Can anyone dismantle the administrative state?
Only one president has had both the desire and opportunity to crush and disable the administrative state, but more importantly, end the Marxist dialectic that has infected and subsumed this nation and post-modern Western civilization.
Nixon wished to shrink the federal bureaucracy, but enemies inside the government would never allow him the opportunity, while Nixon himself, at the same time, enlarged the administrative state by creating the EPA. Reagan could have engineered the opportunity, but never gave his Office of Management and Budget director, David Stockman, enough power to go beyond just designing tax cuts and small-ball regulatory reform.
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President Trump and his Office of Management and Budget chief, Russ Vought, have maneuvered and neutered the opposition, positioning the so-called government shutdown, allowing Trump and Vought to seize nearly unlimited Article II power and prerogative to eliminate half of the federal workforce and erase the bureaucracy to levels not seen since Calvin Coolidge.
If not Donald Trump, then who?
How did we get here? And why is this the moment to fulfill the counter-revolutionary dialectic reversing Karl Marx’s force of destiny?
Marx’s struggle actually wasn’t between the propertied class and the proletariat, according to the late sociologist Alvin Gouldner in his work, The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class.
The proletariat were mere pawns in the real war for power between the property-owning class and the upcoming rival—the mercenary technocrat and intellectual class, as Professor Darren Stallof remarks in his YouTube reading of Gouldner’s argument.
Further, since FDR, this intellectual class has gradually elbowed its way to power in enlarging, controlling, and manipulating the administrative state, according to retired UNLV sociologist Professor John Marini, in two podcasts with Steven Hayward at Powerline (here and here).
Marini says this intellectual class has dictated rules and norms to the propertied class, and nearly everyone else. It’s an incremental, subtle coup in the takeover of private property and the means of production while dismantling the US Constitution by obviating the separation of powers.
The Marx and Engels “clash of the titans” never actually benefited the working class. Instead, it only enabled the intellectual elitists, the cultural bourgeoisie, the revolutionary technocrats in exploiting the working class to seize state and economic power—ostensibly only temporarily—to facilitate the redistribution of wealth and power to the common man.
Engels expected the proletariat takeover would lead to the evaporation of the temporary central state. Except in the real world, following Nietzsche’s Will to Power, once it acquired central state power, the intellectual class never relinquished it.
Reversing the destructive force behind the administrative state and dismantling it requires more than just a hygienic cleansing. It must be a transforming demolition, leaving neither surface nor cavity behind to let the toxic state hibernate, survive, and re-populate. Instead, we need a politico-governance nuclear winter, leaving only a salted bunker-busted pile of rubble.
A government shutdown doesn’t have to be another inconsequential, flaccid, fleeting mini-drama. It can be the beginning of our own dialectic.
Trump now has the opportunity to make the government shutdown permanent. The big question is whether he has the will?