Case Study: The New Bossism of the American Left
The New Bossism of the American Left, Installment 4
Author’s note: In about three months—sometime in late March—I will be releasing in serial form for premium subscribers my new book, tentatively entitled Liberty in the Age of Bureaucracy, which builds upon my previous book, The New Bossism of the American Left. That latter book was written in 2012-2015, well before the arrival of Donald Trump on the national political stage. I would certainly write some of it differently today—but not much—and I still think it lays out the foundation of the bureaucratic collectivist state that I feel provides important context to the new work. In short, the bureaucratic collectivist state is more dangerous and pervasive than I thought then, its threat to liberty far more existential and imminent. So, for premium subscribers, each Friday until the new book arrives, I am offering in serial form the forerunner and context for that book, The New Bossism of the American Left. As always, I appreciate your support of independent journalism.
Installment 4:
At its core, the New Bossism of the American Left represents a sinister and corrupt alliance between an increasingly powerful bureaucracy, friendly special interests, and the media. This coalition, a dangerous combination of money and secretive legal authority, poses a grave threat to our democratic institutions, for what we are seeing is nothing less than the emergence of a new tripedalism in politics, a three-legged political network so vast it can only be called a machine, with two predominate powers (the bureaucracy and its invested and endowed special-interest allies) essentially being supported by a separate propaganda instrument – the state-run media as the third leg of the stool, if you will.
The New Bossism has six identifying and controlling trademarks, each of which this book will examine in detail. One, the bosses reign through the law of rule, and international rule at that, rather than the rule of law; two, there is an ever increasing quantum of police power, and an ever increasing extension of police power to state employees; three, the New Bosses oversee and protect things rather than people; four, they are intransigently opposed to transparency in government; five, they are hostile to the U.S. and state constitutions in the name of the politics of reinvention; and six, in true totalitarian fashion, the state not only regulates but controls, and it is heartless in doing so.
To conservatives, the eye-popping overreach of the executive branch and the unconstitutional usurpation of power by federal and state agencies – Obama’s use of executive orders is emblematic of the former; the massive regulations proposed and enacted by the Environmental Protection Agency are the poster children of the latter – confirm a constitutional crisis, the likes of which the nation has rarely seen. To the Left, it’s all a conspiracy fantasy, driven by bigotry, greed, and paranoia.
It is anything but, though it is sometimes hard to see the New Bossism forest for the individual trees within it. That is to say, it is hard to understand the nature of the emerging collective tyranny by viewing the egregious acts of any one leg of the tripedalist stool. Any given executive order may be seen as overreach and any headline about it might be viewed as liberal bias, but until the intricately connected and coordinated interactions among the players are revealed, the executive orders and media coverages are likely to continue to be seen as merely individual instances of malfeasance within our constitutional system, rather than as the liaised and synchronized components of a new form of government that they really are. Understanding comes from witnessing the reciprocal actions between the various elements of the New Bossism structure. Only then is the modern age’s ongoing constitutional desecration – and the conspiracy underlying it – fully exposed. Only then is the web of players and the roles of each cleanly seen.
A case study, Glimpsing the New Bossism at work …