Across the Western world, appointed administrators have gained power at the expense of elected legislators. More and more of the most consequential political decisions are made by bureaucrats and judges, while fewer are made by congresses and parliaments. This trend has been slowly underway since the World Wars, and especially in this millennium.
In the US, Congress has quietly walked away from most of its former duties. Major policy changes once came through legislation like the Social Security Act of 1935, or the Civil Rights Act of 1964, or the Clean Air Act of 1970, or the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, or the USA PATRIOT Act of 2001. There have been no bills like these for a generation. Today, to the extent that policy changes, it is a result of executive agencies using powers granted by these 20th century laws, or federal judges reinterpreting their meaning. The most significant bills of my adult lifetime were the Affordable Care Act and the Dodd-Frank Act, both of 2010, and both were marginal updates to preexisting 20th century bureaucracies.
Even those are beyond the ability of today’s Congress, which is standing idly by as President Trump reforms the government by issuing executive orders to federal agencies. If you took a neutral observer with no emotional attachment to our written Constitution — say, Aristotle — and asked him to describe the role that Congress plays in governing the US today, he would tell you that their job has been reduced to approving the president’s budget requests and bureaucratic appointments, and that they use this power to demand pork-barrel spending in return for the former. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the rise of the European Union has disempowered elected legislatures de jure as well as de facto.
The underlying reason for this widespread political shift is that changes in weapons technology have concentrated military power in the hands of state militaries. Today, governments are less threatened by popular disapproval than they once were. The tacit threat of a popular revolt has been essentially removed. This threat is, historically, the largest check on a state’s ability to override what its people want. It is the ultimate source of an elected legislature’s power.
In Weapons Systems and Political Stability, the master historian Carroll Quigley explained that a society’s form of government is downstream of the balance of military force. When the best weapons system requires expensive equipment used by highly-trained specialists, like a medieval knight with his horse and lance and heavy armour, this concentrates military power into the hands of a small group. On the other hand, when the best weapons system is cheap and can be used effectively by amateurs with relatively little training — for example, muskets or rifles — military power is spread more evenly throughout the population.
Groups which can wield military power will have their interests reflected in the government. This is not an overnight event, with opportunists launching a revolt the second they calculate they have a small advantage. Rather, it’s a gradual and messy process of negotiation and reevaluation, where people pursue their interests, make compromises, quietly push the envelope of what they think they can get away with, and sometimes miscalculate. When a new power centre rises, it’s usually incorporated into the existing structure through gradual reforms. Only occasionally will this provoke an outright military conflict — and these rare military conflicts reveal the de facto balance of military power to observers in other nations, helping to guide those negotiations and keep them grounded. Changes in the fundamental balance of military power usually take decades to propagate through the system and bring the balance of political power into a new equilibrium.
By the late 1700s, guns became widely affordable. With the rise of these amateur weapons, the new balance of military power was much more widely distributed, so over the 1700s and 1800s, revolts and reforms throughout Europe and the Americas shifted political power towards the people. The most aristocratic elements of the United States Constitution were purged over time; the original scheme of an Electoral College formed of wise elites who would use their independent judgment to select the president was almost immediately abandoned, and by the 1830s electoral votes were allocated by popular vote in every state except South Carolina, where the state legislature retained this power until the Civil War. The Senate, too, was originally appointed by state legislatures rather than by popular vote, until the 17th Amendment was passed in 1913. These had been deliberate checks against what the Founding Fathers perceived as the excesses of a pure democracy.
In America and especially in Europe, the new, more democratic political regimes were much more likely to enact policies favoured by large majorities of the people. Regimes which overrode the popular will risked popular revolts that could face government forces head-on. These revolts had a real possibility of deposing even strong governments. This period was roughly bookended by the American Revolution and the Spanish Civil War, 1776-1939.
In the 20th century, this phase ended. The weapons system based on amateur-friendly guns was supplanted by a series of weapons systems based on specialist equipment like airplanes and tanks and rockets. Accordingly, since the Second World War, there have been no popular revolts engaging in pitched battles against any first- or even third-rate army. Revolts against real states have been limited to glorified coups toppling governments that lacked the will to crush the rebels even if they had the ability, like the 1989-1991 wave of revolutions that swept away the Soviet republics. Outright warfare has been effective only in places where the government exists mostly on paper, without anything resembling a functional modern state or military, like Syria or Sudan.
The end of effective military revolts can be ascribed mostly to the development of weapons technology that has made revolts largely futile, against even half-coherent armies. But the trend is also reinforced by ageing populations. Revolts are driven by young men in their teens and twenties willing to take big risks. These young men are usually overrepresented in a revolt’s leadership, and always do the bulk of the killing and dying. Few 35-year-olds are eager to abandon their settled lives and join an ideological crusade or a wild adventure.
On the other hand, middle-aged men are generally willing to be violent inside a stable institution with a steady paycheque. The average US police officer is around 39 or 40 years old. Middle-aged men are rare in riots and in ideological volunteer armies, which can arise from popular opposition, but common in conscript armies and mercenary armies, which are available only to states. So, as the middle-aged come to outnumber the young, the balance of military power — and eventually also political power — shifts even further away from the people and towards state administrators.
“As the middle-aged come to outnumber the young, the balance of military power — and eventually also political power — shifts even further.”
Some military theorists believe that the advent of drone weapons will change the balance towards democratic weapons. Only time will tell, but this seems unlikely. In principle, drone weapons can be used by individuals and small teams to strike at military and government targets while making the attackers relatively difficult to identify, like a roadside bomb which can target more than just patrols. But in practice, drone weapons have been used almost exclusively by state militaries which can marshal the full force of industrial mass production. If there is an earnest drone-based rebellion, it will probably prove feasible for the state to trace back the attackers reliably enough to win the conflict. The 19th century Russian anarchists were able to assassinate state officials not by avoiding capture, but by resigning themselves to it. However, no one can confidently predict the course of future technology, and some future weapon might shift the balance back towards popular military power regardless of what might or might not happen with drone weapons.
The 20th century decline of popular military power, then, led to the gradual but thorough transfer of power from elected representatives, who are somewhat constrained by the popular will, to bureaucracies and agencies able to act however they wish. In other words, within Western states which describe themselves as democracies, the people — the demos — have lost much of their power — their kratos. Elections have become less important in determining the government’s policy, and more ceremonial.
In the US, the legislature has abdicated effectively all of its power to the executive branch bureaucracies and the Supreme Court, leaving the presidential election as the only vehicle for the demos to exercise kratos — which is ironic, considering that the Electoral College was originally envisioned as the most aristocratic part of the Constitution. The presidency of Joe Biden — especially its latter half — demonstrated that the executive bureaucracies are capable of governing autonomously without the president’s involvement, which is to say, they are capable of governing without any accountability to the demos at all. However, the second presidency of Donald Trump demonstrates that a determined president can still steer the executive bureaucracies, if he chooses. The selection of a single man to steer the bureaucracy (or not) is a thin reed on which to rest a claim to democratic governance.
Across the Western world, bureaucrats and judges frequently enact major social changes popular among their own class but unpopular among the demos, such as mass immigration, “degrowth” and deindustrialisation in Europe, and affirmative action in the US, among many other examples. In contrast, older social changes were enacted mostly by elected legislatures.
This change is most advanced in European states. In the past year, administrators in Romania and France have simply disqualified candidates for national office who favour popular policies over the policies of the administrators, using very thin pretexts. Meanwhile, German administrators, always the vanguard of Eurofederalism, are attempting to do the same without resorting to a procedural fig leaf, openly attempting to suppress Alternative für Deutschland for the content of its platform. Such administrative disqualifications are very likely to become the norm, at least in Europe and perhaps more widely. And why not? The days when a disenfranchised demos might storm the Bastille or defend barricades in the streets are long gone.
Modern street protests, such as those regarding asylum policy in Britain, are at most an exercise in daring the state to look bad by using its invincible might, not an attempt to win a real fight. Lately, widespread dissatisfaction has led to quiet chatter of possible uprisings, but outright civil war is unlikely, because everyone knows the demos will lose to an army that actually fights. If any Western government does fall, it will look more like the fall of the Soviet Union, where politicians and generals chose not to fight because they had lost faith in their own regime and saw no point in defending it.
