In this episode, Doug Thompson, associate professor of political science at the University of South Carolina, sings the praises of bureaucracy and its essential role in the fight against climate change.
Text transcript:
David Roberts
It’s well-understood that the modern US conservative movement is a mix of two primary forces, fiscal and social conservatism. (See: fusionism.) Put more crudely: it’s the oligarchs and the evangelical white nationalists.
The left’s pushback to social conservatism — anti-racism and civil rights more broadly — is well-developed and richly articulated. But what about the oligarchs and their stated mission to, in Steve Bannon’s words, “deconstruct the administrative state”? Where is the left’s defense of the administrative state, or as it’s less fondly known, the bureaucracy, or even less fondly, the “deep state”? Who will speak up for the deep state?
The left has an ambivalent relationship with bureaucracy (which, after all, only overlapped with democracy for the last century or so) and has largely failed to articulate a coherent defense, even as Biden’s administration scrambles to rebuild the agencies Trump decimated.
The right has told a clear, consistent story: government bureaucracies are corrupt, inefficient, incompetent, and expensive. It has been repeated to the point that it is folk wisdom. To this day, the left does not have a similarly clear and consistent counter-story about the merits of bureaucracy, or, to use a less loaded term, administrative capacity.
State administrative capacity may not be well-theorized on the left, but it is nonetheless a necessary condition of virtually all progressives’ solutions to contemporary problems, climate change chief among them. The wealthy can not be taxed, corporations can not be forced to follow the rules, and wealth can not be transferred to those in need without a robust, competent administrative state.
My guest today, Doug Thompson, an associate professor of political science at the University of South Carolina, has been thinking and writing about bureaucracy lately, as part of a larger book project on authoritarianism in America. He wondered why aspiring autocrats invariably degrade administrative capacity the second they are able — what they know about it that small-d democrats don’t seem to — which led him to an investigation of bureacracy that traced through Tocqueville and du Bois.
Anyway, I’m excited to geek out with Thompson about the intense oligarchic hatred of the administrative state, America’s rich and somewhat surprising history with bureaucracy, and the kinds of positive arguments that can be made on behalf of administrative capacity as such.
Without further ado, Doug Thompson, welcome to Volts. Thanks for coming.
Doug Thompson:
Thank you very much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.
David Roberts:
We're going to talk about bureaucracy, which many people mistakenly think is a boring subject; we're going to set them straight. One of the points you make in your writing is that bureaucracy and democracy have somewhat separate histories and only really intertwined recently. As a consequence, our ways of thinking and talking about democracy were shaped in a pre-bureaucratic age and we don't have a robust language to defend democratic bureaucracy as such. Tell us a little bit about that history and how it’s shaped political science and political views.
Doug Thompson:
Sure. Bureaucracy has been around for thousands of years. The first unified Chinese Empire was founded and established by putting together all of these little statelets that had been at war with each other for a few hundred years. All of these states, over the course of their development, had acquired pretty significant administrative capacity. They had a dedicated, somewhat professionalized bureaucracy that was able to levy taxes and measure the population and measure land and take all that information down to help the first Chinese emperors rule. This set China on this path that it continues to be on to this day, of the rise and fall of dynasties but the constant reconstruction of those dynasties on the basis of a pretty significantly powerful and centralized bureaucratic state.
Of course, those are autocratic societies. On the other hand, democratic societies typically developed not only in the absence of bureaucracy, but in many cases because of the absence of bureaucracy. If you're a ruler and you want to demand your people pay some taxes, you can't just yell it from the treetops and expect them to pay up. If you don't have a dedicated administrative system to collect that kind of revenue – the kind of policy that nobody likes; no one wants to pay taxes – then you have to go to other elites in your society, or perhaps even a broad swath of the population if it's a relatively democratic place, and you have to consult with them and convince them to pay up and why it's in their interests.
We see the development of early democratic institutions that way, because of the absence of bureaucracy. You have these two separate trajectories. It's really not until very recently, 19th but certainly in the 20th centuries, when you have large-scale democracies, like the United States, where a huge swath of the population that's able to vote is tied to pretty significant bureaucratic institutions for the first time.
The founding of the US is a great example of demand for democracy because of the absence of bureaucracy. In the 1600s, if the folks running those English colonies on that stolen land (let's call it what it is) want to build a schoolhouse or a road, or irrigate their fields, or whatever it is they want to do, there's no administrative system there that can carry out those policies. They have to come together, consult with each other, debate with each other, then all vote together what to do. You can picture in early America how the absence of bureaucracy made democracy necessary.
David Roberts:
As you say, in the political science literature and also in folk wisdom, a lot of times bureaucracy is framed as counter to the spirit of democracy. That's probably a consequence also of bureaucracy coming late to the game.
Doug Thompson:
I think that's right. There's also another issue that comes up. The earliest development of modern democracies in the 19th and 20th century are larger-scale, more inclusive democracies where people vote for representatives, rather than small councils of elites debating amongst themselves, like in Athens. This time where bureaucracies begin to develop in these democratic societies happens to also coincide with probably the greatest humanitarian crimes in human history.
David Roberts:
Very notably bureaucratized crimes.
Doug Thompson:
Yes. Bureaucracy gets a bad name in many ways because of that. We think of the Nazi regime and its horribly bureaucratized system of mass murder, personified in Adolf Eichmann in Hannah Arendt’s book. We also think of the Stalin regime in the Soviet Union, which also kills millions and is known to have a centralized bureaucratic state. In the American case, Robert McNamara’s Pentagon during the Vietnam War was also a heavily bureaucratized system with all kinds of weird benchmarks, body counts and horrible stuff that also rationalized murder; Americans killed 2 million Vietnamese people. There are reasons why bureaucracy got a bad name as it was being attached to democracies, because it was put to, frankly, anti-democratic uses as well during that period.
David Roberts:
Clearly bureaucracy is a tool that can be used for good or bad, but it's no coincidence that aspiring authoritarians always go after bureaucracy. You sent me a paper a while back on the “authoritarian dilemma”: that any democracy is born out of something else, and the ruling class in whatever else that was is not going to like transferring to democracy; and is still going to be there in the democracy, probably willfully trying to destroy it; yet the democracy, being a democracy, has to extend equal rights to those people.
I've been thinking about that recently, for obvious reasons. We have our own aristocracy that never accepted the onset of real democracy. Say a little bit about why we see this regularity throughout modern history, that autocrats always want to degrade the state.
Doug Thompson:
We can see this in a number of periods of American history and American political development. A great example is the antebellum South. The slave states of the South are not democracies by any stretch of the imagination; the internal politics of the states, especially in the Deep South, are dominated by massively wealthy landowning families that have huge estates, enslave hundreds of people, and make tremendous amounts of money, through the value of humans (since humans are given a financial value during this period), their land, and selling cotton like gangbusters on international markets.
They're in charge of everything in those states. When you need to build a road there, if you want to take care of any kind of policy, usually it's done through highly personalized influence networks and clientelistic networks, and those at the top are at the top of those networks. So the imposition of authority from outside – like the federal government coming in and handing over the administration of roads, of schools, of tax collection, of land use and land distribution, and the monitoring and defense of people's rights – is going to look like a huge imposition and a giant loss of power that these elites enjoyed in the prior, pre-democratic era. It's not just a loss of their money and their prestige; it's a loss of their identity, too. These guys are the lords of this area. They stand to lose everything by federalization and bureaucratization, so they're going to push back against it.
You do get some bureaucratization. During the Reconstruction period you have the Freedmen's Bureau, which is dedicated to implementing the policies put in place after the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments are passed. There are all kinds of problems with the Freedmen's Bureau – it's understaffed and underfunded, but it is a federal bureaucratic system that is enforced by military force; the Army is still occupying the South in the decade or so after the war. And there's a violent insurrection against that system.
David Roberts:
If you're on top of one of those local power structures – you're the son of the guy who owns all the car dealerships or whatever – even if it's only subconscious, you know that to the extent the playing field is made more level, you're not going to come out on top where you were. Insofar as there is a hint of meritocracy introduced, you're in trouble; you know that your reign is not justified or warranted by talent. That's why they've all put so much energy into the mythologies that justify their rule, because they're insecure about it on some level. They know.
Doug Thompson:
This is not really a bureaucratic question, although it can be in many cases, but think of the inclusion of women in elite parts of the workforce and the labor markets, and the incredible pushback on that. If 50 percent of the population that had been relatively forcibly excluded from the best jobs – the neurosurgeon, the high-end lawyer – now is competition, the idiot third son of your local car dealership owner who was going to get into law school now might not, because now he’s got to put up with all this competition.
David Roberts:
All the aristocracies are terrified on some level that if the people they treat like shit gain some power, they’ll treat them like shit. It's clear that the autocrats know that centralized bureaucracy works against them.
Let's flip over and make the positive case for bureaucracy. If you ask 10 random lefties on the street “how do you feel about bureaucracy?” I’m not sure that they would feel positively at all, much less be able to articulate why bureaucracies are good.
Let's tick through some of the reasons. One of the most interesting, and something you argue in your writing that political science has overlooked, is that centralized bureaucracies often do not only reflect the desires of voters, they also affect the way voters see things and the way voters view politics, and in some sense can create constituencies for further change. You wrote about how the Freedmen's Bureau worked that way. Say a little bit about that.
Doug Thompson:
There's an excellent literature on this in political science. It goes by the name of “policy feedback” – how policies, when they’re implemented, affect the process.
There are a few ways that people could frame positive effects of bureaucracy; the one you mentioned is probably the most complicated, so I may get to that one last. It’ll tie your brain in knots if you think about it closely, but we'll get to it.
One of the things that we can say about bureaucracy that is intuitively appealing is that it gives democratic citizens a freedom and power that they wouldn't have otherwise had. When majorities of citizens vote for representatives because those representatives promise to put in place certain policies, if there's no administrative capacity to actually carry out those policies, then it doesn't matter if you vote for them or not, because they'll never happen.
If Congress puts in a law that says “I command companies not to dump toxins into the air or the water,” it's like shouting for taxes from the treetops in the year 1200. Nobody's going to comply with this. You need to have a dedicated staff with a budget and a bunch of experts who can monitor the air and water quality on a day-to-day basis and make sure that the compliance is going on.
David Roberts:
I talked with an expert in Chinese environmentalism recently, and one of the things he said was that the central bureaucracy in China has some ambitions about clean air and clean water and climate change, but frequently it is shouting those commands down to local parochial rulers who have other counter-incentives about making money or fast economic growth and who can just ignore it. The Chinese central party views the EPA and the system of the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act with envy, precisely because it enables us to do these things that we want to do, which are not trivial.
Doug Thompson:
The Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act are policies with huge majority support. In an abstract way, if you say “the EPA is shutting down small businesses and we all hate environmentalists telling you what to do,” you can tell a story that will get people to hate the EPA. But when you ask people “do you want your kids to have horrible asthma or get terrible cancers because of poisons in the air?” everybody says no to that question.
David Roberts:
The problem is the next step you want them to take, which is that the only way to do that is our big, professionalized bureaucracy. We've built a giant, complicated, very professional, very well-functioning machine that enables you to have those preferences. If we didn't have the machine, you could, as my granddad used to say, have the preferences in one hand and pee in the other and see which one fills up first. Preferences without capacity are futile.
Doug Thompson:
Absolutely. That's one of the intuitive stories that we can tell and broadcast publicly. Even Republicans will say they want to have clean air. Republican voters often agree with Democratic voters about specific policies; depends on how you word it, of course. You're free to express your desires in your vote and have it turn into a reality because of that administrative capacity.
We can also make a case for individual bodily freedom that Americans find very appealing. Are you really free to move around where you live? In your metropolitan area, are you really free to commute if you have terrible roads and minimal transportation options? If the transportation infrastructure in your area is awful, your freedom to move around and your choices are reduced.
I used to live in Chicago, and when I would go to work I had two bus routes, two different train routes, and I could drive or bike or walk if I wanted to. I had multiple options for going to work because there's a (crumbling sometimes but decent) public transportation system. I live in South Carolina now and there's very little transportation infrastructure in the South. My individual choices are greatly reduced. I have to drive my car, I have no choice.
David Roberts:
Most Americans have no idea how much their freedom is restricted by car dependence under the illusion of freedom. The whole thing is sold under the banner of freedom, but nothing more restricts our abilities and capacities and choices than car dependence.
Doug Thompson:
It’s a forced choice too. It's a piece of administrative capacity that's lacking.
David Roberts:
We're getting at the distinction between negative and positive freedoms. Negative freedom being, people leave you alone, but positive freedoms being, what is your array of choices? Bureaucracy and good public administration and administrative capacity enlarges the choice landscape, so increases positive freedoms.
Doug Thompson:
One hundred percent. Both on an individual level, in terms of stuff you can do in your area, but also in a larger collective democratic sense. We the people have more choices about what we can ask for and demand from our governments because they're able to deliver those things that we want, such as clean air, clean water, and good infrastructure.
But the one that you asked about initially is the tricky one, and has to do with that policy feedback literature in political science that I was talking about. The way that administrative programs are designed can often have profound mobilizing effects on voting constituencies, and really creative effects in producing new voting constituencies through which we the people can express ourselves. But if designed poorly or maliciously, which often is the case, they can also be profoundly demobilizing.
For example, Social Security was intentionally designed to be very mobilizing. If you're working, you pay into Social Security while you're working, so you're highly conscious of the fact that you are participating in Social Security throughout all of your working life. If politicians come in and say “let's privatize Social Security and expose you to the vagaries of the market,” or “let's try to get rid of it altogether,” as a lot of donors to the Republican Party at present would like to do, you have this already mobilizable constituency that’s ready to say “wait a minute, we actually have an implicit right in this society not to die of old age in poverty and penury and starvation, so I'm going to defend that right.”
The way it's designed makes it obvious to you that you're a recipient and a participant in this your whole life, even if you're not near retirement yet. Even if you're 35 but you've been paying into it for a while, you know you’re paying into it, and you're going to defend it. We saw that in action after the 2004 election, the only election since 1988 in which a Republican candidate managed to win the popular vote majority.
David Roberts:
If there's one thing the US has successfully done, it is mobilize old people as a political constituency.
Doug Thompson:
We mobilized old people in a number of different ways. Medicare is another example of that. People are very well aware that they’re recipients of that program, and huge supermajorities of Americans like those programs. When polled, majorities of Republicans say that they like Medicare; poll Democrats, it's a massive majority.
David Roberts:
You see that finding notoriously over and over again: Americans will tell you they hate bureaucracy and hate government, but almost every individual result of bureaucracy and government, they love. Part of making a case for bureaucracy has to be not always getting sucked up into abstractions and talking more about concrete things.
Doug Thompson:
Although we can get too bogged down in thinking about the individual programs and thinking “well, we're policy wonks, so therefore let me talk about this or that program,” one of the things we've failed to do is to come up with a coherent, concise, unifying narrative about why all of these administrative departments and programs are more than the sum of their parts, but actually are an inherent part of a modern democracy and making a free people and the kind of life that we as modern people want to live. Those institutions are essential to that.
David Roberts:
Getting back to this example of creating constituencies and feedback loops, one of the few clean energy policies that have actually been successful and resilient is the federal tax credits. There's this whole machinery now of federal tax credits around renewable energy, and probably that policy has done more than anything else to make those constituencies conscious of themselves as constituencies and politically mobilized.
Doug Thompson:
You're absolutely right. Even tax breaks can be profoundly mobilizing. For example, mortgage tax breaks (which can fuel inequality because of course renters don't get that, which doesn't make sense).
David Roberts:
That's another thing the US has done really well – mobilize homeowners against future homes.
Doug Thompson:
These mobilizing effects can be very negative if they're focused on entrenching people who are already benefiting from the system and shutting out other people – as you say, with blocking out new homebuilding. But in the case of clean energy, whether it's a tax incentive for solar panels, or buying a new battery, or a new electric car, that also can be mobilizing, in good ways.
We could also say something about public transportation. If you suddenly told New Yorkers that you're going to take away the subway system and we're all driving cars now, people would explode. You couldn't do that.
David Roberts:
Another thing that you note in favor of administrative capacity is that it's the first and only way we’ve figured out how to sustain a broad middle class in a democracy, which is also a relatively new thing in the world.
Doug Thompson:
It really is. When the US was founded, by random chance, it was a relatively equal society – amongst free, white, landowning men, which is not a universal group by any stretch of the imagination. But if you look at the economic data from the time, the US was a more equal society economically than England or other countries in Western Europe or elsewhere at the time.
Then inequality rose over the course of the 19th century. There was this sweet spot period of relative income equality and a relatively much more equal society (not perfect equality by any means) in the few decades after World War II. There was enough of an equal distribution of wealth to build a large middle class for the first time in American history; one of the first times in world history, really, that you have this large, modern, urban, middle class.
Part of that was undergirded by a huge array of administrative programs that intentionally were produced to build a middle class. Billions of dollars of public money were put into middle class suburban housing development. A lot of that was administered on a racially exclusive basis; a lot of those policies were explicitly only for white homeowners at the federal, state, and local levels. But those policies did build a larger middle class than had lived there before.
You can see this also with Social Security and the administration of collective bargaining rights, which was tremendously important for building a large middle class.
David Roberts:
if you want to redistribute wealth (which is a demonized phrase these days but clearly is what we and every other democracy are doing), if you want to keep income inequality from getting out of control and you want to systematically lift up the working classes, you need a big machine to redistribute all that money. It's a job fraught with the temptation for corruption and inside dealing; the only way you get around that is to create an administrative culture that has its own values and practices and has integrity aside from the interests of the people it's dealing with. You need an administrative culture of quality and competence, especially in that area.
Doug Thompson:
This is one of the reasons why the IRS has been intentionally attacked and defunded and understaffed over the last several decades. The US has become a much more unequal society over the last four decades as the gains of economic growth have gone to the people at the very top; the very wealthy have gotten much wealthier, we all know the story. Incomes have stagnated for 90 percent of Americans, while health care costs, secondary education costs, and housing costs have gone up and up and up.
The middle class has shrunk, and taxing wealthy people who can pay for it to fund infrastructure and education that will help ordinary people get ahead – without destroying wealthy people; no one's talking about revolution, at least in mainstream politics – is a pretty popular program. If you ask people “should very wealthy people pay a little bit more in taxes since they've been benefiting way more than everybody else over the last 40 years?” people say yes to that at large majority rates.
David Roberts:
This is what I was getting at before. You can get people to say yes to that, but how do you get them to take the next step – to not just love taxing rich people, but to love the IRS without which you could not do it? The IRS has a terrible reputation.
Doug Thompson:
And by design. The very intentional counter-strategy to that has been to pour billions of dollars of lobbying money into Congress, to have Congress, when writing tax law, write in all kinds of exceptions and complications. The US tax code is tens of thousands of pages long, when other countries’ tax codes are often shorter.
David Roberts:
And we force normal people to fill out their own tax returns. I don't know if most Americans are aware of this, but in other civilized countries, the government will generally just fill out your forms for you and send them to you to sign. We don't do that, because TurboTax has a lock on Congress.
If you need large bureaucracies to do things and you erode away your administrative capacity, what comes to fill that is corporate capacity, which is not better and not necessarily more efficient, despite all the market myths. I feel like neoliberalism should have taught us that it's not automatically better to have private actors fill that space.
Doug Thompson:
This is often the contemporary equivalent of old, feudal, personal influence networks. Private owners will take care of all these services for you in ways that obviously are going to benefit them primarily, and they’re going to feed the wealth that they accrue from capturing these services back into the political process to bend the rules more in their favor.
The complicated tax law is a great example of that. The IRS can easily get ahold of all of my records; all of my income comes from working. But it's easy to hide money if you have enough money to pay for the kinds of financial services that know how to do that. And the huge, very powerful financial services firms that cater to the wealthiest clients have way more legal firepower than the IRS has, by design, because those firms lobby Congress to defund and diminish the personnel in the IRS. That then feeds back onto the public where people say, “I hate the IRS, it's such a pain to fill out those forms and then I get audited. I'm just a small business owner, why am I being audited?” When, as we've seen, very wealthy Americans are paying close to nothing in taxes these days.
David Roberts:
They somehow rallied to defang and degrade the IRS, and (to get back to the larger theme of the conversation) there isn't language laying around with which to defend a big bureaucracy. We don't have that vocabulary or conceptual structure, despite the fact that the US has this mythology of individualism – yeoman farmers and independence and all this. But the US has actually been a pioneer in bureaucracy at several points, and not just in the modern era. Tell us about that.
Doug Thompson:
One of the issues we have in talking about bureaucracy is that so much of our language for talking about politics comes from early modern and ancient Europe, where strong centralized bureaucratic states were notably absent. A lot of our language is based around ideas that are in many cases wonderful and worth defending, but don't tell us much about bureaucratic institutions.
This was an issue in the 19th century as the first centralized bureaucratic institutions were developing. One of the earliest examples would be the Post Office Department, which had thousands of employees and a centralized administrator overseeing it that actually was a cabinet position by the 1820s. It covered thousands of miles of roads and was the principal source of information dispersal that was able to create a new, national, modern democracy in the United States.
David Roberts:
Getting back to our point about the feedbacks, the ability to send information to and fro anywhere in this territory in a large way made it into a country and created Americans as a constituency.
Doug Thompson:
Exactly. As de Tocqueville puts it in Democracy in America, although I don't know exactly what words he used, it took this abstract idea of a national community and lodged it in people's habits; no longer just concepts, but actual habits. You felt like a member not just of Virginia or Massachusetts or whatever but of this “we the people” that was just words on paper a couple decades ago. The building of a national culture was produced through the rise of administrative capacity in the US.
Nineteenth century Americans often didn't recognize this. They thought of the US government only in terms of the separation of the three powers and Bill of Rights and that sort of thing. Throughout the 19th century, Americans did not describe those kinds of institutions as administrative or bureaucratic institutions. They didn't have a concept for it, because it wasn't yet part of the national culture.
David Roberts:
In the 20th century, weirdly under Nixon, there's a flourishing of administrative capacity in ways that are notably successful. It's not part of our folklore about American successes, but the flourishing of administrative capacity in those years has redounded to our benefit in so many ways.
Doug Thompson:
Absolutely. The Clean Air Act is an example of an innovative program where the US is a first adopter. You can say something similar about New Deal programs from the 30s and 40s, some of which have lasted to the present, such as Social Security. And think of the huge gains made by middle class people in the United States due to collective bargaining rights that were monitored and implemented through the National Labor Relations Board and other agencies.
David Roberts:
There's a well-known phenomenon in the environmental sphere called green drift. Once the Reagan Revolution happened, it became practically impossible to pass substantial new environmental legislation, but the administrative capacity set up by those pivotal 60s and 70s laws (the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, etc.) was designed to evolve, and it just kept evolving and moving forward and taking care of new threats and expanding its remit. It was built to evolve, and that's the main reason the oligarchs hate it, because it works so well.
Doug Thompson:
They have funneled billions of dollars into think tanks to develop theories as to why the mission creep of those bureaucratic institutions is fundamentally against American principles, and that it amounts to (and they’ve been saying this since the 30s) a form of socialism, in some cases even communism, and is a road to destruction, a road to serfdom.
David Roberts:
I feel like there are two contrasting instincts or impulses that ordinary people, including me, have about bureaucracy. One is the traditional conservative instinct, which is that the farther away from the local level you move administration and the more you centralize it, the more you create bureaucracies that are distant from the people they're supposed to serve, and they become inefficient and issue burdensome rules because they're not in touch enough with the people on the ground. This whole idea that centralizing moves away from democracy is a very common small-c conservative story, and it’s sunk in even to ordinary people.
But then there's the counter-intuition, which I have very strongly these days, which is that the closer the locus of political administration gets to the local level, the more likely it is to recreate and be taken over by those local power hierarchies and used to their benefit. I think of the example of California NIMBYs. They have this theoretically extremely democratic process of housing in California, but what that mainly amounts to is that locals control everything, and they use it to cement their power and their money, which derives from housing scarcity. So in that case it's very intuitive – to be more fair and to pursue more public benefits, you need to be moving the administration up, away from the local level.
Everybody has versions of these two instincts. Is there something we can say about what marks a good and legitimate bureaucracy from the many, many bad ones we have examples of? Are there rules or guidelines about what's the best bureaucracy and what's the right level of administrative control?
Doug Thompson:
That's a great question. The answer is always incredibly complicated, unfortunately. There are some things we can say clearly, though. We have seen in American history how dangerous it is to leave the administration of policies that touch upon people's fundamental rights as people and also as citizens – for example, voting rights – up to the local level.
Maybe there are different policies that are more appropriate for administration at a local or state or regional level, but for policies that touch upon fundamental rights, it's not enough to leave them up to the states because it's too dangerous that those laws will be captured by local elites and that people's rights will be taken away from them. We’re seeing this as a real possibility in the current moment with reproductive rights.
David Roberts:
It seems we disagree about what's a basic right. We're having that argument under cover of this weird procedural argument about which level of government we're going to do it at. It’s a little silly.
Doug Thompson:
This is an aside, but I think a lot of the elites and ordinary citizens who say they want to get rid of those rights have not thought through the horribly authoritarian consequences that are to follow as soon as Roe goes down. Speaking of administrative capacity, how do you police that rule if all of a sudden abortion is murder in one state but it's not murder in the state right next door? How are you going to police that without intense surveillance, discipline, and horrible threats?
David Roberts:
Conservatives love law enforcement administrative capacity. They love the need for that. Look at the knee-jerk response to 9/11 and the years following; a lot of that was just a bureaucratization of paranoia and permanent war footing. You need a coherent critique of bureaucracy in those cases that also makes room for good bureaucracy.
So as you say, the more fundamental the rights involved, it seems the less should be left in local hands. You also mention public feedback, some way for the administrative process to not be the opposite of democracy but to involve democratic participation.
Doug Thompson:
Yes. A way we can measure or think about whether something is a good, democratic, public power-enhancing, public freedom-enhancing administrative system is whether it mobilizes or demobilizes people.
Take Medicaid, which is administered by states. Because it deals with poorer people, states will often fragment the implementation within the state and intentionally put up several administrative burdens, like all kinds of paperwork about whether you're working, how much you're working, how many hours a week you're looking for work. This makes it very difficult for people to access those programs, but it also is profoundly demobilizing, because you've fragmented groups of citizens; you've branded them as less than the rest of the population, which is a horrible thing to do; and you've given them all of this administrative work that they have to do so they don't have time for anything else.
David Roberts:
I think some earnest, center-left, moderate Dems don't get this. They hear about means testing, and they're just thinking about it in the abstract quantitative, like how it affects the top line budget numbers. But the conservatives pushing stuff like that instinctively get that the real effect of means testing is demobilization, and that the demobilizing effect matters even more than a budget effect.
Doug Thompson:
Very clearly. They learned this from their successful anti-labor politics from the 80s onward, going after and successfully gutting private sector labor unions that were a major source of mobilization for the Democratic Party. (There's no reason why Republicans couldn't also appeal to those unions; they obviously just didn't want to.) That mobilization was terrifying for anti-labor Republicans and huge business owners who don't want to pay higher wages and certainly don't want to pay for any social programs through taxation. That was an intentional strategy to shut down unions, not just because they don't want the union to bother them about higher wages, but also because they saw that political mobilization power that unions give to ordinary workers. This is also why, more recently, they've gone after public sector unions, such as in the case of Wisconsin under Scott Walker.
David Roberts:
Not to get all socialist on you, but the last thing capital wants is for workers to be mobilized and to think of themselves as a constituency. Legendarily, this is what racism has always in part been about in the US: preventing the formation of a cross-racial, self-identified constituency of workers.
Doug Thompson:
And it’s one of the most successful strategies. Again, when polled with “do you want to have clean water and clean air?” people say “absolutely.” If you poll most Americans and ask “would you like to have government introduce a better public health care system that will reduce your costs and provide better outcomes to more people?” – which we know is possible, because other countries do it – most people will say “actually, yes, I would like that kind of administrative system to be established and strengthened and well-funded so that I get better medical services.” Because the private health care system in the United States is a total catastrophe. It's awful. People hate it and are aware of the fact that they hate it.
David Roberts:
This is why the “get your government hands off my Medicare” sign is so telling. It speaks to this split brain. The effect of the bureaucracy, the results of the administrative capacity, are valued. Yet somehow, at the same time, in the same mind, the origin of that administrative capacity is bad. The capacity itself is bad, even though the results are good.
Doug Thompson:
The Republican Party and the massive wealthy donor organizations that basically have taken over the party at this point have been effective at repeating over and over again a very simple narrative that those institutions amount to socialism and tyranny. Especially, they have been very effective, through dog whistles and sometimes through overt appeals, to paint administrative institutions, especially social insurance and other forms of regulation, as racial transfers from hard-working white Americans to “those people” who don't want to work – which is of course nonsense, but has been very effective.
You can get people to vote against people who are promising the stuff that they actually want if you can activate that feeling of identity threat – “they try to take stuff from people like me.” In fact, most of those voters would benefit and, when asked separately from that messaging, know that they would benefit.
The question is, what is the elite counter-messaging that can activate those voters otherwise? I don't know. That's a tough question. And some of them may be gone for a while.
David Roberts:
I've been thinking about the love affair that American lefties have with the Scandinavian government, but missing from that is specifically an appreciation of their very competent, professionalized administrative capacity. They are good at government, and that is what enables the whole thing to happen.
In the 2016 Democratic primary, you have a variety of messages on offer. You have traditional, moderate, Dem wishy-washiness. You have Sanders on the left, offering all the socialist goodies. Then you have Warren, and a big part of her message and public record is about administrative capacity. She gets that it's incredibly important what agencies you have, who is staffing the agencies, what the rules are; she gets that it's the mechanics and architecture behind the scenes that are really shaping results. And she tries to build a campaign at least in part around “I've got a plan for that, I'm going to make the administrative state better. I've got plans to fix the bureaucracies and make them more high-functioning.”
To me, that's singing my heart song. But the moderate Dems, the self-identified pragmatists – they don't seem to care about it. They just care about their same old boring, watered-down, austerity stuff. The lefties, the Sanderites, don’t seem to care about it either. So Warren doesn’t take off.
There's obviously a lot going on in and around all that, but one of the lessons to me is that it is super difficult to mobilize people in a democratic polity around good bureaucracy, even though good bureaucracy is the very fundament of everything they want and care about. Is that just the way of things and we're stuck with it? Or do you see any prospect of making a defense of administrative capacity a real significant plank in anyone's politics?
Doug Thompson:
It's time for Democrats and others who want to defend democracy against its very dangerous assault at the moment to lean in to the actual benefits that we receive – and I don't mean financial benefits from particular programs, but the stability, the capacity for wealth generation if you want to look at it in those terms, the capacity to make choices in your life, to vote for stuff that you want to vote for, to have clean air that your kids can enjoy, and a future that is bright for all of us.
David Roberts:
I'm sure you've read Michael Lewis’ The Fifth Risk; that's a great book that's exactly about this. There's administration stuff going on all around you all the time, keeping you safe, that you don't even know about.
Doug Thompson:
People take a pay cut to do those jobs; you can make more money in industry and they choose not to because they love that stuff.
It's time for us to lean into that narrative. One of the pitfalls we can fall into (and I'm not saying necessarily that Warren did) is to focus only on the fragmented array of various administrative programs and why they're individually good. We can’t only say “I have a plan for that and for that and for that” but not stitch that together into a coherent narrative about your freedom to vote, your freedom to have the policies that you want, your freedom to have a possibility of a middle class life and an affordable house to live in, and roads that work, and schools that you really want, and a stable climate, and a rational program for when areas are going to degrowth because the Colorado River isn't flowing anymore. Do you want your children and grandchildren to be free to have those things? Or do you want to have those things taken away from you because Steve Bannon and massively wealthy billionaires are working 24 hours a day with laser focus to destroy those administrative systems on which your freedom depends?
You can have a more rousing language for this and not get bogged down in the details. Of course you're going to have policy stuff on your website that's going to talk about those details of how you're going to fund it, how you're going to implement it, and why this design is mobilizing to constituencies and why this one is bad. Absolutely, get in the weeds. But there is a passionate story to be told about bureaucracy and democracy in America, and I hope that people might be ready to hear it.
David Roberts:
I’m trying to envision how that might play out in coming elections.
Doug Thompson:
Who knows? I might be overly optimistic.
David Roberts:
Maybe in 10 years when the war's over and Reconstruction has begun.
Well, this is fascinating. I was excited to find someone trying to rehab bureaucracy in the eyes of political science. Thanks so much for coming on.
Doug Thompson:
Thank you very much for having me. I enjoyed it.
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