A response to Khoa Sands ’26
On July 2, 1881 — exactly 105 years after the Continental Congress voted to declare American independence from Great Britain — President James A. Garfield was shot by a disgruntled, and likely schizophrenic, lawyer named Charles J. Guiteau. During the 1880 campaign cycle, an unknown Guiteau had supposedly delivered a speech in favor of Garfield’s candidacy. He claimed this entitled him to a lush position in the American foreign service. In March of 1881, he even went so far as to hand-deliver a copy of his speech to the newly-elected president, though he left before Garfield could finish reading it. A few months later, miffed by rejection, Guiteau shot Garfield in a Washington, D.C. train station — with Secretary of War Robert Todd Lincoln as an onlooker. After battling the wound for two months, Garfield would eventually succumb to the gunshot, about fifty miles east of Princeton in Elberon, New Jersey. In little over a century, the American experiment in self-government had mutated into a multi-headed monster of political nepotism. As it had killed the president, it threatened to kill our republic.
In the wake of the Garfield assassination, efforts began to reform the American spoils system, aiming to replace personal loyalty with professional qualification. A cartoon published soon after Garfield’s assassination depicted Guiteau with a pistol in his right hand and an unfurled paper — “An Office or Your Life!” — in the other. This “model” was what Congress sought to change. After months of debate, they produced the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883, which formed the United States Civil Service Commission, required “open, competitive examinations for testing the fitness of applicants for the public service,” and even barred applicants “habitually using intoxicating beverages to excess.” These requirements and more were to be enforced and regulated by the Commission itself. The solution to bad bureaucracy would be more bureaucracy.
Of course, some form of systematized governance was necessary by this time. In its first century of independence, America had grown from some 2.5 million colonial subjects to a staggering 50 million citizens. It had expanded across thousands of miles, and it had developed into vast new states and territories. The Civil War alone resulted in the largest bureaucratic growth seen to that point, with the burgeoning Pension Bureau expanding by 1894 to command 37% of the federal budget.
Despite its apparent necessity, bureaucracy has always maintained a tenuous relationship with the country’s republican principles. The modern DOGE moment can be seen as a revival of this reformist vision for the federal bureaucracy, though it is responding to a corruption of the initial mission of the Pendleton Act. Political favoritism didn’t cease. Rather, it flew under the guise of dispassionate expertise, of neutral, meritorious professionalism. Over the decades, it has become a wing of the progressive consensus, putting personnel to the policy of identity grievance politics and tax-and-spend social programs.
By the time the Progressive wave lifted Woodrow Wilson into power, the tools to euthanize Madisonian constitutionalism already existed. Its replacement? “Administration.” Or, in modern parlance, technocracy. This vision of government assumes that the people cannot govern themselves. If progress requires specialization, and if specialization requires experts, then the average citizen is unfit for his own governance. His affairs must be placed in the hands of those who know better. Though Wilson thought the European science of administration “must learn our constitutions by heart; must get the bureaucratic fever out of its veins; must inhale much free American air,” he also cautioned that “we have reached a time when administrative study and creation are imperatively necessary to the well-being of our governments saddled with the habits of a long period of constitution-making.” Time was up for thinking. Now was the time for doing. Most importantly, however, it was time for trusting. “Self-government does not consist in having a hand in everything,” Wilson claims, “any more than housekeeping consists necessarily in cooking dinner with one’s own hands. The cook must be trusted with a large discretion as to the management of the fires and the oven.”
But who picks the cook, and who is responsible if he makes a mistake? If the guests want chicken and the chef serves crickets, shall his “expertise” still be trusted? What if he thinks that an insect diet is better for the dinner guests than their own preferences? Republicanism takes as a core principle the nonexistence of political neutrality. Rather, it takes human nature as inescapable. Man’s interests exist, and they should be represented by those with care for — and accountability to — those represented. Process is as much a part of the American system as outcome because it is through process that the people’s desires are weighed, debated, and put into place. This process is intentionally slow, ensuring that the passing whims of the people cannot too easily find enactment. It also aims to promote the general welfare of a people, a concept which shares neutrality’s equality of application but not its ignorance of the good.
On the other hand, bureaucracy makes efficiency its central telos, and it divides this efficiency across its various constituent parts. However, since efficiency — not justice or the general welfare — is the end goal, bureaucracy loses sight of the people it serves. As departments grow, their aims narrow. Though bureaucrats only have custody over a small set of problems, they form entire prerogatives from it. This spirit of specialization — and the credentialism it incentivizes — makes the means of bureaucracy its ends. Expertise becomes trusted for its own sake, not for the general good of a given community.
Alexis de Tocqueville perfectly illustrates this bureaucratic creep in the last chapters of Democracy in America, describing “what sort of despotism democratic nations have to fear.” This despotism would not, he believed, come from a conniving tyrant. It would come from a force “more extensive and more mild,” and “it would degrade men without tormenting them.” This force would assume a paternal quality, and it would become “the only arbiter of [the people’s] happiness: it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances – what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living.” It would “cover[] the surface of society with a net-work of small complicated rules, minute and uniform.” “It does not tyrannize,” he continues, “but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people,” until they have “entirely given up the habit of self-government.”
Today, bureaucracy kills our habit of self-government, not through hanging but through slow strangulation. Bureaucracy, though for some things necessary, is not the fabled end of history. It must not be acquiesced to, nor must it be allowed to dictate its own terms. It is best when corrected by, and legitimized by, republican principles. Though self-government has its problems, we should still favor democracy in America, not bureaucracy in America.
Image Credit: “The County Election” (1854), George Caleb Bingham — Wikimedia Commons
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