The central question of our time: Who decides?
Gorsuch cuts to the chase: Are we a bureaucratic collectivist state, or a democratic republic?
In 2015, in my book The New Bossism of the American Left, I argued that, over the decades, the American government has been slowly transforming from a democratic republic into a bureaucratic collectivist state that was taking control of every aspect of daily life. Under true bureaucratic collectivism, the economy is no longer privately owned, even if it remains so in name. In a bureaucratic collectivist state, compliant and favored special interests are allowed to “own” the means of production, and they distribute its profits and power perks to the members of the bureaucracy. Most important, it is the bureaucracy—not the workers or the people or the dictator or the president—who control the economy and the state.
Exhibit A: The constant threats by the government — and its Democratic party allies — for Big Tech to censor conservatives, or else.
At its core, I argued, the New Bossism of the American Left represents a sinister and corrupt alliance between an increasingly powerful bureaucracy, beholden 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-controlled media as the third leg of the stool, if you will.
I will elaborate more on this proposition in The New Bossism of the American Left, Volume II, which I will present on this substack. But for now a quick recap: Back in 2013, the constitutional scholar—and one-time Barack Obama voter—Jonathan Turley gave brilliant testimony before Congress in which he worried that the American government was being reshaped through the expansive use by Obama of executive orders. Instead of a tripartate system, he argued, we were traveling toward a model of an imperial presidency. Indeed, he asserted, Obama’s unilateral actions took away the thumping heart of the Madisonian system: the legislative function of converting disparate factional interests into majoritarian compromises. By acting unilaterally, the president polarized the political system, he testified:
In this sense, Congress is meant to be a transformative institution where raw, often competing interests are converted by compromise and consensus. One of the most striking aspects of the recent controversies … is that they involved matters that were either previously before Congress or actually under consideration when President Obama acted unilaterally.”
The loss caused by the circumvention of the legislative branch is not simply one branch usurping another, Turley said, but a loss of the most important function of the three-branch system—channeling factional interests and reaching resolutions on matters of great public importance.
All of which, Turley contended, was signaling the triumph of a “royal prerogative” and imperial presidency in the American political system. The Founders sought to distinguish the American president from a King by making a distinction between a president and the law, he said. That is, they affirmed “the idea that the executive must enforce the law established by the legislative process.” Collapsing the distinction collapses the idea of shared government, he asserted.
It does even more, Turley contended. It gives rise to a fourth branch of government: the agencies concocting and carrying out the president’s executive orders.
The American governmental system is being fundamentally transformed into something vastly different from the intentions of the Framers or, for that matter, the assumptions underlying the constitutional structure. As I recently discussed in print, we are shifting from a tripartite to a quadripartite system in this age of regulation.
In other words, the administrative state was shifting the center of gravity in the system to a fourth branch of federal agencies:
As a result, our carefully constructed system of checks and balances is being negated by the rise of the sprawling departments and agencies that govern with increasing autonomy and decreasing transparency.
In The New Bossism, I argued that Turley has invaluably put his finger on an important transformation occurring in American government: the increasingly exponential power of the executive branch, which he expressed as the growth of a peremptory presidency and of a fourth estate of massively expanding government agencies. In this world, both Congress and the constitution had become almost irrelevant.
But I also argued that the analysis, while good, was not quite accurate.
The New Bosses behind the counter …