Democracy Gives Way to the Experts

It would be unfashionable for our gnashing, moralising and increasingly irrational elites to take heed of the teachings of St Thomas Aquinas. Born in the Kingdom of Sicily in the thirteenth century, St Thomas had perhaps the greatest theological career in the history of the Western world. In 1567, Pope Pius V proclaimed him a doctor of the church, elevating his celebration to equivalence with the four great fathers, Augustine, Jerome, Ambrose and Gregory.

It is Aquinas who is responsible for the formulation of much Church law, and it was the Church that carried the legal-philosophical inheritance of the ancient world through the Middle Ages into the Reformation and Enlightenment. Aquinas, as the theoretician behind Church doctrine, emerges from history as perhaps the most significant, most systemic authority on the nature and function of law.

It is Aquinas that we have to thank for propagating the doctrine of subsidiarity.

This principle of social organisation holds that actions performed effectively and competently at local level should remain properly in the jurisdiction of authorities at that level. It is also a basic tenet of common sense—why push issues into the control of the higher tiers of government when they can be efficiently dealt with by real people in real settings?

But its importance runs deeper. Subsidiarity implicitly acknowledges the limitations of the state. It realises the inefficiency and amorality of bureaucracy, and demands that a people govern themselves in local structures, before looking to the state above for help. In this way, it remains a principle indispensable to the flowering of free and prosperous civilisations. Progress, in our extant civilisation, has often come at the behest of the subsidiarity principle. The success of Victorian Britain, pre-First World War America, and the conspicuous longevity of the Church itself, are testaments to its effect. Australia too, began its national life as a logical beneficiary of the subsidiarity principle—the eight-month voyage from Portsmouth to Sydney behoved the British Empire to bestow full executive agency upon the first governors.

In contemporary politicking, even the UN and the European Union have acknowledged the impossibility of building a coherent intra-European legal framework without the force of the subsidiarity principle. The 1997 Treaty of Amsterdam and 2007 Treaty of Lisbon, ironically both exercises in strengthening the European supra-state, explicitly enshrine subsidiarity as a bedrock of the EU’s practical functioning.

There is, however, a peculiar brand of malformed modern statesman who has long sought to usurp the principle. In the late nineteenth century, a rising educated class grasped political thought, wrenched it away from the public square, and thrust it into the scientific control of Western academies. Woodrow Wilson—still the only American President to hold a PhD—would emerge as the first conspicuous usurper of subsidiarity politics in the twentieth century.

Wilson’s crime was not so much the growth of government—that would come later, with Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “New Deal”—but rather, the propagation of an elitist governing disposition. Wilson championed the growth of a new cadre of “experts” who would sit adjunct to, then eventually usurp the democratic law-making process. Jay Richards, at Washington’s Heritage Foundation, frames this contemporary state of affairs as “the tyranny of experts”. It is currently experiencing its most vicious flowering to date, but it is no new phenomenon. It is a Wilsonian creation. As Ashland University’s Steven F. Hayward writes of Wilson, “His great confidence in the wisdom of science and benevolence of expert administrators led him to the view that the founders’ worries about concentrated power were obsolete.”

In Australia, Nick Cater has used the term to describe the appalling influence of our administrative elite in shaping totalitarian responses to the Covid pandemic. Cater unveils the administrative disaster set in motion by an unchecked belief in the “wisdom of science and benevolence of expert administrators”. Of our elites’ purport to omnipotent political wisdom, Cater says, “The assumption of perfect knowledge by the expert class lays the ground for catastrophic policy errors.”

Covid aside, Australians have for generations now had their local interest in self-government usurped. Historical accounts help shed light on the peculiar Australian condition. Russel Ward, in The Australian Legend (1958), placed the seed of a collectivist mindset firmly in the planter-box of Australia’s material circumstances. The paucity of reward for the enterprising individual (and by extension, his family and local associates), hacking away at a barren Australian frontier, may well have driven our national psyche towards a socialist disposition. This lay in contradistinction to the experience of the American journeyman settler. His discovery of endless fertile soils, and of terrain friendly to community settlement, perpetuated an endless explosion of individually realisable wealth. With that wealth came the psychological development and eventual nationalisation of an individualist, anti-statist American disposition. Keith Hancock (Australia, 1930) and Manning Clark (A History of Australia, 1962) variously canvassed Australia’s psychology by invoking the historical circumstances of our national “birth”; our talent for bureaucracy; and our unusual penchant (contra the romantic image of Australis-rusticus) for a thoroughly modern, urbanised lifestyle.

These are valid local antecedents to the eventual faltering of the subsidiarity principle. However, Australia is both a new world and an Anglosphere nation, and the fact remains that not one country that flowered in modernity under either of these broad cultural umbrellas has retained an immunity to the afflictions of an upward-looking statism.

Thomas Jefferson, third President of the United States, and the catalytic agent of New World law through his authorship of the Declaration of Independence, saw the danger long before the rise of the “expert” in governing circles. For Jefferson, the legislature itself posed an imminent threat to the healthy functioning of the local polity. In a letter to his eventual successor James Madison in 1789, Jefferson warned that “the tyranny of the legislatures is the most formidable dread at present, and will be for long years”. Jefferson, an anti-federalist deeply wary of the establishment of a strong central government, was concerned with the crushing effect that empowered factions could have on the freedoms of everyday people. Writing half a century later, still in the birth of the Democratic Age, Alexis de Tocqueville famously quoted Jefferson’s letter in his own book, Democracy in America, singling out Jefferson as “the most powerful apostle that democracy has ever had”.

Powerful though Jefferson was, Tocqueville, blessed by a stronger-yet connection to philosophy’s ancient task, could go beyond the Jeffersonian critique of governing systems, to unveil a deeper, more personal, source of the malaise in the democratic age.

Democracy in America is both the best book on America and the best book on democracy, because it deals not primarily with the systemic features of modern society and government, but with the very nature of man in a democratic era. Tocqueville describes with prophetic clarity the way in which man’s quality of soul would transform under conditions of increasing equality. He describes the way democracy would irreversibly contort the relationship of the state to its people, and in turn, irreversibly contort the nature of man in society:

Above [men], an immense tutelary power is elevated, which alone takes charge of assuring their enjoyments and watching over their fate. It is absolute, detailed, regular, far-seeing, and mild. [Government] would resemble paternal power if, like that, it had for its object to prepare men for manhood; but on the contrary, it seeks only to keep them fixed irrevocably in childhood; it likes citizens to enjoy themselves provided that they think only of enjoying themselves. It willingly works for their happiness; but it wants to be the unique agent and sole arbiter of that; it provides for their security, foresees and secures their needs, facilitates their pleasures, conducts their principal affairs, directs their industry, regulates their estates, divides their inheritances; can it not take away from them entirely the trouble of thinking and the pain of living? … it hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes, and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd.

These extraordinary passages, first published in 1840, lay bare a truth that Tocqueville saw a century before Roosevelt transformed the relationship between a people and their government with his New Deal program, enacted between 1933 and 1939. Tocqueville saw that people in more equal societies would be cut adrift from ancient hierarchical structures. These structures—ranks, classes, prescriptions and functions—could be seen to give meaning and definition to civic roles. The prescriptive, vertical society dominated by king and court promulgated a social ethic absent the degree of choice and agency beloved of modernity. But it also ensured an ethic of social obligation, and local co-operation. Aristocratic structures throw the sovereign obligation skittering downward. They delegate a robust, if not always conspicuous strength to local self-governance.

In the Scottish enlightenment, David Hume recognised that—contra modern democratic legislatures—when a sovereign is but one man, that sovereign’s capacity to govern in minutiae is significantly restricted. The subsidiarity principle finds a natural home in aristocratic eras, because the sovereign can only do so much when his personal power of dispatch ends at the tip of his own sword. In Of the First Principles of Government, Hume posited that opinion alone must project the sovereign prerogative outward, holding a supreme ruler in the good favour of his subjects. The king, as a single embodied sovereign, puts a natural limitation on the state’s meddling in local affairs. Too much ado about the neighbourhood, too much usurpation of the local prerogative, and the monarch risks slipping from the favour of local chieftains. Under Hume’s reckoning, it would become dangerous for a monarch, bestowed with absolute power, to dispatch that power absolutely, in pursuit of an anti-localist prescription.

With the fall from history of the absolute monarchs, comes the rise in their stead of the ambitious new men of the legislature. These fellows would purport to a localist prescription where politically convenient, but leaving problems to the people would for them never suffice. Too grand was their romantic vision of the future, too perfect their utopian schemes, to be left in the rugged artisan hands of lesser intellects.

Gough Whitlam romanticised, then legitimised the anti-localist prescription in the Australian imagination. Whitlam’s conceit about his own call to history is not news to either friend or foe of his government. But something important is lost in the inevitable focus on Whitlam’s personal hubris: the intergenerational damage his romanticisation of politics wrought upon an already compromised instinct for Australian self-governance. Australia, as per Ward’s, Hancock’s and Clark’s observations, was never going to be the natural home of small government. Still, by the mid-twentieth century, the nation had avoided some of the cultural contamination of FDR’s legitimisation of big government. Coming out of the Great Depression, Joseph Lyons’s prevalence over the debt-default politics of Ted Theodore and Jack Lang had produced a country at least somewhat more conscious of the necessary limits of state power. Lyons’s fiscal restraint placed a psychological check on the rising opinion that government might step in to save society from itself. The succeeding Menzian ethic—of lifters, not leaners—certainly did no harm to the rapprochement between state and citizen powers. It can also not have hurt Australia’s citizenry that soon afterward, on the world stage, John F. Kennedy arrived in a blaze of enterprise and optimism, dragging the West away from any post-war notions of government salvation. Kennedy’s “ask not” speech at his 1961 inauguration invoked the socio-political spirit (if not the economics) of renewed localism and self-reliance. In the wake of Kennedy’s death and Johnson’s Vietnamese quagmire came Richard Nixon. Entering the 1970s, Nixon saw that Kennedy’s spiritual invocations would be insufficient to save civilisation. Nixon realised that the interests of a free people were set against the suffocating, self-perpetuating interests of permanent bureaucracy. In his 1968 nomination acceptance speech, Nixon declared war on the administrative state. In his 1971 State of the Union address, he paid heed to the virtue of localism explicitly: “The idea that a bureaucratic elite in Washington knows best what is best for people everywhere, and that you cannot trust local governments, is really a contention that you cannot trust people to govern themselves.”

At the same time Nixon was careering towards personal catastrophe, Australia met its own disaster. Six months after Republican operatives broke into the Watergate Building in Washington, the Whitlam government broke into the Treasury coffers in Canberra. Whitlam’s considerable skill in oratory, and his capacity to invoke the adventure of interventionist government’s new science, heralded a distinct break in national disposition. Having landed a man on the moon (thank you again, President Kennedy), ought the English-speaking peoples not now turn their attention to even bigger problems? Ought governments not now engineer societies, in lieu of rocket ships? Menzies had railed against this statist conceit in a speech to Young Liberals in Sydney in 1962: “To compare the mechanism of government, as if it were some sentient creature, with the genius of the human being, is absurd.”

Whitlam was never one to suffer such reservations. He positioned government itself—not the people, as Menzies, Kennedy and Nixon had sought to do—as the prime mover in the new adventure.

Whitlam, raised as a boy in the bureaucratic heartland of the Canberra suburbs, reflected on his career thus: “My great objective as a parliamentarian was to dramatise the deficiencies and devise practical government programs to deal with them.”

Read today, Whitlam’s words barely raise an eyebrow. They are so typical in tone for politicians across the ideological spectrum, we seldom read them closely enough to grasp their shocking import: Whitlam’s first clause espouses the principal role given to government as the stoker of public passions. In second place, he establishes a moral imperative in response to newfound manias: the exponential growth of the state and its appendaged operatives. Politicians ever since have seen themselves as the real dramatis personae in the Australian story.

Whitlam famously fell, but the purported virtue of government as fixer of everything did not. It lives so deeply embedded in the Australian soul, that a child growing up now in Australia could scarcely conceive of a world where government isn’t the thing that rightfully sits above and encompasses all. The Parliament, with its long train of post-Whitlam pundits and performers, absorbs and absolves responsibility from all. Its new conception is in all respects the very definition of Tocqueville’s forewarned “tutelary power”. The word tutelary derives from the latin tutelarius (from tutela—“keeping”), and though related, does not mean to “tutor”, in the modern sense. Rather, it is to serve as protector, guardian and patron, justifying its immense power by virtue of its duty to keep its subjects safe.

Alexis de Tocqueville wrote his book for his countrymen. No surprise then to see that amongst today’s democracies, the French government is the supreme patron of its people. A mammoth 31 per cent of France’s GDP is directed to social spending. But still we must ask: Is there any bureaucracy in the Western world now more enamoured of the role of protector and guardian than Australia’s? Does any other cadre of mandarins espouse the sacred duty, religiously chanted by pretty doctors and petty dictators, of keeping us safe? Tocqueville’s forewarning of the nascent tutelary power resonates profoundly in the Australia of today—a nation torn away from self-determined agency by the insistent roar of an expert class who believe that more power and more law will solve more of our problems.

Medical crises are a wonderful pretext for the exercise of increased law and power. No threat so demands expert attention like the one that might pierce the walls of both the body politic and the body corporeal. But the temporary fanaticism brought out by the viral threat is but a window into a far deeper malaise.

Our cultural leaders are today also possessed of a great general pathology: the post-Christian desire for national atonement. Only their national (or supra-national) prescriptions can deliver us salvation from the crimes of our ancestors. At the top of the list of atonements sought by our administrative elite are two great mortal sins: first, what we’ve done to the Earth, and second, what we’ve done to its “original” inhabitants. The great magnitude of these allegations is the pretext under which today’s tutelarians seek to wrench the subsidiary levers of government away from their rightful, local custodians.

In the first case, the charge is so grave, there is no longer any pretension made to local prerogative whatsoever. The “crisis” of climate is now apparently so severe that only the heaviest-handed, top-down response will suffice. Of course, this is a moral abstraction: there is never a problem so severe that it behoves those fixing it to ignore a better real result, in lieu of boosting their own moral superiority. But that is precisely what Australia’s elites have done in addressing the mooted catastrophe. Crushed is any desire for real people, in their real communities, to come to terms beneficially with their own environment. Elevated is the notion that only the experts can dictate how we shall live if we are to survive not only the crisis itself, but the moral stain it splashes across the fabric of our body politic. In fashionable streets, Teslas adorn driveways and solar panels decorate rooftops. These are the moral signals of the modern Passover ritual—blood smeared atop the doorway to signal ritual sacrifice and moral obedience to a vengeful God casting plagues upon a sinful world, in the hope he will pass over the faithful.

In the second case, the problem is more opaque. Racial histories are complex even when they’re simple: blood and culture trickle from national mythology in messy interpolated streams, making unilateral governmental solutions an obviously ill-advised bet. So, the preferred strategy of elites is to advertise falsely. National sledgehammers are dressed as local chisels, constitutional megaphones as soap-box street announcements. “The Voice” was always a grand, radical national action, promised to us with the delicacy (and supposed benignity) of a local listening tour. The promise—always vague—was that the Voice would be a triumph of locality. The claim was embedded in the DNA of the “Yes” team’s marketing campaign. That even on the best estimates, with the best of intentions, such a claim would never stack up in reality, was not important. Setting aside the transparent, nefarious and revolutionary intentions of so many leading “Yes” campaigners, the Voice’s purport to localism was itself patently ridiculous. Could the despondent cries of an Alice Springs child really find honest resonance in such a body? The Voice begged Australians to imagine a kind of magic bush telegraph: omnipresent ear held to red earth, effortlessly amplifying the whispers of the desperate. Their hitherto hushed tones transmogrified into an irrepressible roar at the despatch box. The once-blinkered cabinet minister, with miraculous change to blood and fibre, would be reconstituted by the Constitution. He would speak anew with an imbibed indigenous fire and wisdom. And, somehow, this fantastical machine would have run pure in blood and spirit—ne’er to be corrupted by the avaricious forces which have undone every such effort at social sophistry.

Why then, in the face of such obvious fallacy, do hapless proponents of government wisdom so earnestly believe in it? Tocqueville perhaps had the answer, when he said that “it seeks only to keep them fixed irrevocably in childhood; it likes citizens to enjoy themselves provided that they think only of enjoying themselves”.

Our cultural and political governors are indeed fixed irrevocably in childhood.

They practise politics by the undeveloped reason of pre-pubescent boys and girls: immoderately, inconsiderately, and possessed of the conviction that help should properly come from above. They don’t have the self-control to leave the arena when time is up. They play beyond boundaries their impoverished souls were never equipped to recognise. They hold on to their toys for dear life, scared witless by the missteps that might occur—or the power they might lose—were they to slacken their grip on the handles.

Without the breaking of that grip, Australia, like the rest of the West, awaits a miserable descent into further governmental failure. But through the rediscovery of self-government, local problems can be brought into the purview of local people, and solved through local action. Through the re-elevation of the subsidiarity principle, our country might meet the course it must take, and regain the competence it sorely needs, in order to renew itself and prosper.

Benjamin Crocker is a fellow of Common Sense Society in Washington DC, and Director of Special Programs at the University of Austin, Texas. He is a Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation Postgraduate Scholar Alumnus.