Why Progressives Believe Democracy is Undemocratic

The Progressives' View Of Democracy

That most of the political absurdity these days is generated by progressives is a given, and the nation has underscored that reality in the election, but where all the nonsense came from ideologically has been somewhat of a mystery, especially given that old-fashioned civil liberties’ liberals have fled the Democratic Party in droves.

Just who gave birth to woke progressives, and where are they hiding?

Woke pieties have abounded since the early years of the Obama administration with little resistance: Way back in 2016 Hillary Clinton made clear that the U.S. should embrace open borders. Things only escalated from there. Children should vote and society should encourage their self-mutilation without parental knowledge. The government should raise and educate our children. The U.S. should willingly bequeath to poorer nation its wealth and its manufacturing jobs so we can join the developing world in poverty. White people are racist, and so are white-people institutions, whatever those are, and founding documents such as the constitution.

Not least, people should not be free to say what they want. Hate speech must be criminalized, and the government will decide what is hate speech. As Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz finger-wagged us: free speech is not guaranteed.

One of the great hallucinations and head-scratchers in the modern progressive pantheon of absurdities is that democracy is somehow undemocratic, and nowhere is this more clearly articulated than in the left’s defense of the modern administrative state. Increasingly, while culture issues have dominated the headlines, thanks to corporate media’s obsession with anything DEI, the progressive left has circled the wagons around the federal bureaucracy as the most important vanguard of its revolutionary hopes.

It’s a distinct change from the Democratic Party’s liberalism of yesteryear. While the Old Left was fond of welfare bureaucracies as a tool for the modest or even immodest redistribution of wealth, today’s progressive left champions a saturating and smothering bureaucracy that redefines democracy itself and takes a whole-of-government approach to achieve complete control of society.

That is to say, in their minds, unelected bureaucrats are the lifeblood of democracy, and their nation-saving work in building, maintaining, and expanding bureaucratic collectivism must be defended at all costs. The real threat to democracy are those evil authoritarians who seek to tame bureaucratic power, otherwise known as those elected by the American people.

Here’s how James Goodwin, senior policy analyst at the Center for Progressive Reform, put it in 2023 in The New Republic:

Ah, government by the people is actually government by the bureaucrats. Who knew?

This is so much nonsense. We read these things and wonder what planet progressives live on. It is just common sense that, in a democracy, unelected officials answer to elected officials, who represent the people and their will. And not only answer to those officials, but work aggressively to implement the will of the people through their policy agendas.

It’s such a simple concept that many times we have to wonder if progressives suffer some type of delusional psychosis or derealization disorder.

The Transformation And Inversion Of Progressivism

Fear not. I’m here to tell you they are perfectly sane (I think).

More than anything, rank-and file progressives are merely brainwashed. After several generations of public schooling and media gaslighting, they can imagine only a fictive administrative state. To progressives, the administrative state is a wondrous entity, doing all sorts of wondrous things. It makes sure the food we buy is safe. It protects us with vigorous public health programs, especially vaccinations. It protects the environment; it insures our bank accounts; it steps in to serve vulnerable populations and underserved communities; it commands agencies to help register voters and make sure marginal communities have a voice; it ensures that sound science guides policy.

The reality, unbelievable to them, is that the real world is almost the opposite of what they think it is. Many of the foods the FDA approves are unhealthy; vaccinations are not always safe and effective; environmentalism is a trope for cultural virtue signaling and aesthetic compliance; voter registration is simply a ploy for votes from dependent populations; and protecting underserved communities is really DEI-mongering on a societal scale.

The bureaucracies act every day in vengeful, totalitarian ways and seek total control, but progressives see virtually none of this. They see oppressors and the oppressed, and they see elected individuals issuing calls for liberty and threatening the one thing progressives admire most in their world: The Collective. The Machine. The Borg bureaucracy. To them, that’s democracy.

The question remains, how did they get all woke in the first place?

The pat standard answer is to blame the original progressive movement for its insistence on a civil service based on expertise rather than on partisanship and patronage as a way to curb political corruption. There’s a lot of truth in that explanation, especially for New Deal liberals and their civil liberties’ heirs.

Take blind faith in liberal institutions to its logical conclusion and you have an unwieldy, too-powerful bureaucracy.

But believing in the value of giving federal departments independent agency does not explain the transformation of the core ideological tenets of progressivism from a view of bureaucracy as an important functional cog within the democratic polity, in which the civil servants managed a complex economy and delivered crucial social services with their expertise and ability to specialize, to an all-omniscient deity that must control not just government but life.

It’s a different world view about what the administrative state is, not a manager and implementer of democratic policy and law but a revolutionary vanguard whose superior knowledge makes it the arbiter of truth and the commander of government.

Herbert Is Alive And Thriving

That ideology is not rooted in the progressive movement of the early 20th century at all. It journeys instead from the nooks and crannies of the New Left in the 1960s, back during the Vietnam War when the New Left broke from the Old. The Old Left—whose modern-day descendants include such figures as Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, and Matt Taibbi —believed in civil liberties and free speech as foundational principles.

The New Left, whose descendants now control the Democratic Party, believed in no such thing. They believed in the New Left philosopher Hebert Marcuse instead.

For the unfamiliar, Marcuse was a totalitarian. The evisceration of civil liberties during the pandemic would have made Marcuse proud. For Marcuse, “free elections” and “free speech” in so-called democratic societies masked intolerable and massive oppression. The constitution he considered a ruse. Marcuse believed the government tolerated opposition within a “framework” determined by democratic institutions and rights, but such things as freedom of speech (and things like the constitution or the electoral college) merely reinforced the tyranny of those institutions under the guise of liberty.

Marcuse wrote: “Within the affluent democracy, the affluent discussion prevails, and within the established framework, it is tolerant to a large extent. All points of view can be heard: the Communist and the Fascist, the Left and the Right, the white and the Negro, the crusaders for armament and for disarmament.”

The problem is, Marcuse argued, the oppressor and the oppressed might both have a voice, but the ruling class has the bullhorn of oppression. While the disadvantaged can yell to a few from their soapbox on the corner, the toxic message of the establishment blares from the loud speakers of the nation’s massive social, political, economic, and educational institutions, all day long, every day.

What to do?

Well, easy-peasy, according to Marcuse. He believed liberating speech could be objectively determined—much as the Wisconsin DNR believes it can define objective beauty (they’re totalitarian, too)—as can oppressive speech. You allow the former and gag the latter “because there is an objective truth which can be discovered, ascertained only in learning and comprehending that which is and that which can be and ought to be done for the sake of improving the lot of mankind.”

The light comes on. To create a society free of institutional slavery, he wrote, power must be limited to those who have discovered that objective truth. The people qualified to make decisions are those “in the maturity of his faculties” as a human being, everyone who has learned to think “rationally and autonomously.”

That would be an intimate group of thinkers, Marcuse argued:

“Where society has entered the phase of total administration and indoctrination, this would be a small number indeed, and not necessarily that of the elected representatives of the people. The problem is not that of an educational dictatorship, but that of breaking the tyranny of public opinion and its makers in the closed society.”

And so liberating tolerance, Marcuse wrote, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left, obviously believing those of the left were the mature ones:

And there you have it, in a few paragraphs, the foundational totalitarianism of the modern progressive left. In those few paragraphs we see exactly what happened during the Biden administration’s crackdown on speech and civil liberties during the pandemic. We see the ideological justification of the administration’s massive censorship complex. We see in those few words the justification for the U.S. Department of Justice labeling parents as domestic terrorists, or the government rewriting Title IX to erase an entire gender.

Marcuse, who was enormously influential and known as the Guru of the New Left, left behind a generation of Marcusians in academia and nonprofits to indoctrinate youth and to influence progressive politics, ultimately to an extent far beyond what he himself could imagine.

Through the years, this “subversive majority” has come to be seen as the administrative state. The task has become to organize that “intimate group of thinkers”—not necessarily the people’s elected representatives—who would build a dictatorship of total administration and indoctrination, run by those who know objective truth and know the way society must go, in other words, bureaucrats who think “rationally and autonomously.”

To the left, real democracy is defined simply as the consensus of the bureaucracy.

This dictatorship or repressive tolerance, otherwise known as bureaucratic collectivism, otherwise known in the real world as the administrative state, is the fervent mission of today’s progressive left and it has been ever since Marcuse. It is the foundation upon which today’s federal government is built. The several million bureaucrats who work in the hive every day might not be all true believers, but their institutional leaders are—the Democratic Party, the unions, the environmental organizations, and identity groups.

All of which brings us back to the unhinged reaction to Trump’s proclaimed coming war on the deep state. Progressives loathe Trump not because they believe he’s an autocrat. They loathe him because they know he isn’t, and because he threatens all the gains totalitarians have made by controlling the federal bureaucracy now for 60 years.

Time For A Musical

As Trump prepares for his second administration, deep state philosophers are asking: How do you solve a problem like Donald Trump? It’s a vital question, for this time the bureaucrats will be far poorer positioned to subvert and thwart the president’s agenda from within, though they will try.

Expect instead a major philosophical attack on the elected presidency itself, as progressives decry an imperial presidency that is—wait for it—anti-democratic. In this view, an elected autocrat will subvert democratic institutions to pursue his own policy preferences and cement power.

The Marcusian prescription is to strip the elected presidency of any actual power. After Trump’s first term, legal scholar Kathryn Kovacs advocated for just that in her piece entitled “From presidential administration to bureaucratic dictatorships.” The title is misleading. What Kovacs is really examining is her view of an imperial presidency that is dictatorial— a dictatorship over the bureaucracy, not by it.

Written in 2021, Kovacs dissected Elena Kagan’s earlier writing two decades earlier celebrating presidential control of the administrative state, but Kovacs’s point is clear: “Twenty years later, presidential administration is beginning to resemble authoritarianism.” Specifically, Kovacs complains that “[t]he American President is now the dictator of the administrative state.”

Kovacs argues that Congress’s proper constitutional role is as “the primary creator, organizer, and controller of the administrative state.” Such an analysis undermines the constitution’s separation of powers by combining executive and legislative functions—there is a big difference between legislative oversight and legislative control—but it does more, for the bureaucracy could not both legislate and enforce if it did not also accrue judicial authority: The quartering of two core functions of government demands inclusion of the third if the first two are to carry any authority at all.

Such authority would set up a power struggle between the elected Congress and the unelected bureaucracy—a struggle that already plays out in the tug-of-war over administrative rule review, though it is somewhat tempered by the overriding existence of the presidency.

If Kovacs had her way, though, the president would be neutered in his/her oversight of the administrative state even more—she has advocated turning the presidency into just another federal agency for purposes of applying statutory authority.

“I’ve suggested one way to move in that direction: recognize that the President is an ‘agency’ under the APA [Administrative Procedures Act],” she wrote in her 2021 essay. “Thus, when the President exercises purely statutory authority, the APA’s rulemaking and judicial review provisions would apply as they would to any agency.”

In other words, the president would become just another bureaucrat, with statutory authority subject to rulemaking procedures and judicial review, including administrative litigation. A mandate from the people through a presidential election would count for very little.

The problem with all this, as the late justice Antonin Scalia pointed out, the constitution states: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States."

“This does not mean some of the executive power, but all of the executive power,” Scalia wrote.

Or as Bill Barr put in in an address to the Federalist Society:

The founders sought not just separation of powers to preserve individual liberty but a unitary executive to constrain the other branches. The major proponent of a unitary executive, James Madison, wrote that “if any power whatsoever is in its nature Executive, it is the power of appointing, overseeing, and controlling those who execute the laws.”

In the real world, Kovacs’s belief that the legislature should control and oversee the administrative state is unconstitutional at best and unworkable, where bureaucratic consensus would always trump legislative fragmentation. The ability to adjudge rules before enactment is important but ultimately the legislature can deliver only law, not implementation.

Administration is always an executive power, and without elected control of that power, the tyranny of the administrative state is assured. As such, expect progressives to launch an all-out assault on an imperial presidency once Trump takes office, with the deep state riding shotgun.

The goal is not to stop an elected autocrat; it is to assure an unelected dictatorship.

Nothing would have made Herbert Marcuse happier than to see the progressive lot these days.