The Heritage Foundation has a fascinating piece on "The Birth of the Administrative State."
As you might suspect, this birth can primarily be traced back to FDR's "New Deal" which took us off the "Constitutional standard" and into the "make-it-up-as-you-go standard." But the origins of this shift go farther back.
Here is what liberals (or "progressives" as the piece obligingly calls them) thought about the nature of government and administration.
The fundamental assumption behind the vast discretion that Progressives wanted to give to administration was a trust in or optimism about the selflessness, competence, and objectivity of administrators, and thus a belief that the separation-of-powers checks on government were no longer necessary or just. If the Framers of the Constitution had instituted the separation of powers out of fear of "the abuses of government"--fear that the permanent self-interestedness of human nature could make government "administered by men over men"[16] a threat to the natural rights of citizens--then the advocates of administrative discretion concluded that such fears, even if well-founded in the early days of the republic, no longer applied in the modern era. Thus, administration could be freed from the shackles placed upon it by the separation of powers in order to take on the new tasks that Progressives had in mind for the national state. This key assumption behind the separation of politics and administration is exemplified in Wilson's political thought.
The strong Progressive belief in the enlightenment and disinterestedness of administrators stands as an instructive contrast to the permanent self-interestedness that the Framers of the U.S. Constitution saw in human nature.[17] Just as this sobriety about the potential for tyranny led the Framers to circumscribe carefully the authority of the national government, the Progressives' passionate optimism fueled their call for maximum discretion for administrators.
Here we see that the Founders had a Christian worldview when the constructed our government. They recognized that humans are fallen creatures with a sin nature, and that we require "checks and balances" to temper and insulate the government of the people from the sin nature of those at the reins of government.
Liberals, however, have adopted the humanist view that "just as man is evolving physically according to Darwin, he is also evolving morally." Therefore, they believed that humanity had evolved beyond the point they were at during the founding of the United States, and no longer had the "sin nature" the Founders sought to keep in check. (A look at Bill Clinton--or if you're a liberal and believe the charges of MoveOn.org, look at George Bush--quickly illustrates the fallacy of this notion. YET LIBERALS CLING TO THE NOTION THAT WE HAVE 'OUTGROWN' SUCH MORAL CONSTRAINTS, EVEN THOUGH WE ARE SLAPPED IN THE FACE DAILY WITH THE EVIDENCE THAT WE HAVE NOT).
Here catch another glimpse of the theological and philosophical underpinnings of these political philosophies:
In his New Freedom campaign for President in 1912, for instance, Wilson urged that the rigid, mechanical, "Newtonian" constitutionalism of the old liberalism be replaced by a "Darwinian" perspective, adjusting the Constitution as an organic entity to fit the ever-changing environment. Wilson also blamed separation-of-powers theory for what he believed to be the inflexibility of national government and its inability to handle the tasks required of it in the modern age:The trouble with the theory is that government is not a machine, but a living thing. It falls, not under the theory of the universe, but under the theory of organic life. It is accountable to Darwin, not to Newton. It is modified by its environment, necessitated by its tasks, shaped to its functions by the sheer pressure of life. No living thing can have its organs offset against each other, as checks, and live.
In formulating his "evolving" theories of government and administration, the Heritage piece says Woodrow Wilson looked to Europe (the system we had intentionally divorced ourselves from in setting up the United States) and a philosophy that rejected the rule of law:
Relying heavily on European models of administrative power, Wilson laid out a vision for administrative discretion in 1891 that directly rejected the rule-of-law model:
The functions of government are in a very real sense independent of legislation, and even constitutions, because [they are] as old as government and inherent in its very nature. The bulk and complex minuteness of our positive law, which covers almost every case that can arise in Administration, obscures for us the fact that Administration cannot wait upon legislation, but must be given leave, or take it, to proceed without specific warrant in giving effect to the characteristic life of the State.
Liberals like Wilson and FDR saw themselves and other "progressive" bureaucrats as too "enlightened" to be encumbered by trivial things like check and balances, and the rule of law. Since they had reached a superior level of moral evolution, they needed to be free of these traditional constraints in order to govern efficiently.
Frank Goodnow was another of these "progressives" who viewed our system of government as outdated.
The Founders' system of government, Goodnow acknowledged, "was permeated by the theories of social compact and natural right." He condemned these theories as "worse than useless," since they "retard development"[40]--in other words, their focus on individual liberty prevents the expansion of government. The separation-of-powers limits on government, Goodnow realized, came from the Founding-era concern for individual liberty: "It was the fear of political tyranny through which liberty might be lost which led to the adoption of the theories of checks and balances and of the separation of powers."
Again, we see that it is this liberal fantasy that humanity has evolved beyond the need for restraints which is responsible for their strange view of American government and our heritage. It also explains why they view limited government, the Second Amendment and the Tenth Amendment with such disdain: they do not see them as necessary, because since humanity has evolved, the tyranny the Founders feared is no longer a danger.
(Oddly, if humanity has evolved so much morally, then why do they seek to erase the Second Amendment with gun control--if we were so evolved morally, we wouldn't be shooting each other, would we? Perhaps liberals believe that while the masses haven't evolved this far, the elites have. But Bill Clinton illustrates that even those who rise to the top of the political heap are not "evolved" morally. And though I don't share their view, even liberals should see this truth, because they make endless claims that George Bush is an American "Hitler." But then, logic and consistency have never been a liberal strong suit.)
I think this foundational "worldview" difference between conservatives or the traditional view of American government, and the liberal view is at the root of our current ideological struggle.
We are currently in the middle of a civil war (and have been for 60 or more years), but it is a war that involves the tools of government itself as the weapons, rather than bullets or bombs. And it is a civil war that conservatives have only awaken to in the last 20-30 years--with a vast number still asleep.
Despite evidence to the contrary, liberals continue to insist that man has evolved past the need for moral and governmental restraints. In their mind, the struggle has shifted beyond accountability to God, and to an accountability to a "higher" social consciousness. Unfortunately for the masses, that "social consciousness" is defined by the elites who don't have to live under the consequences of the "social consciousness" they impose on average Americans.
We can try to ignore the evidence that man is still the fallen creature the Bible says we are in Romans 3:23, and indeed humanists work very hard to ignore this. In the end, though, the truth reveals itself in our crime rate, our teen pregnancy rate, our divorce rate, and throughout the fabric of current social decay.
Until we abandon the modern fantasy about the human condition and return to the traditional American constructs of checks, balances and limits, we will continue our slide into suffering and governmental debilitation.
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