If elected, Donald Trump has vowed to demolish what he calls the “deep state” – a conspiratorial term for the American federal bureaucracy. A second Trump administration, running mate JD Vance has said, should fire thousands of civil servants and replace them with MAGA loyalists.
Trump has said he would tap the billionare Elon Musk as the hatchet man to lead his proposed government commission on “efficiency” in government.
Compared with the other fireworks of the campaign – like Trump’s promise to criminally prosecute his political rivals and suppress news organizations – threats to gut the United States’ vast federal bureaucracy don’t get much attention. But doing so is a big a threat to democracy.
For years, conservatives have claimed that taking power from government agencies gives it back to the people. Yet while it might seem counterintuitive, Americans actually exercise their sovereignty through the administrative state.
The American administrative state was established almost 100 years ago by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. As a historian of American democracy, I think it’s valuable to remember what the old deal looked like while Trump rails against the New Deal.
Around 1900, America was not really democratic. The federal government did not rule by the consent of the governed. As historian Heather Cox Richardson recently argued, the American government was an oligarchy.
Millions of working-class Slavs, Jews, Italians, Asians and Scotch-Irish Appalachians toiled mercilessly in death-trap sweatshops, suffocating mines and fiery steel mills. Cotton farmers in the Black Belt lived like peons.
These people were America’s “other half,” as the social reformer Jacob Riis called them in 1890. And they were effectively excluded from the........