This week we continue in TRP with our questions essay. Last week we covered abundance and tariffs. This is week we cover a more esoteric, but also more important matter: subsidiarity, a shorthand I am using here for an investigation of the evolved structure of American government in the context of changes in the culture. We will refer to themes and sources mentioned in The Age of Spectacle project for the purpose of bringing the unfolding Trump 2.0 era into sharper focus.
It’s Money That Matters: The Federal Power of the Purse
It is a notorious truth of Cold War geostrategic vintage that dominoes fall a certain way because they are set up a certain way. That simple observation repurposed for present application rests at the very base of the shock elicited by the Trump 2.0 Administration’s wielding of the Federal government’s vast financial sway over an array of civil society institutions and hybrid public/private arrangements to pressure them into doing things they would rather not, or to not doing things they rather would like to keep doing.
The enmeshing of Federal money amid American institutions of nearly every kind has become capacious. We have long taken it for granted as normal, natural, and generally OK within limits few bothered to specify….because it was thought normal and natural.
So every American adult who literate and has not been living under a metaphorical rock is aware of Defense Department and IC and NASA and even NOAA contracts let to what remains of the U.S. the military-industrial base, and to other high-tech corporations that tug at the interests not only of major corporate partners but a vast linkage of subcontractors, as well. Raytheon and General Dynamics aside for a moment, everyone knows by now how interconnected Tesla (Musk) and Palantir (Thiel) and Blue Origin (Bezos)—and Google and Apple and Meta, as well—are with large lucrative government contracts and subsidies for most if not all of them. We do this for the sake of national security. Changes in the details of the arrangements, and what implications issue therefrom, don’t bother most of us.
A bit less well known are subsidies and insurance guarantees to agribusiness corporations, but they too tug on huge stakes and lesser stakes as distributed downward to service and subcontractor interests. We could list and describe the intermeshing of Federal government money and technically private-sector interests for hours, covering nearly every corner and pocket of economic activity, not to exclude the major impact of tax code design, the hopeful result being the revelation that what is public (government, supposedly….or formerly) and what is private are not anymore as distinct as we might like to think at a time when Net Effect gigantism, driven largely by technology, has changed old rills and rules.
But here is the point: In recent months we have been deluged with shocked analysis and angry commentary on what has turned out to be America’s “bad emperor problem” that pretty much no one thought we would ever be faced with, and yet hardly anyone has asked the obvious question: How did the Federal government grow to be so huge and hence capable of such finance-based blackmail and extortion of civil society? How did the title of a nifty Randy Newman song, “It’s Money that Matters,” come to be important in a way Mr. Newman surely never imagined when he wrote the song in 1988? And why oh why amid the hail of blather out there are so few asking these kinds of questions?
Some very fine and extensive scholarship exists on this topic, but we’re not about to discuss it here at any length. Suffice it to say that the earliest manifestation of the phenomenon to hand probably goes back to the canal-building adventures of the Monroe Administration. We’ll direct infrastructure progress from Washington, you citizens will pay for it one way or another and build it, and we’ll all be better off. Fine; but it was the Lincoln Administration’s founding of the National Academy of Sciences in 1863 that began in earnest the conjunction of the Federal state with the nation’s universities and increasingly diverse and capable manufacturing sector. Lincoln himself earned patents and was deeply interested in all forms of mechanical innovation. He was for this kind of union as well as for the other, better known kind.
The interrelationship among government, higher education and industry further developed after the Civil War but only reached grand institutional form during World War II. The invention of ENIAC—the world’s first Electronic Numeral Integrator and Calculator built in the basement of the Towne Building at Penn—to help the Army folks just down the road at Aberdeen develop more accurate artillery fire was just the appetizer; the entree was the Manhattan Project a few years later. Then came Vannevar Bush’s pipeline model of innovation and the development of the National Labs system that in due course crowned U.S. Cold War-era scientific-technical superiority and its consequent strategic successes.
Randolph Bourne famously wrote in War and the Intellectuals—famous, that is, to those who know the history and related literature—“War is the health of the State.” He wrote that during World War I, not World War II; he died in 1919 in the Spanish Influenza epidemic. He should have written, perhaps, “war and the science-tech based long-term deterrence of major war is the health of the state,” but how could he have foreseen that? Besides, that’s not an elegant sentence, and the man had style. Elegance aside, his concern was later echoed by an entire school of leftwing “military-industrial complex” and “national security state” critics, not least C. Wright Mills, but these critics never amounted to more than a minor irritant in the flow of mainstream thinking.
Rightly so most thought—I did, too—because the institutional marriage of government, higher education, and industry clearly seemed at the time a glorious American chapter in the history and sociology of science and technology. Look how much good the conjunction did for everyone, look how powerful, wealthier and healthier and more secure it made the nation, and look at how able the nation became to fight and defeat not just one but ultimately two totalitarian threats to freedom over more than half a fraught century. Possible future downside of putting too many and too many different kinds of financial eggs in the Federal basket? What downside?
Now we behold a downside, although not exactly the one Mills et al. expected. To sum up, we now behold the unexpected downside of an excessively powerful Executive Branch in an excessively centralized Federal arrangement: The current pre-Enlightenment-brained Administration is able to intimidate, harm, and pressure all sorts of people and institutions by dint of the extremely dense and by now longstanding financial relationship between the Federal government and so many critical parts of civil society, all bound together by what we casually and vaguely call “the economy,” as if it were only and ever the same thing over and over again. We gleefully and profitably set the dominoes up that way, and now they’re falling awkwardly all over the place as if by the hand of a petulant child whose craving for masterly disorder knows no bounds. Like, who knew? Not only was that not supposed to happen; it was literally unimaginable.
No particular point would be served by reviewing the facts, since they are on the whole well known. The Administration has threatened universities with sudden penury in order to coerce their leaderships to either do or desist from doing things the White House prefers: validate colorblind student admissions and faculty promotions guidelines; dump DEI, end speech codes and otherwise crack down on cancel culture; stop transgendered anatomical males from participating in women’s sports—we all know the plainly ideological anti-“woke” list.
But that plainly ideological list is not even half of the subtler and more general anti-elitist ideological list in play, too: the savaging of the NIH and CDC budgets now that anti-science mystics and maniacs dominate the HHS empire; the related destruction of USAID’s preventive medical programs abroad, designed to protect us as well as help others; the intended destruction of the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) and all the Radios under that umbrella; the similar budget euthanasia of PBS and NPR; the elimination of DOD’s Office of Net Assessment (ONA) most likely because of the extensive contractor relationship it has maintained with elite academia; the summary destruction of the U.S. Institute of Peace by dint of a patently illegal raid on non-Federally owned property, USIP being an independent 501©3 institution albeit one financed exclusively by a congressional appropriation (about $54 million in FY 2024) to avoid funders’ bias issues; and one can go on…..
What all of these dollar excisions form the Federal budget have in common is that they are victims of the government-as-a-for-profit business model in the head of the President: Accreted appendages of government lacking a positive revenue flow are ipso facto liabilities that, as with any private equity hostile takeover, one would sell off or eliminate as soon as possible. But they all have something else more important in common, too: They are easy, soft-target kills in an anti-elite turkey shoot just because the Federal government has acquired purse power over them. Trump and his associates are not about saving money, balancing the budget, and paying down the national debt; they are positively enjoying how much pain and whining they can cause to anyone who insists on cooperative, positive-sum approaches to social policy issues, domestic and international alike. These avatars of Randian puerility, these clueless megalothymic adventurers, absolutely love sticking it to the goody two-shoes prigs of the world.
We may agree or disagree with various Administration desiderata, at least insofar as we can discern what they actually are; but few of us see suddenly cancelling biomedical research grants and threatening rescissions of Federal tuition and support aid to education as legitimate means to achieve them. Most of us see a positive role for the Radios abroad and for NPR and PBS at home, but arguments from principle, not mere cost-benefit thinking, against them do exist. Even I can make them if pressed, to wit: After the Cold War aren’t the Radios at least imaginable as undue interference in the internal affairs of other countries, and why should other governments not mind them anymore than we mind RT propaganda aimed at us? Maybe we should stop being the mother-in-law of the world, besides which while most of the communications extrusions conjured up by governments that are the presumed targets of Radio Free Europe/Liberty, Radio Free Asia, and Mideast Broadcast Network are pure propagandistic wind, we cannot exclude the possibility that in at least some cases the producers believe their own cow-flop because we mustn’t assume that we abide in the only crazy house on the street.
As for PBS and NPR, like them or not, what exactly is the rationale for public broadcast communications at taxpayer expense in a capitalist, market economy? Why can’t all culturally elevated radio and television be financed via public fundraising and dedicated foundational philanthropy like the wonderful Penn radio station WXPN? A question—yes, another surprise question—I’ll wager few of you have ever asked yourself: PBS and NPR obviously didn’t always exist, so why did they come to exist? Do they exist only because the Reagan Administration foolishly trashed the Fairness Doctrine? Or are there other sources and origins? If you’re a normal reader you’ve no idea, do you? Yet you’re probably much disheartened to find that PBS and NPR are in the crosshairs of the Trump 2.0 devastation machine.
Ah, but these are my arguments for the purpose of making a point. They are not the Trump 2.0 Administration’s arguments. They have and make no such arguments. They rarely engage on that level. They do not think they need to, and this is why are you so discombobulated by their antics, for the same reason I am: Because it’s all about the body language. It’s the badassery ‘tude that they exude. And it’s shocking scary because it’s designed to be that way; it’s a bullies’ delight this punching down, and it takes after the endearing personality of the bully-in-chief.
The best example at present concerns the case of the USAGM Radios. No actual argument has been made against them, just thrown slogans and innuendoes about fake news, waste, and corruption and other seat-of-the-pants invented malarkey with no specifics or evidence in sight. The USAGM’s Arizona-imported executrix Kari Lake refuses to talk with staff, even to its head, the honorable and estimable Ambassador Ryan Crocker. The corruption charge, meanwhile, is just more standard MAGA projectile dysfunction, to wit: Lake has recently hired a new Trump-adjacent public affairs firm—the Ragnar Group—to undertake a four-month investigation, for $250 million, of RFE/RL, RFA, and MBN for corruption, waste, fraud, and abuse. Having little experience and having never before won a Federal contract, how will the Ragnar Group do this in so short a time if the abuses are really as deep as they and Lake insinuate?
Not important: Steve Bannon attended Ragnar Group’s launch party, and key firm members, including Robert Wasinger and Mike Andrews, were involved (on the wrong side) in the Michael Pack debacle during the first Trump term, so some kinds of experience they do have. More to the point of the grifter mentality rife in the MAGA elite world, they have political backing and presumably legal immunity to do whatever they think they can get away with. As was not the case in 2019-20 with Michael Pack, Congress is not about to stop or even question them. $250 million for four months of hatchet-job “work,” divided up among fewer than a half dozen “senior” staff people? Can you imagine?
No, it’s really the body language that reeks of hollow-eyed malice and gleeful anti-elitist cruelty that says to us, in effect: “We don’t need arguments, or need even to say one word, for we have so much relative power that pleas for logic and basic fairness are jokes to us.” It’s the silent curled smile that is so creepy. One is reminded, again if one knows the history, of the Francoist 1936 raid on the University of Salamanca, a spectacular repeat manifestation of Ortega y Gasset’s “reason of unreason” that epitomized it. No one of stature has yet been murdered with a fire poker blow to the skull, true, as was—probably, though the matter is still debated—Miguel de Unamuno on December 31, 1936. But these are still early times.
Same goes for the White House’s coercion of prestigious law firms that would dare serve as counsel for Trump’s real and imagined enemies; revoke their security clearances, unleash the IRS on them, even indict them if necessary for assorted imaginary offenses. It’s all about the money—the big money these firms can no longer make unless they grovel. Witnessing the rush to bend the knee on the part of most of these firms was even more disgusting than the coercion threatened against them, and the unwillingness of not a few Democrats earning seven-figure annual salaries to resign from compliant firms was even worse still. But they are lawyers, trained and experienced in playing smoke-and-mirror games with truth, so what did anyone really expect from most of them? All the MAGA types had to do was raise a metaphorical bludgeon and most of the intended victims capitulated without a single blow being landed. Remember “Millions for defense but not one cent for tribute”? Ha! Our haute lawyers were eager to get millions for defense, sure, but they went a little soft in the tribute department, promising multiple millions worth of pro bono services for Donald Trump’s pet projects. Absolutely Barbarous.
Do not misunderstand: It is neither possible nor desirable to untangle all the monied institutional financial knots that have been tied over the years. We are never going to return to any gentrified Jeffersonian yeoman farmer ideal-America. Many non-national security things we obviously should do at the Federal level using taxpayer money—a good example is NIH/CDC work where relatively rare expertise and esoteric experimentation need to be concentrated for both efficiency and security reasons. But many other forms of centralization involving a virtually permanent financial meshing with the Federal government are or may become counterproductive now that they have been found vulnerable to the culturally post-literate vicissitudes of American politics. Wherever civil society institutions can reasonably reduce their dependence on Federal money in favor of other means of securing financial support they should be avidly pursuing it. The Philanthropy Roundtable has just become way more important than ever.
Three Balances, Not Just Two
Another question: Do we really understand just why we now have too powerful an Executive Branch at the expense of the Legislative and Judicial Branches, and too over-weighted a Federal government at the expense of state and local government? I doubt many do understand how that happened. The reason, perhaps, is that the American political order built on the core of a constitutional republic was imagined and fabricated with a mind to three intermeshing kinds of balance, so to create a balance of balances. Two of them were quite explicit in the Founding and are written plainly in the Constitution so that we can easily name and describe them; but the third, the most important, was so obvious to the Framers that they said and wrote down in civil scripture relatively little about it. And so we in turn have come to rarely think of it, and that absence of thought, and of questions pertaining thereto, is confounding us.
The first balance was horizontal: the separation of powers, checks and balances, between the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial Branches of the state. This horizontal balance is now being deliberately destroyed before our very eyes. The attempt is not even seriously concealed, so certain are the attackers of success. They may be right on that point. Even democracy, which is the plinth upon which the legitimacy of the Legislative and Executive Branches rests—the Judiciary only indirectly so—is manifestly at risk, yet at least a third, possible as many as half, of adult Americans know this and don’t seem to care. (The Age of Spectacle manuscript, as devoted TRP readers know, explains why they don’t care, and more on this below.)
The second, vertical, balance inheres in the Federal system, which is also a form of separation of powers but in this case between the federal center on the one hand, and the states and localities within them on the other. This balance has long been out of whack, gradually leaning far too much toward the center. The key shift came during the Progressive Era in the form, symbolically and legally, of the 16th and 17th Amendments—the income tax amendment and the direct election of the Senate. Both reforms in due course emaciated the status and clout of local government, which in effect, for all its warts and flaws, was true self-government—the government of the town hall. Not surprisingly given Americans’ affection for nostalgia, Norman Rockwell’s famous and beloved painting/poster of it arrived on the scene just as the reality of it was fading.
Other changes occurred at around the same time: the birth of the Department of Labor and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the creation of the Federal Reserve System, and before that of course the ICC and after it the FCC, to cite just two of many exemplars of Federal government sprawl. As many have suggested, these changes to the system constituted a third or fourth American republic, depending on how one counts major structural changes in governance through American history. As administrative capacity matured through technological advance it seems the obviously modern and progressive thing to do to centralize (a.k.a. nationalize) ever more government functions, an impulse mightily advanced by the need to deal with the Great Depression and then to fight and win World War II. (Bourne was right.) This seemed tantamount to progress, and much if it was clearly necessary. Since airplanes fly over many states at a time on normal flights we can’t have fifty different state mini-versions of the FAA. Because most of these Federal government accretions bore a common sense logic, it rarely occurred to educated people in the day that there could be any serious downside here.
But there was a downside gestating in all this, which can be seen more clearly when the third kind of balance—let’s call it a diagonal or orthogonal kind of balance—is made explicit.
The third balance was not about a balance among aspects or functions of government, or about the spatial distribution of governmental authority in a federal system; it was about the scope of governmental responsibility in juxtaposition to that of the rest of society.
The whole set-up in 1787-89 presumed both the limited and self-limiting ambit of government in favor of a civil society center. If one wants to give it a name, the best choice could be the balance of freedom, understood, as Lord Acton put it, not as the freedom to do what one wants, but the freedom to do what one ought.
In other words, placed properly amid the social and intellectual history of post-Reformation Britain, this third implicit balance was about the centrality of faith communities and, within the Protestant ones at least, the centrality of following the dictates of conscience leavened by the power of human moral reasoning. Freedom in this historical content meant that deciding what was right and wrong, moral and not, was the people’s business—not a government-from-on-high’s business—as filtered and organized through individual conscience, family, and community. The people would then order their representatives to codify in law what they determined necessary as times changed and new challenges arose. That was the basic idea: We the People give the government rights at the various levels of the federal system, and We the People ultimately direct the general course of evolving common law—not the other way around.
Ultimately, then, the key to keeping government within bounds, so that it never would become tyrannical, was the maintenance of a strong social order that informally governed itself so that external state-centric constraints would be necessary only at the margins. Two classic quotes make this crystal clear. First Edmund Burke:
Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon the will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.
Second, John Adams:
. . . we have no government armed with the power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, and licentiousness would break the strongest cords of our Constitution, as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
Both Burke and Adams were spot-on, and what we are witnessing in the Trump 2.0 era, early as it is, is the proof of it by way of negative evidence. We as a nation have become too passionate about public affairs for all the wrong reasons and too irreligious, especially in a communal sense, to manage our private passions. The result is that too few of Americans even understand let alone are capable of operating self-government in the light-handed, limited and self-limiting ways that the Founders imagined. It was the loss of this mostly implicit third form of balance that paved the way, in conjunction with other impulses and gradual memory losses, for the current imbalances that have arisen in the separation-of-powers and the federal domains.
Another question: How so? How did We the People lose the Founders’ plotline?
As described in The Age of Spectacle manuscript, the seed of the erosion of the Founders’ understanding of freedom and what it needed to portend for government was present at the creation not just of the independent nation but of the society itself. And it is not just an American phenomenon, but one that has been at the least a Western Christological one. Listen to Gustave Flaubert writing in 1869 when he had a character complain in A Sentimental Education about “legislators who set themselves up as a Lycurgus to mold society,” insisting that “all modern reformers believe in Revelation.”[1]
What was Flaubert up to here? He was wrestling with as well as portraying the insight that reform beyond a certain timidity requires an authoritative godhead that speaks to humankind about earthly as well as celestial issues. The secular government (in France, obviously) became that godhead or strove to become it, putting it necessarily at loggerheads with existing faith communities. In the novel’s context, the speaker is contending that Rousseau and the Papists actually had more in common than either would have admitted. And it was true: They both sought the mantle of the sacred to justify their moral authority amid the polis.
Another way to express the essence here: What happened in the West as modernity advanced is that the state over time acquired the powers of enchantment that religious communities forfeited. Hence those once called heretics in a religious age became frauds; secular law spoke to application of moral judgment in a pluralist social sphere, not the church; mentally ill people were not exorcized but turned over to the care of psychologists and psychiatrists; scientists now explained the mysteries of the natural world, not “doctors of religion.” As religious institutions lost the aura of enchantment it had to go somewhere; it never disappears, for humans are at base theotropic, always caring about mystery and wonder, order and purpose, redemption and epiphany.[2] So it migrated, at least in large part, toward the state.
Nonetheless, as many have observed, the separation of political authority from the godhead in a classically liberal culture is never a done deal; a strong temptation toward monadic reunion, toward political theology, is never subdued entirely. The result is a process in continuous flux of dis- and re-enchantment among authority claimants in a given society. In the latter part of the 16th century Michel de Montaigne sensed the essence but not the problem: “I have always observed a singular accord between supercelestial ideas and subterranean behavior.” Many years later in a world Montaigne would barely have recognized, a young Carl Schmitt put the prolematique this way in 1922:
. . . all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development—in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example, the omnipotent god became the omnipotent lawgiver—but also because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts.[3]
Since human societies do seem to gravitate theotropically toward a monadic moral order, liberal alternatives that support the cocooning of private lives and consciences from the press of majoritarian hectoring thrive only insofar as they are diligently adumbrated, committed to writing, studied, practiced, and taught. When they are not, as civics has not been seriously taught in American schools for decades on end now, the weeds of political theology spring up thick and quick.
Recent evidence: In both 2022 and 2024 the majority of Republicans, the party having by the latter year shed most of its centrist-leaning members, wanted the United States officially designated a Christian country despite their awareness that so doing would be neither constitutional nor in keeping with American political-cultural principles.[4] That measure of rising Christian nationalism, which is more of an identity marker than a sign of genuine religiosity, is how far gone from the Framers We the People have drifted. Rather too many of us have gone far backwards to what amounts to pre-Enlightenment forms in which intuitions of magical efficacy now outweigh understandings of rational efficacy.
The historical switch of location for the sacred, mainly from religious institutions to the state, seems in part at least a natural product of increasingly literate societies that arose in the cultural West during the 18th and 19th centuries. Once modern nations reached the stage of collective self-consciousness through the interiority-generating effects of deep reading, many sought a form of meaning to social life beyond just being, buying, and consuming. Once a critical mass of society comes to feel that way, its leaders and elites usually want their social and political institutions to correspond to and support that feeling. That can lead—or in any event has led, to the Lycurgus impulse to mold society, to state-directed meliorism at full social scale. And that is the urge which over time can throw the third balance, the one that helps stabilize and order the other two balances, out of whack. If the state becomes the trusted moral arbiter of society, enshrined by the aura of the sacred, then wanting to limit its sway to do good starts to seem downright wrong.
So it is ironic: The Founders saw secularism, as defined in late-18th century terms, as protection against tyranny and a goad not just to a formal separation of powers between branches of government, but also to a separation of passions, so to speak, between faith-based and political ones. The political ones needed cooling, as the Senate was George Washington’s saucer to the House as he explained to a young Mr. Jefferson. Better then to keep private passions about ultimate questions away from politics. But if the separation between a cool state and a warm civic order breaks down for whatever reasons, then the passions of the private can flow into the relatively temperate vacuum of the state to alter the premise of what governance is and is for. Once abided within that premise, a Lycurgusian meliorism tends to expand of its own momentum, not infrequently in step with a version of Tocqueville’s Paradox: There can never be enough moral progress, and what is left to do rises in intense obligation in proportion as final triumph approaches an asymptote.
The process of change itself is consequential. A government that usurps the function of tending to the moral ballast of civil society can further vitiate that society’s underlying organic social coherence—what’s left of it, in the contemporary American case, in the rush of pluralizing and destabilizing postmodernity—and cause it to further hemorrhage social trust. James C. Scott, in his “anarchist’s squint,” explains:
Most villages and neighborhoods function precisely because of the informal, transient networks of coordination that do not require formal organization. . . . [T]he formal order of the liberal state depends fundamentally on a social capital of habits of mutuality and cooperation that antedate it. . . . [T]he formal order of the liberal state depends fundamentally on a social capital of habits of mutuality and cooperation that antedate it, which it cannot create, and which in fact it undermines.[5]
In a nutshell, the great morphing of the American political order over the past 250 years expresses the dynamic wherein the original American constitutional republic, meant to be limited and self-limiting by the Founders, eventually undermined its own design and future through the vehicle of none other than democracy, which channeled the appeal of state-centric meliorism either because We the People simply wanted it, or because we thought we had no choice as the sustaining, underlying coherence of the social order crumbled around us for reasons we strained to comprehend. One way or another the social gospel, so called, leaped the guardrails of the freedom balance and nothing has been the same since. But only in very recent times has the price of that leap become manifest: protection against the kind of nihilism-tinged, anti-meliorist backlash whose tyrannical teeth and eyes we now see for what they are.
A Divided Polis
The backlash against the meliorist project—and that at base is what MAGA is all about—might have remained in conventional and recognizable form as a liberal versus conservative tussle, with the former wanting ever more meliorism and the later saying no, that’s enough, or even more than enough, for now. But it has not remained in that form. The shattering of the old cultural order, based on shared stories of origin, credit, and blame, that Americans told themselves for centuries has given birth to a third shard among We the People, something that does seem like something new under the sun in its current, suddenly towering, form. A moist finger in the air estimate of the current ideal-type breakdown of the American polis would go something like this.
Perhaps 20-30 percent of the adult American population understands, responds to, and affirms rational-legal authority, to again employ Weber’s still-serviceable typology. They are concept-fluent and deep literate, and their cognitive model of causality is rationalist. Most are college graduates and many work or have worked as symbol manipulators or professionals of one sort or another.
Perhaps 25-30 percent of the adult American population understands, responds to, and affirms traditional authority. They are generally less concept-fluent and less inured to deep reading, and their cognitive model of causality is less granularly rationalist. Common sense, such as it is, suffices at least most of the time. Many if not most remain church-affiliated, relatively few have graduated from a four-year college or university, and their labor profile is very diverse but generally sub-professional.
Perhaps 40-55 percent of the adult American population today understands, responds to, and affirms charismatic authority. They are rarely concept-fluent and are non- or post- deep literate. Their cognitive model of causality, at least for anything beyond the materially concrete such as a heavy object falling off a work bench headed toward one’s foot, is mythic/magical. Very few have graduated from a four-year college or university, and their labor profile is generally sub-professional.
If only the first two groups existed at politically salient size, reforming an over-centralized and overbearing state might be possible. But unlike most of the second group probably, if given a choice, this third group does not want to go back to 1789, to the womb of Enlightenment political ingenuity. It does not understand what that is about because it is not concept fluent, and it is not concept fluent because its constituents either cannot or do not deep read. It wants to go back before 1789, to a might-makes-right, survival-of-the-fittest, zero-sum world that in its deranged imagination it thinks is normal, given, inevitable. Everything touchy-feely beyond that, to quote the Vice-President, is to them “moralistic garbage.” These are, often enough, cynics educated by elite disrespect who are pretending, often convincingly to themselves, to be realists.
Alas, this third group, together with confused parts of the second, form the current political plurality in the United States. Their politics are not traditional, and the bedrock of their beliefs is not religious but mythic—hence the fine fit with conspiracy theories of many kinds whose logical syntax abides on the same level. For practical, functional purposes MAGA is a cult, not a party, and Donald Trump is less a president than a shaman. As such, there is literally nothing Trump can do to disabuse this sector of the electorate, and nothing anyone else can do to win them away from Trump.
This is why, as Janan Ganesh wrote recently, at least a third (I would say more) of the American electorate (Ganesh includes the British electorate, as well) is “. . . more or less unreachable,” constituting a constitutional problem for the United States: “It is hard to know how a republic is to survive such a large caucus who are loyal to their partisan team—to one man, in fact—over any rule, principle or institution of state.”[6] Ganesh’s grasp of the deeper reason for this situation is a bit shallow—he leaves out the entire cognitive/literacy factor—but he gets fairly close:
[P]olitical tribe offers the sense of belonging that religious affiliation once did, before church membership declined in the US. The fellow feeling, the structure, is so dear to them as to override all ethical qualms, just as a worshipper won’t have a word said against an obvious low-life of a pastor. The left isn’t so different.
Whatever his depth of analysis, he’s not wrong on the facts.
The New Subsidiarity
We cannot to go back to the 18th-century vision of the Founders, which is impossible in an interdependent society such as we have today. If there were a pragmatic way to rebalance what’s now in three ways out of whack, it would be to rebalance the system insofar as possible away from an arrangement that is too Executive Branch-heavy, too federally centralized, and too weighted toward government directed meliorism at the expense of community-level autonomy. So another fundamental question that pretty much no one is asking: What would that look like?
Were it possible, it would look like a New Subsidiarity. The underlying argument in terms of democratic theory is clear: The more local we site our politics the denser the reservoirs of social trust we can bring to bear, and that is the natural predicate for a form of self government with a chance to work. When government decisions are closer to home it becomes more difficult to screw up things like, say, housing construction--remember the point from last week in discussing “licensing and inspections” barriers to abundance? Why? Because people are more likely to notice both lapses of procedure-obsessed common sense and self-dealing and organize to do something about them. People are far more likely to speak up and take the time to act if they think what they’re doing will matter, a very far cry from imagining what an ordinary citizen would have to do to make a dent in an opaque process happening in Washington, D.C. I still believe, as I have for many years, that the larger the concentration of power, whether public or private, the worse for democratic self-government and the worse for government as an incubator of and model for civic virtue.
In short, with the many details left for some other time, we need a new Whig-like American System in which the Federal government takes a self-limiting but bold approach to policy and management architecture, but leaves the details of implementation to state and local government. Maximum feasible subsidiarity ain’t what it used to be, to be sure—although the network character of new information technology, for all the challenges it poses, may sire advantages here over the centralized tendencies of the age of industrial brawn. In any case, a newly hewn American System should be and could be our future as well as part of our laudable Whiggish past. Practical ways to start this journey do exist, were the political will present to launch them. My “New Pioneer Act” idea, I still think, could be an important bridge to get from here to there, from now to then.[7]
Ah, but in an Age of Spectacle in which We the People are partly demobilized and partly deranged, where “bread and circus” takes the form of “fast food and endless spectacalized entertainment,” how could a social movement based on such principles arise? How could a revived civic order sustain itself when so many Americans are now seized by the cyber-driven New Orality that is propelling so many, in their heads, back to a time well described by Hobbes’s imagined state of nature?
And why are so few, as far as I can discern, asking questions of this kind? Hope starts with imagining a better future. If we can’t do that, we might as well open all the windows and doors and drop the lighted match.
[1] Flaubert, A Sentimental Education (Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 193.
[2] See Joshua Landy and Michael Saler, “Introduction: The Varieties of Modern Enchantment,” in Landy and Saler, eds., The Re-Enchantment of the World: Secular Magic in a Rational Age (Stanford University Press, 2009).
[3] Schmitt, in his Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty.
[4] Shibley Telhami, principal investigator, “Study of Change in U.S. Public Attitudes Towards Jews and Muslims, 2022-2024,” University of Maryland Critical Issues, Poll Study No. 13.
[5] Scott, Two Cheers for Anarchism (Princeton University Press, 2012), pp. xxii-xxiii.
[6] Ganesh, “Take no comfort from America’s Trump backlash,” Financial Times, May 7, 2025.
[7] See “A New Pioneer Act,” National Affairs (Winter 2017), and for other parallel ideas see my “The Quadrivium Fix,” American Purpose, March 19, 2021.