Volts podcast: Doug Thompson defends the deep state

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.


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transcript)


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transcript)


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 s**t gain some power, they’ll treat them
like s**t. 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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