The Bureaucracy Will Fight Trump’s Counterrevolution
One hopes that the incoming Trump administration is prepared to wage bureaucratic wars against the permanent managerial class that runs Washington as presidents come and go. The old saying that personnel is policy is only too true in the swamps of D.C. Presumably, Trump learned that from his first term. He must staff his second term with men and women who have a counterrevolutionary mindset, or else his second term will only accomplish change on the fringes of policy in Washington.
When presidents challenge the bureaucracies, they strike back — as when … holdovers from the Obama administration promoted the Russia collusion hoax.
Counterrevolution is what is necessary to initially reverse the dangerous and damaging policies that extend back to the Obama administration’s efforts to “fundamentally transform America.” But the bureaucratic rot goes back much farther — to FDR’s New Deal. There will be dogged resistance among the managerial class that has infested our government since then.
Normal bureaucratic inertia will compound the difficulties of changing the direction of the ship of state. Richard Nixon tried to tame it with bureaucratic tactics but failed, and paid the price for that failure. Ronald Reagan had some success in the 1980s, but not nearly enough. Trump during his first term and continuing afterward up to this day has been targeted for oblivion by the managerial class (Trump calls it the “deep state”). Unlike Nixon, Trump had both personal wealth and, more important, alternative media that enabled him to survive the wrath of the managerial class.
Trump’s populist movement is a direct threat to the managerial class that has run Washington for nine decades. The great James Burnham in two still very relevant books from the early 1940s — The Managerial Revolution (1941) and The Machiavellians (1943) — and another book written in the late 1950s — Congress and the American Condition (1959) — showed us how the managerial or “ruling” class operates often to stifle the will of elected leaders.
In The Managerial Revolution, Burnham wrote that politics, hence government, “is the struggle for social power among organized groups” of people, and in every society — no matter what the form of government — there is a “socially dominant or ruling class.” In the 1930s and early 1940s, Burnham perceived that the enormous growth of the state with its ever-expanding bureaucracies that exercised more and more control over individuals and private businesses meant that a “new class” was replacing the old capitalist class as the dominant social group in the United States and elsewhere in the world.
Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal brought an explosion in the growth of government that has proceeded apace to this day, with only a few minor interruptions. Burnham wrote about the “widening control by government of more and more parts and features of the economy.”
“Those who control the state, those whose interests are primarily served by the state,” Burnham continued, “are the ruling class.” In this new managerial society, Burnham explained, “there are the powerful and the weak, the privileged and the oppressed, the rulers and the ruled,” and the rulers today cling to power in Washington and resist those who would lessen or remove their power.
In The Machiavellians, Burnham analyzed how ruling classes maintain their privileges and power. One method they use is to create and foster “myths” which are used to indoctrinate the citizens they rule. Such myths today include promoting “democracy,” supporting the “rules-based international order,” establishing a nuclear free world, institutionalizing “diversity, equity and inclusion,” the need for “criminal justice reform,” promoting the LGBTQ+ agenda, the dangers of “white supremacy” or “white Christian nationalism,” open borders, the need for green energy to replace fossil fuels to combat climate change, and many more.
Such myths, Burnham noted, are sometimes sustained by coercion and state violence because “force is always a main factor in regulating society.” If and when Trump seeks to challenge those ruling class myths, he will meet with great resistance and perhaps violence.
Burnham noted that there was an ongoing shift in power from Congress to the executive bureaucracies. Those new agencies of government, Burnham wrote, “are the sovereign bodies of the unlimited state of managerial society.” Even as the New Deal floundered in the late 1930s, the emerging Second World War solidified the rule of the managerial class. “War,” Randolph Bourne rightly said, “is the health of the state.”
The war bureaucracies added to the existing New Deal bureaucracies, and the emerging post-war Cold War led to the creation in the United States of the national security state, which, Burnham wrote, became the “receiver” for the declining British empire. The new managerial class now exercised greater power and control over both domestic and foreign policy. Those bureaucracies have only grown since then, and with them, the powers of the managerial class.
In Congress and the American Tradition, Burnham called the executive bureaucracies a “fourth branch of government,” which developed interests and aims of its own, often in opposition to the elected leaders. “The bureaucracy,” he wrote, “not merely wields its own share of the sovereign power but begins to challenge the older branches for supremacy.” The managerial class staffs the bureaucracies and their members remain in power through presidential administration after presidential administration.
Trump and the Bureaucrats
Most presidents end up formulating and implementing policies that accommodate the interests of permanent bureaucrats. When presidents challenge the bureaucracies, they strike back — as when the Pentagon inserted a “spy” into the National Security Council during the Nixon administration, or more recently when holdovers from the Obama administration promoted the Russia collusion hoax against President Trump.
Trump’s picks of Pete Hegseth to run the Pentagon and Tulsi Gabbard to oversee the intelligence agencies will produce great resistance from members of the managerial class who are entrenched in those bureaucracies. And even if Hegseth and Gabbard are confirmed by the Senate, they will face resistance from the permanent bureaucracies that view them as a threat to their interests and powers. That will also likely happen with most of Trump’s Cabinet selections. All the more reason then for Trump to insist that his selections have the fortitude and courage to impose Trump’s agenda on the bureaucracies. The mainstream media will back the managerial class against Trump, so he will have to rely on alternative media to counter their message. It worked during the 2024 election. It will hopefully work in the 2025-2029 counterrevolution.
READ MORE from Francis P. Sempa:
Will Reagan’s Strategy Work With China?
Jimmy Carter’s Favorite Song ‘Imagine’ Sung at His Funeral
The post The Bureaucracy Will Fight Trump’s Counterrevolution appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.