During the 2008 Democratic primary campaign, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was asked to define the particular political philosophy that best captured her political ideals. She answered by asserting that she was not a liberal but a progressive. The hope of the progressive is best understood, Clinton observed, by looking back to its roots in the early twentieth century. While the term “liberal” is typically associated with a belief in larger government and more programs to assuage inequalities, Clinton argued that progressivism best contains and expresses the philosophical premises of the belief in government’s firm, superintending role in modern civil society. Given this interesting statement and the current debates over federalism and the powers of the commerce clause, Liberty Law Talk thought it would be profitable to explore the intellectual roots of progressivism in a conversation with noted expert, Ronald Pestritto.

A recent panel discussion at Georgetown’s Tocqueville Forum entitled “The Quest for Community in a Digital Age,” reconsidered the American sociologist Robert Nisbet’s powerful thesis in The Quest for Community: A Study in the Ethics of Order and Freedom. New York Times columnist Ross Douthat cited Nisbet’s thesis as a powerful way to understand the continued growth in bureaucratic power in America. Nisbet’s ideas, however, are not conventional, and they challenge central components of the way most people think about centralization in the twentieth century and in our own.

First published in 1953, and recently republished by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute in 2010, The Quest for Community offered an alternative understanding of the diminution of liberty by the modern nation-state.  Rather than viewing the heroic, autonomous individual as the one under siege, Nisbet instead looked to the collapse of the “contexts of liberty” that man had formerly known. The reduction of various forms of community: religious, civil, neighborhood, labor, etc., had resulted in individuals shut up within themselves, removed from vitalizing communion with other people. In turn, the power of the state and its various missions of war, social justice, environmental justice, to  name a few, became inviting new forms of communion. In 1988 Nisbet subsequently updated his mid-century thesis in The Present Age: Progress and Anarchy in Modern America, where he considered contemporary developments as further contributing to his earlier observations.

We live in an irreligious age but that does not mean that we hold nothing sacred. We have many sacred cows, whole herds of them in fact; and one of them is equality of opportunity. To question the sanctity of this notion – as I have found if not exactly to my cost, at least at the cost of some disapproval of me – is a social faux pas worse than eating peas with your knife.

Recently I spoke to some pupils at a school in Geneva. They were highly privileged children who, as a result of their privileges, were almost certain to remain privileged for the rest of their lives. I mean this as no criticism of them or to arouse any hostility towards them; for among their privileges, or perhaps I should say advantages, was an early appreciation of the necessity to work hard. And in the modern world even the privileged have to work hard in order to maintain their privileges.

Be this all as it may, the question of equality of opportunity came up. Needless to say, all the privileged children were in favor of it; they had absorbed the indisputability of its desirability with their mother’s milk, as it were.

It did not occur to them, of course, that a reduction in their own privileges might conduce to equality of opportunity; or that, if equality were important as a goal in itself, the equal denial of opportunity of some would do as well as the expansion of opportunity to others. Indeed, a complete absence of opportunity for anyone would be equality of opportunity, but it would hardly be desirable.

I said that of all the notions known to me, equality of opportunity was the most totalitarian. One of the pupils, rather surprised, asked whether I believed in the level playing field, a cliché I detest but which is nevertheless useful (explaining, I suppose, why it became a cliché in the first place).

If by level playing field is meant purely formal (and never quite realized) equality before the law, I was indeed in favor of it. But if what was meant by a level playing field was that everyone should be born with precisely the same opportunities in life I was not merely against it, but I was deeply opposed to it. One could almost hear the gasps of surprise.

If one took the goal of equality of opportunity seriously, as in fact nobody does, it would soon lead to Brave New World. Babies and children would have to be brought up in hatcheries to avoid the inevitable influence of parents on a child’s destiny. It does not matter precisely what proportion of a child’s destiny is attributable to heredity and how much to environment; so long as it is conceded that his environment plays some part in it, the necessity for hatcheries, or at least of an utterly uniform environment, would hold. Only the most utopian of totalitarians would find this attractive or desirable.

But the genetic lottery would also have to be fixed: it would be no good having equality of environmental circumstances if the dice were heavily loaded in some children’s favor, or against others, from the moment of conception. Cloning and absolute identity of upbringing are the only way of bringing about equality of opportunity.

Again, are we speaking of equality of opportunity within societies or between societies? If equality of opportunity is sought in the name of justice, it is difficult to see why a geographical accident of birth, according to which a child born in one country had more opportunity than a child born in another, should be permissible. Equality of opportunity means world government, as Aldous Huxley understood.

In fact, no one really believes in equality of opportunity; it is a slogan uttered more to vaunt the political virtue or bona fides of the person uttering it than it is a consummation deeply desired. But just because a slogan is not really believed in or meant to be believed in does not mean that it can do no harm, quite the contrary.

It should be possible in a modern society to provide everyone with opportunity, if not equality of opportunity. But the slogan of equality of opportunity is a very useful way of disguising the fact that our society denies many of its children opportunities that it should be perfectly possible to open up to them.

Let me illustrate what I mean by reference to my own country, Great Britain. Torrents of crocodile tears are spilt over the inequality of chances between the best off and worst off in the country, an inequality that may actually have increased in late years – precisely at a time when immense expenditures supposedly intended to decrease the inequalities have been undertaken by the government, to the swift ruination of the economy. At the same time, practically no notice is taken of the fact that a very significant proportion of children emerge from state school after eleven years of compulsory attendance hardly able to read or to perform simple arithmetical calculations, despite the fact that about $80,000 has been spent on their education, so called, and that it has been almost conclusively established that the overwhelming majority of children can be taught these things, whatever their social circumstances. This is a scandal of gargantuan proportions, yet it is hardly noticed.

Why? Why a fixation on an impossible chimera, equality of opportunity, and a complete disregard of a perfectly achievable end conducing to more opportunity for millions of actual people, namely teaching them to read and reckon with facility? The answer, I think, is that chasing chimeras is a source of endless job opportunities and bureaucratic expansion; trying to achieve limited, but achievable and invaluable, goals would demand painful change (and possibly even admissions of guilt). There is every reason why a child born to ignorant parents of degraded habits should not have the same life chances as a child born to wealthy and cultivated parents; but there is no reason why he should not learn – that is to say, be taught – to read and write.

Equality of opportunity is not a cry of the people; it is the perpetual alibi of a bureaucracy.

The Obama Administration’s now-disintegrating excuse for the IRS’s investigation of Tea Party and other conservative groups is that it was done by career employees and not politically directed. After all, “The IRS has two political appointees: the commissioner, who serves a five-year term, and the chief counsel.”

Staying on the superficial level of comparing Obama with Nixon ignores the fundamental problem coming into sight here: the administrative state. In Woodrow Wilson’s conception, this scientific, a-political unity would inflict the will of an elite class on an electorate. In its modest way the IRS in this current scandal is playing out the logic of the great Progressive theorists of the administrative state—as well as its practitioners (see Woodrow Wilson, especially his classic essay on public administration). I have made this argument in some posts for this site, e.g., this one on Cass Sunstein and FDR, and several others, including John Marini and Joseph Postell, have made similar arguments.

If we know how the Administrative State came to be and what its purposes are, we see the depth of the crisis in self-government the IRS scandals disclose. Franklin Roosevelt centralized federal government power in the White House, with an administrative apparatus that would be the party that would end all parties. (Sidney Milkis’s study of FDR, The President and the Parties,  is particularly telling on this point.) Of course what FDR and the Progressives before him meant by ending parties or being apolitical is partisan liberal. This he made clear toward the end of his 1944 State of the Union Address:

One of the great American industrialists of our day—a man who has rendered yeoman service to his country in this crisis-recently emphasized the grave dangers of “rightist reaction” in this Nation. All clear-thinking businessmen share his concern. Indeed, if such reaction should develop—if history were to repeat itself and we were to return to the so-called normalcy of the 1920’s—then it is certain that even though we shall have conquered our enemies on the battlefields abroad, we shall have yielded to the spirit of fascism here at home.

FDR’s once revisionist history of Calvin Coolidge as a precursor of Hitler has been played out in various ways in the institutions that prop up the Administrative State—universities, the chattering classes, and journalism. The highly educated professionals that staff the IRS and other Washington bureaucracies don’t even need to be told who the enemy is—organizations that have “Constitution” (or “Liberty,” for that matter) in their names—because their education has told them whom and what to suspect.

The assault on bureaucracy today pits the rights of the people against the wisdom of the ruling elite. Try reforming the CIA, the civil rights division of the Justice Department, or the IRS through political appointees, who reflect the results of elections. Those agencies have long been captured, not through some iron triangle of interests, but through the acceptance of their employees of a conception of justice that is at war with constitutional government. That is what the IRS scandal is bringing to light.

The IRS stories keep piling up, on top of the other Obama Administration curiosities. Among all the worthy reading, one recent NY Times article  remains the most revealing of the many that might be read. See as well my previous post on the “Professionally Political IRS.”

As well, two other commentators need to be kept in mind—investigative reporter and Calvin Coolidge scholar Charles C. Johnson  and the sober Pete Spiliakos, who blogs regularly at Postmodern Conservative (a lively team led by Peter Lawler).

Last Sunday’s New York Times had a lengthy article on the “unglamorous” Cincinnati IRS office, which some would identify as the focus of IRS evil. For the most part, the reporting supports the Administration’s current narrative that an out-of-control bureaucracy of this “independent” agency created the current mischief. So, some advise, increase the IRS training budget for the sake of this “understaffed Cincinnati outpost that was alienated from the broader I.R.S. culture and given little direction.” (It also buys into the falsehood that in 2010 the IRS was “flooded” with 501(c)(3) and 501(c)( 4) applications, when in fact these were fewer than in the previous year. )

Nonetheless, the article indicates the bureaucratic behavior that suggests skullduggery and future scandals:

“There’s a buzz in the office about this Tea Party situation,” said Neal Juarez, a case advocate in the Taxpayer Advocate Service. Like several other I.R.S. workers, Mr. Juarez was skeptical that employees in Cincinnati would have acted as they had without some direction from leadership in Washington.

“You know what they say when there’s trouble,” he added. “You know what rolls downhill.”

The reporting notes at several points the discrepancy between the Administration line and the unequal treatment of applicants, for example:

Tom Clifton, the treasurer of the Mid-South Tea Party in Memphis, said he called the I.R.S. repeatedly over the year and a half it took for his group to win approval of its tax-exempt status. Every time, he said, the agency employees he talked to alluded to how they were “overrun with applications” or told him, “You don’t have any idea how much we have to do here.”

“Most of the time, I would ask, ‘Well, if that’s the case, why do you have to have so much information that doesn’t seem pertinent?’ ” Mr. Clifton said, referring to several rounds of follow-up questions he received. “None of them could ever answer that.”

Delay itself can be an important bureaucratic tactic. It is in appearance an apolitical way to achieve partisan goals. Justice delayed is often justice denied.

These lessons and more of IRS politics extend to other agencies and how Administrations can use them. I’ve seen firsthand the potential for partisan mischief in civil rights enforcement agencies, such as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) of the Department of Labor. Their heads, Clarence Thomas and Charles James, sought to rein in their arbitrariness through management reforms.

In both agencies regional and local offices are the sources of charges. The central office can also develop statistically-driven systemic cases of discrimination based on the theory of disparate impact. I have described before how such agencies can make themselves nuisances in their pursuit of law enforcement.

The organizational culture of agencies reflects its mission besides emphasizing how both the lowly and the managerial can rise.

In civil rights enforcement no one gets supervisor plaudits for former Justice Department lawyer Christian Adams’ views on the Black Panthers’ voter intimidation. Similarly, the old Immigration and Naturalization Service did not exist to let immigrants in but rather to keep them out. Likewise, no one was going to escape the Cincinnati IRS office by simply being an efficient processor of applications.

The OFCCP, recently placed within the Office of the Secretary of Labor, is a ready-made tool for political abuse. (The EEOC operates through a Chair who needs the votes of three of five Commissioners to approve cases.) When badly run (and even when not), the OFCCP would conduct arbitrarily chosen site visits, demand document after document, make statistical runs of employee data, and seek anecdotal evidence of discrimination.

Bullying and intimidation would achieve civil rights compliance. Since the financial costs to the employer were relatively minor, it was easier to settle a charge on the cheap than to fight it in court. Curiously, the Bush Administration reforms of OFCCP, which made it the federal government’s systemic discrimination enforcement agency, may have left larger corporations more vulnerable to targeting. The current Administration might, for example, write in all sorts of affirmative action obligations in the federal contracts the agency supervises. But written rules are not essential to get investigators to act. This is part of their culture.

Given what has transpired with the IRS, can we doubt that the OFCCP would be used in the same, partisan way against corporations and other employers who have the wrong politics?

Which brings us to Labor Secretary nominee Tom Perez, whose nomination proceeds apace. Not curiously at all, Cleta Mitchell, an attorney representing a Tea Party affiliate in the IRS matters, made the blocking of the Perez nomination one step of five in remedying IRS’s wrongs (published in the Washington Post Friday “Forum,” May 17, A15, but available on-line only here). The IRS scandal and Perez policies are part of the same scandal of bureaucratic despotism.

In light of a claim that the IRS has been harassing religious institutions, I would add an anecdote to further burnish bureaucratic bigotry.

For a few months late in the last century, I worked for the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV), evaluating the worthiness of courses as acceptable for college credit and, more seriously, whether prospective institutions of higher education might set up shop in the Commonwealth. A senior colleague handled public institutions such as the University of Virginia; I got to examine private for-profit institutions and some other private ones.

I flagged a couple for-profit institutions for flagrantly fraudulent practices. Then I was assigned some interesting institutions that applied to offer courses for credit—one an Evangelical Christian college that featured a  classical core of courses, with a focus on public service. The new school sought to attract home-schooled students. The other was a Catholic graduate program that sought to offer degrees in psychology, based on the study of theology and classical metaphysics, in addition to traditional psychological scholarship. In other words, they would recover the original meaning of psychology—the study of the human soul.

After examining the appropriate documents, I gave a strong endorsement of the college, noting that they required what any liberal arts college would require, plus more (the study of Latin, for example). Any requirements concerning religion were an extra option for the institution. Likewise, following a site visit, I urged approval for the psychology program, arguing again that the addition of theology and philosophy complemented a more conventional curriculum.

Though with some supercilious skepticism about the religious elements, my colleagues and supervisor accepted my positive recommendations. The problem here is that some of my colleagues—none of whom are still with SCHEV—might well have categorized these colleges as fundamentally religious institutions. This happened in at least one case I know of. That would have meant that these institutions’ courses could not be counted for college credit in Virginia and have effectively prevented accreditation. SCHEV, I later found out, has a notorious reputation for delaying and denying approval of institutions. (Ultimately, accreditation is given by SACS, one of several regional accreditation associations; this cartelization of higher education and their inflicting of illiberal political standards on colleges is an enormous scandal but a somewhat different subject.)

The attempts of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison to separate public from religious institutions in order to protect the integrity of both are at best a distant ancestor of this  lamentable bureaucratic chokepoint. (See Philip Munoz’s God and the Founders for a study of the founders’ differing views on religious establishment and free exercise.) Secular-minded bureaucrats armed with Ph.D.’s can prevent religious institutions from gaining approval to offer courses for college credit. We see here the same attitude that led the President of the College of William and Mary to order the removal of the cross from its chapel.

The two institutions I approved have subsequently performed great service, though not without controversy. The Evangelical Christian college is Patrick Henry, in Purcellville, some of whose graduates I have had the pleasure of working with in government. The Catholic psychology program is the Institute for the Psychological Sciences, in Arlington, which boasts world-class scholars among its faculty and a stimulating lecture series.

When I questioned the credentials of some for-profit institutions, I was admonished that SCHEV didn’t have the resources to perform thorough studies of them. Yet, with the religious schools, there seemed to be a free hand to consign them to higher education oblivion. I suspect such a free hand is also wielded, with accompanying snicker, throughout governments at all levels.

The destructive urge, said the anarchist Bakunin, is also a constructive urge, presumably because one can, at least in theory, build anything one likes upon a foundation of ruins. The cities of Dresden or Coventry do not really bear him out; but these days the destructive urge focuses more on intangibles, such as social limits or boundaries, than on buildings or infrastructure.

Modern man seems unwilling to accept any inherited limits or boundaries, which is to say any that he has not set for himself or that cannot be justified by a valid argument starting from an indubitable Cartesian point that he acknowledges as such. I suspect that this unwillingness is the consequence of the mass rise in self-importance, but that is by the by. Since we live in a social and even physical world composed more of continua rather than of categories, it is not surprising that limits and boundaries tend to dissolve under this intellectual regime: not any given limit or boundary, be it noted, but limits and boundaries as such.

Let me give an example of what I mean. In the prison in which I worked I would, from time to time, talk to a prisoner who had been convicted of having sexual intercourse with a girl who was too young to give legal consent. The men complained, as often as not, that they had been duped by the girl, who had acted and dressed older than her age; that she had complained only when he had stopped, not when he started, her liaison with her; and that in any case the age of consent to sexual intercourse was itself absurd. For by what strange process was a girl mature enough to give her consent on her sixteenth birthday, but not when she was 15 years and 364 days old? I never heard anyone argue that the age of consent ought to be 14, or even 12 (as I believe it is in Spain, and as it was in Victorian England); no, it was always that it was absurd that someone should not be able to give her consent on her sixteenth birthday minus one day.

This argument in effect dissolves the very notion of an age of consent, for the very obvious reason that the same objection could be made whatever the chosen age of consent might be. The demand that our legal categories should correspond to natural categories, when the world is full of continua, means either that we must fit continua into a procrustean bed of categories, thus doing violence to our intellectual honesty, or abandon legal categories altogether, accepting the terrible social consequences:

… untune that string

And hark what discord follows.

Recently in a British newspaper I saw a relatively subtle attack on the distinction between the private and the public realm. Anyone who knows contemporary Britain knows that the most unattractive public drunkenness is prevalent throughout the towns and cities of the land, particularly on Friday and Saturday nights. Young people aged between their late teens and their mid-thirties take pride not only in being drunk, but in acting drunk, screaming and shouting, fighting, falling over, vomiting in the gutter and generally behaving in such a way that people who do not want to participate or witness such scenes stay at home like Transylvanian peasants after sundown. Hardly any foreign visitors to our shores fail to see what I have described; only natives close their eyes to them, either from a feeling of impotence and despair, or because they fear to appear judgmental. As for the participants themselves, the worse they have behaved while drunk, the prouder they are of themselves: for they have fully absorbed the notion that any form of self-restraint is treason to the self, than which there is no worse kind of treason.

The newspaper article that caught my eye was in the liberal Sunday, the Observer, founded in 1791. The headline of the story read:

Elderly abusing alcohol more than the young.

And among other assertions in the story, we find the following:

The number of alcohol-related deaths in the UK remains highest

in the 55 – 74 age group…

Leaving aside the question of whether people between (say) the ages of 55 and 65 can properly be called elderly in a society in which life expectancy is 80 years, and in which the retirement age has just been raised to 67, it is probable that the overwhelming majority of people who die of ‘alcohol-related’ diseases between the ages of 55 and 74 die of such diseases that are the consequence of chronic abuse, that is to say of abuse that started years and even decades before the age at death, i.e., when they were not elderly by any possible stretch of the meaning of that term.

What distinction, then, was the article collapsing? In effect, that between the public and the private realm, between what ought and ought or to come under the purview of the public authorities: for not even the Observer would claim that elderly people of 55 who drink too much, even much too much, are the reason for the scenes of violence and debauchery on our streets on Friday and Saturday nights, or the reason why respectable citizens avoid town and city centers on those nights. It is not to avoid drunken 55 year-olds that one stays indoors.

This is important, because to fail to make the distinction (which, of course, is on a continuum rather than being absolutely categorical) is either to promote totalitarian interference in private life or to encourage or fail to discourage public disorder on the grounds that others behave just as badly in private. In fact, the objection to people being drunk in public is not that they are doing themselves harm either in the short or the long-term, which is their choice, but that they are spoiling and even damaging the public space, making it frightening and intolerable to others.

The story serves more than one end. It provides an excuse for the authorities not to do what it is their one indisputable duty to do, that is to keep public order, on the spurious grounds that those who create public disorder while drunk are no drunker than many people at home. This means that the same authorities can dodge a task that would require a little moral courage to perform, the performance of which would upset a large number of young people and some alcoholic drink companies at the same time.

But the story also justifies a bureaucratic opportunity. It reported that £25 million of public money was henceforth to be ‘invested in a campaign to tackle the late onset of drinking problems.’ I think it hardly needs proof that the great majority of this £25 million will end up in private pockets without any necessity or even likelihood that the expenditure will conduce to its supposed end, namely a reduction of excessive drinking and its associated problems among the elderly. And to call such expenditure ‘investment’ is typical of those who habitually spend or advocate spending other people’s money with no thought of the actually economic return. They are the kind of people who would be much impressed by the news that the elderly are abusing alcohol more than the young.

Frederick Douglass

Hillsdale College is justly acclaimed for not taking federal funds. The Michigan liberal arts college even employs an attorney to make sure it does not unintentionally receive any. It fears the intrusiveness of federal regulations on its academic freedom and the quality of student life. (I taught for Hillsdale’s Washington, DC program, before they raised its standards. In fact, Larry Arnn, as President of the Claremont Institute rehired me there and, perhaps fearing the consequences of his decision, shortly left and became President of Hillsdale.)

Hillsdale’s principled stand has once again drawn the ire of government—this time Michigan education bureaucrats and state legislators. In 2000 the State Office of Professional Preparation Services (aka OOPPS) declared,

“It is felt [keep relying on that passive voice!] that the Hillsdale approach does not meet the intent of the standard. There is no way to ensure [sic!] that the program will produce a culturally diverse body of teachers or that candidates will complete their studies in a culturally diverse environment.”

Moreover:

“There is no evidence of a plan to recruit, hire and retain a diverse faculty, which currently is not a culturally diverse body….”

Hillsdale’s teacher preparation program is not certified by the State, because the College does not record information on what is known in the federal government as “protected classes” and obviously cannot report what it does not have. This of course opens the College to the charge that it lacks “diversity.”

Culturally diverse faculty!? Will we see quotas for Bible-thumpers? Goals and timetables for Slavs? Of course not, that would be offensive and, moreover, irrelevant for and even hostile to the legitimate purposes of education.

This provides some background to Hillsdale President Arnn’s recent testimony to State legislators about the Common Core standards that threaten to put schools under further federal regulation. He complained that

The State of Michigan sent a group of people down to my campus, with clipboards … to look at the colors of people’s faces and write down what they saw,” Arnn said. “We don’t keep records of that information. What were they looking for besides dark ones?”

In fact, the College’s website states that the school “was the first American college to prohibit in its charter any discrimination based on race, religion or sex, and became an early force for the abolition of slavery.”  One early visitor to the college was Frederick Douglass (pictured).

The OOPPS bureaucracy at first denied it had sent out any such campus color-coordinators but had to relent when Hillsdale produced a written memorandum of such a visit, in 1998.

C.S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters comes to mind:

The greatest evil is not done now in those sordid ’dens of rime’ that Dickens loved to paint. It is not even done in concentration camps and labor camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice.

Higher education policy asserts that categorizations by race and ethnicity are needed to “ensure” quality, when of course they promote the opposite. Can anyone cite a single example of their improving higher education? Legislators’ mock offense taken at Arnn’s sardonic “dark ones” comment would have been credibly directed at the instigators of such classifications, who seem to forget we are all of one human nature. This self-evident truth lies at the heart of Hillsdale’s teaching from its founding through today.

The post The UN’s Failures Show Why the U.S. Is the Indispensable Nation appeared first on Online Library of Law & Liberty.

Ever since the reelection of President Obama, bureaucrats have been behaving badly. Conservatives may have steeled themselves to expect bad performance from bureaucrats at all times; but even fans of federal authority should be concerned about recent bungling and abuses. The Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) required millions of Americans to sign up for health-insurance policies, but last year’s rollout of the federal website failed disastrously and has been limping ever since. The Veterans Administration turned out to be falsifying records to conceal long waiting times and poor care at hospitals for military veterans. When it was revealed that the Internal Revenue Service…

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Jeremy Rabkin has written a fine essay about the continuing relevance of James Q. Wilson’s 1989 book Bureaucracy: What Government Agencies Do and Why They Do It. I have been fortunate enough to benefit from Wilson’s analysis in my own writing on the Justice Department’s Office of the Solicitor General. His framework showed why the craft values of a bureaucracy often resist the President’s jurisprudential positions. But I want to use this brief essay to discuss a few issues that I do not believe Wilson sufficiently stresses, and to suggest corrective legislation that might be passed to rectify these distinctive problems…

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It’s Bureaucracy’s twenty-fifth birthday. To celebrate, let’s state some basic facts that correspond with James Q. Wilson’s thinking. Americans want a lot from their government. We want more than we’ve wanted before. It doesn’t ultimately matter where these desires come from (rising standards of living? the inner logic of democracy? interest groups? politicians?). What matters is that they exist and influence government behavior. Wilson reminded his readers, in Bureaucracy and elsewhere, that we get the government we ask for—and of course he was right. Americans expect much from their government, government power changes to meet these demands, and the part…

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All the participants in this discussion seem to agree that James Q. Wilson’s book, Bureaucracy, still offers valuable insights, a quarter century after its initial publication. At the same time, we all seem to agree that Wilson’s book didn’t prepare readers for the scale of dysfunction we now see in the federal bureaucracy. We have some disagreement, however, about the explanation of current patterns and what’s most disturbing about them. John McGinnis stresses that federal officials – or at least, a lot of staff attorneys in the Justice Department – are too committed to left-wing visions and too ready to let…

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