The Moral Context of the Administrative State

April 17, 2025

By John G. Grove

Describing Americans’ attitude toward “bureaucracy and state centralization,” the great conservative Robert Nisbet observed that they “curse it, deride it, abhor it, all the while they are beckoning it to them with one hand.”

There is plenty of cursing and deriding going on today. Opposition to the administrative state is having a moment. Following up on Donald Trump’s rhetoric about the “deep state” and DC “swamp,” the “Department of Government Efficiency” has, with much sound and fury, laid off federal employees, slashed budgets, and worked to shutter certain agencies. While its actions are clearly controversial, it might be fair to say that meaningful rollback has never been more politically palatable.

The rage, though, is often expressed as if the administrative state is a distinct and isolated phenomenon—the product of a cabal of left-wing activists and corrupt swindlers who took over institutions that would otherwise be the righteous tools of the American people. On this view, the problems with the administrative state are simply the result of ideological employees and wasteful practices. They certainly have nothing to do with the American people themselves.

That message is attractive to populists, offering a simple, morally compelling narrative that casts them as the heroes, bringing government back in line with the “will of the people.” Indeed, it may be that such rhetoric is responsible for turning the issue into an electoral winner.

It would be a mistake, however, to proceed as if ordinary citizens were blameless. The bureaucratic state is tightly intertwined with the dynamics of contemporary democracy, and shouldn’t be separated from the moral context in which it exists. Unfortunately, even the loudest critics of the federal bureaucracy today continue to beckon it with their other hand by feeding the underlying attitudes that give it strength.

The Problem-Solving State and the Politico-Moral Imagination

The sprawling, expertise-driven, and often unaccountable bureaucratic apparatus in Washington DC did not spring up out of nowhere, nor was it a coup plotted by nefarious ideologues. It emerged quite naturally and a long ago as Americans came to see their central government as, in the words of Vincent Ostrom, “a universal problem-solver.”

The transformation of a national government of limited and enumerated powers, focused on international and interstate issues, into a more comprehensive and centralized modern state is not simply a story about the quantity of power concentrated in DC. That question went hand-in-hand with evolving attitudes about what the aims of national power ought to be.

The precise confines of national power were open questions all the way back to American independence. But beginning in the early twentieth century, mass communication allowed national politicians to speak more local concerns, and the experience of war revealed the sheer power that could be harnessed by an uninhibited national government. Those eager to wield that power began to promise Americans that it was the key to solving a host of problems that, at other times in history, would have been the task of individuals, families, churches, local governments, and communities—or just considered part of the human condition. It could create jobs, and the right kind of jobs. It could not just mitigate poverty, but eliminate it. It could care for the elderly; stave off recessions; guarantee a proper education; ensure a “fair” wage; make employers, workers, landlords, or schoolteachers behave correctly when it comes to sex, race, or religious differences; improve Americans’ health; protect them from having the wrong vices; provide them with the right kind of radio and television programming; regulate the information they consume or advertisements they see; save “the environment”; and certify that workplaces had acceptable toilets.

Commenting on the rise of this attitude in America, Nisbet observed, “whenever there is a dispute of some kind going on over a moral, social, economic, cultural, or even religious issue, the words ‘the government must…’ lead all proposed solutions.”

In short, the American people have come to see the central government as an all-purpose overseer of social life, which not only looks after their interests, but also acts as their moral agent. They expect it to identify social and economic problems and injustices—real and imagined, large or small—and rectify them with the appropriate application of power.

That shift in public expectations goes hand in hand with a broader shift in the way contemporary man sees his place in the world. In his final book, The Servile Mind, the political theorist Kenneth Minogue identified this shift as a degrading of the moral life into what he called a politico-moral vision. The moral life emphasizes the personal obligations of the individual to the people and institutions around him and the limitations on his own actions. It is a question of character, and it is always a matter of deliberation between different obligations, and a balance between different goods. The moral life is a challenge—and therefore a burden that comes as a condition of Western liberty, which emphasizes the responsibility of the individual to conduct his own affairs.

The politico-moral vision is a rejection of that burden, one that avoids difficult matters of personal obligation, self-limitation, and moral deliberation by merging morality directly into the political. The politico-moral sees personal circumstances and choices largely as the result of broader forces beyond individual control and therefore places the locus of responsibility in a political commitment to change the “morally deficient” world. That primarily means a search for victimhood and grievances, with corresponding “oppressors” who are blameworthy not so much for their own conduct, but for their status and perceived impact—direct or symbolic—on broad social dynamics. Personal decency and restraint give way as the markers of a moral life to the signaling of correct political views.

At the same time, modern science, technology, and communication seems has eroded the sense that human beings must come to grips with inherent constraints on our ability to create the world we want. Increasingly, people see no limits at all on mankind’s ability to solve our problems as long as collective power is used effectively. Only the empowered, problem-solving state seems to have the ability to do this. Harnessing government to “change the world” according to a preconceived ideal comes to be seen as the only truly moral course of action.

On this view of things, the individual becomes as a cog whose only agency is in his ability to throw his weight along with that of his fellows into whatever “cause” or “movement” promises to arrange the world in the way he thinks is best. Thus, Minogue observed something “irreducibly dirigiste about … ‘the psyche of the demos.’ The traditional balance between evils that we may change and evils that we must put up with has been lost in the public imagination. In the popular view, anything can be achieved that governments decide to do.” This leaves, for modern man, only one great, overriding politico-moral question: “what should we put our collective power to use for?”

If the problem-solving state is to have the means to pursue the politico-moral vision of the people, it must monitor and intervene effectively in the minutiae of American life. A powerful bureaucracy run largely by experts is the only means to do so. If its task is to manage national life, create specific economic outcomes, monitor the employment practices and work environment of every major employer in the country, dictate educational policies, oversee banks, supervise mass communications, regulate emerging technologies, and a host of other technical tasks, it cannot do so without a huge and complex bureaucracy. These are not a matter of “common sense,” and managing them would be impossible for a president or Congress.

Put another way, the politico-moral mindset demands an expert-driven, empowered administrative state. The problem is that most people now share this mindset and demand that politics correspond to it.

How “Undemocratic” is the Administrative State?

Minogue understood the rise of the politico-moral as the natural culmination of certain tendencies inherent in modern democracy. That moral outlook emerged along with the dominance of an equalized “mass man” whose influence on the world around him increasingly seemed to come only through being politically galvanized. The rise of the problem-solving state and the bureaucratic institutions meant to fulfill its promise should likewise be understood as thoroughly democratic developments, even when they do not involve public deliberation or elections to office.

That, however, is not how its critics are inclined to speak of it. Instead, they present it as the product of a cabal of elites who thwart the will of the people, or of a managerial class whose activity is entirely shielded from the demos. To be sure, there is something to the caricature of the “out of touch bureaucrat”. And the administrative state is certainly undemocratic in a certain way.

But these apparent tensions are a consequence of the vagueness and flexibility of the concept of democracy itself. Modern administration is undemocratic in the sense that it empowers unelected officials to make key decisions; in the sense that it often frustrates the average voter with its inability to successfully do what it promises; and in the sense that 51% of voters often disagree with the specific applications of its power.

Yet the administrative state is in a different sense a crown jewel of mass democracy. It alone has the potential to fulfill the promise of an empowered national majority whose aim is not primarily the protection of its liberties or local prerogatives, but a systematic rearrangement of life that suits its moral vision. The fact that it usually fails to deliver on its promises, and thus raises the people’s ire, does not make it less a product of democratic forces. As Minogue commented, “The demos often gets what it wants, but doesn’t like it very much.”

The populist critique relies on a myth of a unified “will of the people” that is being thwarted. The people’s tribunes (i.e., the politicians) must step in and redirect the bureaucratic apparatus toward the right problems and the right solutions. But the very myth of a unified people acting collectively through their agents to arrange social and economic life reflects the same politico-moral imagination that gives life and breath to the ambitions of the administrative state. Populism rejects bureaucratic rule and demands it at the same time.

True, populists want to make administrators answerable to an elected executive. But their emphasis on “political control” offers, at best, the possibility of radical instability—with intrusive policy swinging this way and that with each successive presidency. “The people” after all, is not a unified force with stable preferences. It is a cacophony of desires and interests formulated as moral demands. Nisbet observed that one of the reasons Americans continue to embrace the administrative state even while decrying it is that it offers some stability and regularity against the flailing, bumbling, and inconstant politicians, who always seek to realign the state’s moral enterprise with whatever constellation of interests happened to get them elected. As bad as “unelected bureaucrats” may be, many of the most egregious and illegal intrusions into American life that have come via administrative agencies in the twenty-first century (such as the infamous “dear colleague” letter, the Obamacare contraception mandate, and Biden’s loan “forgiveness”) were directly aligned with the political agenda of the sitting president.

The “undemocratic” critique, therefore, does what Nisbet observed was so common in America—curses and beckons the administrative state at the same time. It lambasts the bureaucracy for straying from its vision or for not utilizing resources correctly, but at the same time holds out the promise that it can be fixed and made to serve the people’s will. The right has finally brought political force to bear on this monstrosity, but only by acceding to the dirigiste psyche that reduces economic, social, and moral life into a question of political control.

There are many obvious reasons that politicians would reach to something like “democracy” for their talking points. Pointing out the fickleness, contradictions, and moral servility of voters is rarely the key to electoral success. Moreover, it is not a problem that the activist class could solve even if they cared to. There is no five-year plan to reverse moral rot.

But any attempt to tackle the phenomenon of the administrative state ought to be aware of the deeper social dynamics at play and not further contribute to the “dirigiste psyche” of the American public. Unfortunately, Trump and the people around him often do just that. In MAGA ideology, entitlements have become sacrosanct; the federal government is seen as a vehicle to “make America healthy”; economic policy revolves around sweeping tariffs (which practically demand independent bureaucratic discretion) justified by the false promise of creating specific, “fair” social and economic outcomes. The administration has adopted the same kind of expansive interpretations of civil rights law used for decades to bind nearly every major social institution to the political preferences of DC; it speaks of sending education “back to the states” but uses the threat of funding cuts to dictate curriculum requirements; and it has embraced and expanded the practice of “emergency” rule that has characterized the era of expansive national government.

The full case against the administrative state must aim not just against its excesses, trappings, and inefficiencies, but against its pretenses and claims on American life—most importantly, the claim that we need a protective national state to arrange the world for us. Such a case cannot be made by appealing to the same forces of mass democracy that give the administrative state life. It must rest on the rule of law and the capacity of individuals, families, civil society and localities for self-government. It must refuse the electoral impulse to promise “liberation” from an unjust or rigged world, and instead find some way to turn populist outrage into a constructive case for liberty, locality, and moral responsibility.

This may seem like a pipedream—and perhaps it is. There is certainly no partisan faction waiting in the wings to sell the American people on a politics centered on the rule of law and decentralization, and greater personal and social responsibility. But it would be wrong to suppose that there are no possible openings for such a message. Polling reveals a pervasive exasperation among Americans with national politics as it is currently practiced, even as the most committed partisans become consumed by it. Moreover, Americans also tend to trust their local governments and state governments far more than they do the federal government. It is at least possible that the Trump phenomenon may reveal to moderate liberals that no one side can reasonably expect to be the permanent winner in a system defined by rule-from-the-top. And for all its faults, the Trump movement has inaugurated disruptions to the longstanding status quo that might allow ideas once unthinkable to come to the table.

Are there messengers willing and able convince Americans that there is a better way of practicing politics? Is there wisdom and moderation enough in the American people to embrace the burden of moral responsibility? Those questions only time will answer.

John G. Grove is the editor of Law & Liberty.