work, look almost anywhere, to an Environmental Protection Agency on a mission from God, to a politicized Justice Department and most recently to an Office of Government Ethics that blinks at a speck for Trump without seeing the beam of the Clinton Cash machine. You’ll see it when a CIA director tells the president-elect what he can and cannot say.
But the most shocking example comes from a report in the Jerusalem Post that Obama officials have warned their Israeli counterparts not to share information with the Trump administration because Russian President Vladimir Putin could blackmail the new president. At a time when Trump’s people are talking to Russian officials about ending the war in Syria, that’s a betrayal of our country.
Of course, it’s naïve to expect that the deep state will be singlemindedly loyal to the United States. Bureaucrats have their own interests. They’ll want to keep their jobs, above all, and they’ll be aligned to the kinds of policies that make their jobs more secure. The deep state loves the government that employs them and will seek to subvert an administration that threatens them.
Trump isn’t a Jacksonian. His ideas are much closer to those of Henry Clay, Jackson’s inveterate enemy. But when it comes to civil-service reform, I’d like to see a little more politics, Andrew Jackson-style. Civil-service reform gave us more, not less, corruption.