MAGA is Teaching America to Love Bureaucracy Again

The Trump administration's reckless behaviors have piqued interest across country in counter measures. Namely, bureaucracy.

Few things have been vilified recently quite as much as “unelected bureaucrats” or the “administrative state”. This is the “deep state” that we’ve all heard so much about and should supposedly be fearful of.

But the Trump Administration has shown us in under a month why the deep state exists: to prevent people like him from running roughshod over the country. There are rules and regulations carefully put in place by legislators and administrations before his.

In fact, many of the rules and regulations were put in place as a response to the last brazenly undisciplined dictator wannabe that was in power, Richard Nixon.

So what is this deep state, or bureaucracy, we keep hearing about?

Well, first off, when you really think about it, every administration has countless “unelected bureaucrats” in positions of power to administer the business of government.

In fact, the only elected officials in an administration are the President and the Vice President. Outside of that, every other official is an unelected bureucrat.

But, these unelected bureaucrats are generally not just people off the street that are quickly hired and then placed on the job the next day. They have to go through a vetting process, that at least requires an extensive background check, and often requires hearings by the Senate so that they can be confirmed and approved for service. Theoretically, at least, they must be qualified and resistant to corruption.

These processes are different in government versus private businesses because by its very nature government serves everyone, not just a select group of voluntary customers.

And in order to serve everyone, they must obtain and retain sensitive personal information on everyone.

In addition, since some of the services involve repelling bad foreign actors from invading our space for their own advantage, we have to keep our inner workings secret from the rest of the world.

Because of all this, we need to ensure government workers are qualified, uncorruptible, and highly trustworthy people.

Therefore, we have systems in place to increase the likelihood this happens.

And even then, after these people take their positions, they have to follow certain rules to ensure that everything they do is accountable and potentially rebuttable by others, to ensure the utmost integrity of the system.

This is essentially the “bureaucracy” we have been taught to hate.

But in what will be a huge backlash to the administration’s current behavior, America is about to love bureaucracy again.

Why? Because the richest man in the world, who has built his fortune off of government subsidies and tax breaks, and has strong ties to many foreign adversaries, is currently plugging into our government’s most sensitive financial and data systems and doing…..no one really knows what, unfortunately.

If you trust him completely, then it’s simply to identify fraud and waste and recommend actions to combat it. If you half-trust him, then it’s to do some of that, but also to manipulate the system—or at least the politics of the system—to his advantage. If you don’t trust him, then he’s doing it to literally take over the government.

But how do we know if we can trust him? We don’t.

He’s not an elected official that goes through a highly public campaign process that supposedly allows the public to vet him. He’s not an appointed official that went through a Senate hearing in which the public vetting process is delegated to Congress. He hasn’t been through a background check that privately vets him, to approve him for having access to such information. And he hasn’t gotten a security clearance that helps assure that he’s a trustworthy uncorruptible actor in this sphere.

In other words, he hasn’t been through the bureaucracy necessary to at least minimize the chances that he’s a bad actor that might damage the country.

Everything I listed that most government workers have to be subjected to is the bureaucracy. The “deep state”. It is there to keep our country afloat and thriving, and ensure that we are being ruled and led by our own people and our own interests, not any particular individual’s interests or any adversarial foreign power’s interests.

An attack on the “deep state” seems kind of fun and exciting when we have the luxury of living in general stability, peace, and prosperity.

However, once rich elites that profess a hatred of government and a desire to tear down the administrative state take power, then—as Seth Rogan says in the movie Step Brothers— “the tuxedos seem kind of fucked up”.

Suddenly, the “deep state” seems kind of necessary. Now, the undesirable “unelected bureaucrat” that needs to be removed seems to be taking the form of the unaccountable and opaque Elon Musk himself.

And the more actions that are taken by this administration to freeze spending and disrupt services that we were all dependent on as recently as yesterday, the more people are going to realize the value of bureaucracy and why it exists.

In short, it will Make America Love Bureaucracy Again. MALBA!

I think I may have just found a winning rallying cry for the next election. Democrats, take note.