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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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 a