The President is a Hole, and Money Falls Through Him

the self-administering state

There’s one topic in American politics, today, and it’s the end of politics. The people talking about “Our Democracy,” and “protecting Our Democracy,” and “Trump is attacking Our Democracy,” are working to close an instrument of financial distribution to democratic inputs. They’re trying to build, or to some degree to rebuild and fortify, a system that can’t be changed from outside that system. Joe Biden was really their model of a great president: an oblivious thing in a suit with an autopen nearby. The 21st century presidency, perfected.

In the March/April issue of Foreign Affairs, the Harvard professor Steven Levitsky and a Canadian colleague, Lucan Way, argue that the United States is on a path to authoritarianism — as a result of “democratic breakdown.” Sample claim, and I promise you’ll laugh out loud if you read every word of this:

Modern states are powerful entities. The U.S. federal government employs over two million people and has an annual budget of nearly $7 trillion. Government officials serve as important arbiters of political, economic, and social life. They help determine who gets prosecuted for crimes, whose taxes are audited, when and how rules and regulations are enforced, which organizations receive tax-exempt status, which private agencies get contracts to accredit universities, and which companies obtain critical licenses, concessions, contracts, subsidies, tariff waivers, and bailouts. Even in countries such as the United States that have relatively small, laissez-faire governments, this authority creates a plethora of opportunities for leaders to reward allies and punish opponents. No democracy is entirely free of such politicization. But when governments weaponize the state by using its power to systematically disadvantage and weaken the opposition, they undermine liberal democracy. Politics becomes like a soccer match in which the referees, the groundskeepers, and the scorekeepers work for one team to sabotage its rival.

This is why all established democracies have elaborate sets of laws, rules, and norms to prevent the state’s weaponization. These include independent judiciaries, central banks, and election authorities and civil services with employment protections. In the United States, the 1883 Pendleton Act created a professionalized civil service in which hiring is based on merit. Federal workers are barred from participating in political campaigns and cannot be fired or demoted for political reasons. The vast majority of the over two million federal employees have long enjoyed civil service protection. At the start of Trump’s second term, only about 4,000 of these were political appointees.

Did you catch that? In a healthy democracy, “Government officials serve as important arbiters of political, economic, and social life.” They mean the permanent officials, the people who are never elected to anything, the people who get government jobs and rise into the senior ranks. They are the arbiters. They decide. Replacing their judgment with the judgment of people who win elections and are chosen by citizens to represent their interests is anti-democratic. Only rule by people who weren’t elected and who “cannot be fired or demoted for political reasons” preserves the democratic process that directs the republic. If voters can choose Trump, and Trump can change the government’s policy choices, that’s an assault on democratic principle. Illustrating the point, Levitsky and Way give some specific examples of institutions that represent and preserve democratic systems, and what they come up with is…central banks.