By Matthew Continetti
Saturday, February 18, 2017
Donald Trump was elected president last November by
winning 306 electoral votes. He pledged to “drain the swamp” in Washington,
D.C., to overturn the system of politics that had left the nation’s capital and
major financial and tech centers flourishing but large swaths of the country
mired in stagnation and decay. “What truly matters,” he said in his Inaugural
Address, “is not which party controls our government, but whether our
government is controlled by the people.”
Is it? By any historical and constitutional standard, “the
people” elected Donald Trump and endorsed his program of nation-state populist
reform. Yet over the last few weeks America has been in the throes of an
unprecedented revolt. Not of the people against the government — that happened
last year — but of the government against the people. What this says about the
state of American democracy, and what it portends for the future, is incredibly
disturbing.
There is, of course, the case of Michael Flynn. He made a
lot of enemies inside the government during his career, suffice it to say. And
when he exposed himself as vulnerable those enemies pounced. But consider the
means: anonymous and possibly illegal leaks of private conversations. Yes, the
conversation in question was with a foreign national. And no one doubts we spy
on ambassadors. But we aren’t supposed to spy on Americans without probable
cause. And we most certainly are not supposed to disclose the results of our
spying in the pages of the Washington
Post because it suits a partisan or personal agenda.
Here was a case of current and former national security
officials using their position, their sources, and their methods to crush a
political enemy. And no one but supporters of the president seems to be
disturbed. Why? Because we are meant to believe that the mysterious, elusive,
nefarious, and to date unproven connection between Donald Trump and the Kremlin
is more important than the norms of intelligence and the decisions of the
voters.
But why should we believe that? And who elected these
officials to make this judgment for us?
Nor is Flynn the only example of nameless bureaucrats
working to undermine and ultimately overturn the results of last year’s
election. According to the New York Times,
civil servants at the EPA are lobbying Congress to reject Donald Trump’s
nominee to run the agency. Is it because Scott Pruitt lacks qualifications? No.
Is it because he is ethically compromised? Sorry. The reason for the opposition
is that Pruitt is a critic of the way the EPA was run during the presidency of
Barack Obama. He has a policy difference with the men and women who are soon to
be his employees. Up until, oh, this month, the normal course of action was for
civil servants to follow the direction of the political appointees who serve as
proxies for the elected president.
How quaint. These days an architect of the overreaching
and antidemocratic Waters of the U.S. regulation worries that her work will be
overturned so she undertakes extraordinary means to defeat her potential boss.
But a change in policy is a risk of democratic politics. Nowhere does it say in
the Constitution that the decisions of government employees are to be
unquestioned and preserved forever. Yet that is precisely the implication of
this unprecedented protest. “I can’t think of any other time when people in the
bureaucracy have done this,” a professor of government tells the paper. That
sentence does not leave me feeling reassured.
Opposition to this president takes many forms. Senate
Democrats have slowed confirmations to the most sluggish pace since George
Washington. Much of the New York and Beltway media does really function as a
sort of opposition party, to the degree that reporters celebrated the sacking
of Flynn as a partisan victory for journalism. Discontent manifests itself in
direct actions such as the Women’s March.
But here’s the difference. Legislative roadblocks,
adversarial journalists, and public marches are typical of a constitutional
democracy. They are spelled out in our founding documents: the Senate and its
rules, and the rights to speech, a free press, and assembly. Where in those
documents is it written that regulators have the right not to be questioned,
opposed, overturned, or indeed fired, that intelligence analysts can just call
up David Ignatius and spill the beans whenever they feel like it?
The last few weeks have confirmed that there are two
systems of government in the United States. The first is the system of
government outlined in the U.S. Constitution — its checks, its balances, its
dispersion of power, its protection of individual rights. Donald Trump was
elected to serve four years as the chief executive of this system. Whether you
like it or not.
The second system is comprised of those elements not
expressly addressed by the Founders. This is the permanent government, the
so-called administrative state of bureaucracies, agencies, quasi-public
organizations, and regulatory bodies and commissions, of rule-writers and the
byzantine network of administrative law courts. This is the government of
unelected judges with lifetime appointments who, far from comprising the “least
dangerous branch,” now presume to think they know more about America’s national
security interests than the man elected as commander in chief.
For some time, especially during Democratic presidencies,
the second system of government was able to live with the first one. But that
time has ended. The two systems are now in competition. And the contest is all
the more vicious and frightening because more than offices are at stake. This
fight is not about policy. It is about wealth, status, the privileges of an
exclusive class.
“In our time, as in [Andrew] Jackson’s, the ruling
classes claim a monopoly not just on the economy and society but also on the
legitimate authority to regulate and restrain it, and even on the language in
which such matters are discussed,” writes Christopher Caldwell in a brilliant
essay in the Winter 2016/17 Claremont
Review of Books.
Elites have full-spectrum dominance
of a whole semiotic system. What has just happened in American politics is
outside the system of meanings elites usually rely upon. Mike Pence’s neighbors
on Tennyson street not only cannot accept their election loss; they cannot fathom
it. They are reaching for their old prerogatives in much the way that recent
amputees are said to feel an urge to scratch itches on limbs that are no longer
there. Their instincts tell them to disbelieve what they rationally know. Their
arguments have focused not on the new administration’s policies or its
competence but on its very legitimacy.
Donald Trump did not cause the divergence between
government of, by, and for the people and government, of, by, and for the
residents of Cleveland Park and Arlington and Montgomery and Fairfax counties.
But he did exacerbate it. He forced the winners of the global economy and the
members of the D.C. establishment to reckon with the fact that they are
resented, envied, opposed, and despised by about half the country. But this
recognition did not humble the entrenched incumbents of the administrative
state. It radicalized them to the point where they are readily accepting, even
cheering on, the existence of a “deep state” beyond the control of the people
and elected officials.
Who rules the United States? The simple and terrible
answer is we do not know. But we are about to find out.
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