The Deep Causes of The Shallow State

Michael E Herz

A year into the second Trump administration, the 47th president has done a pretty darn impressive job of destroying state capacity. Resources, personnel, expertise, law-following, law-enforcement, ethics, and competence have all been jettisoned. For many observers, the result is a catastrophic inability of the federal government to accomplish basic functions.

In The Secular Decline of the American State, Ganesh Sitaraman has arrived with some good news and some bad news. The good news is that the current administration’s sapping and mining are not that aberrant; Trump’s dismantling project has not, in fact, fundamentally shifted the country from the path it has been on for some time. The crisis is not acute. Whew.

The bad news, though, is that the crisis is chronic. It is the result of multiple entrenched factors; Donald Trump is a symptom as much as a cause. Things are worse than you thought.

In his title and throughout the article, Sitaraman refers to “the American state.” This could be read very broadly, but his focus is on the administrative state in particular. He begins by cataloguing four central aspects of government operation, all of which are in decline:

• The rationality element, i.e., “the state’s ability to operate according to principles of rationality and legality.”
• The delivery element, i.e., the state’s ability to deliver positive life outcomes—health care, clean water, personal security, etc.—to citizens.
• The regulatory element, i.e., the state’s control of private bad actors, protecting the citizenry from violence, threats, exploitation, fraud, cheating, scams, and similar harms.
• The evolutionary element, i.e., the state’s ability to adapt, change, and improve, for “[a] state that cannot adapt declines by definition.”

Many would agree that the present is a moment of (steep) decline with regard to all four elements. Sitaraman takes this view. But he rejects the claim that it is all Donald Trump’s fault, the claim that Republicans and general anti-administrativism are to blame, and the view that what is happening is not decline at all but merely right-sizing and the necessary recalibration of a bloated bureaucracy.

Instead, he asserts that we are witnessing a long, slow (thus “secular” in the sense that economists use the term) erosion with multiple contributing causes. In the heart of the article, he identifies fifteen (count ’em!, 15) factors behind the decline. Here is the list, in the order Sitaraman presents it (though he does not rank the factors in importance):

1. The “asymmetry of breaking and building.” One administration can demolish something quickly; it will always take longer for others to rebuild it.
2. “Contagion in systems.” A sort of ecologist’s view of state capacity, where destruction of any one component will have negative effects on many others.
3. “The fragility of credible commitments.” Effective governance rests in part on the fact that third parties can trust the state to stand by its promises; as that reliance is undermined and the state’s credibility destroyed, longer-term goals become much more difficult to achieve.
4. “The red queen effect.” State capacity must grow and develop with social and technological changes, but voters and representatives have no incentive to invest in capacity. Merely to hold steady is to decline. As for the Red Queen in Through the Looking Glass, so for species and so too administrative capacity.
5. Deep-seated skepticism of the state. This leads to insufficient bureaucratic autonomy.
6. Neoliberal enthusiasm for deregulation, privatization, trade liberalization, and austerity. These policies all directly weaken state capacity.
7. Denigration of and disregard for the bureaucracy. Over the last half-century, leaders have denigrated the bureaucracy, leading to a significant blow to its reputation and, in turn, effectiveness.
8. Legislative gridlock. By definition, Congress’s inability to pass statutes interferes with the state’s ability to deliver, regulate, and evolve.
9. Submerged and technocratic policymaking. Even if beneficial, government programs are often invisible, burdensome, and complex—and they are not always beneficial.
10. Proceduralism, or what Nicholas Bagley has labeled “the procedure fetish.” As “abundance” enthusiasts have complained, it is just too hard to get anything done.
11. Elite norms, culture, incentives, and biases. The prevailing mindset renders elected and appointed officials timid, risk-averse, and backward-looking.
12. The collapse of countervailing powers. Social groups and movements that once pushed hard, and with some effect, in favor of a robust state and against the power of oligarchs have collapsed, leaving state-building without a constituency.
13. Judges. Judicial politics and ideology over the last generation, and especially the last decade, have become distinctly anti-administrative.
14. Influential oligarchs. —Wealth and political power increasingly lie with those delighted by minimal regulation, lower taxes (and therefore fewer resources for the government), and crony capitalism.
15. Factional divisions. On both the right and the left (though more on the left), there exist sub-groups that would seek to advance state capacity but cannot do so because it would mean bucking their political allies.

Other than that, there are no obstacles! (Actually, Sitaraman says the list may not be comprehensive. But still, I feel it’s a very good start.)

In Part II, Sitaraman carries on down his cheery path, briefly laying out the consequences of the decline these factors produce: social and economic harms, rising inequality and instability, reduced innovation and technological progress, diminished resilience to crises (both natural and man-made), weakening of American power and prestige abroad, and a “doom loop” in which the state’s very inability to solve problems leads people to question the need for a strong state and to retreat into tribalism, with its attendant unrest, instability, and violence.

Does he see a future that does not involve continued decline? Alas, no. Part IV sketches four plausible future paths: Bannonist deconstruction of the administrative state, which would debilitate the social welfare and regulatory state but enhance the security and surveillance state; creation of a patrimonial, crony-capitalist state; an embrace of the abundance agenda, in which significant deregulation would be accompanied by subsidies; or the establishment of an anti-monopolist state envisioned by, most prominently, Lina Khan. For Sitaraman, the first three will do nothing to restore capacity, and the fourth just isn’t going to happen.

So where does that leave us? Sitaraman does not offer a path forward. In a brief concluding section, he states that recovery will require political leaders who will plan reforms well in advance, rather than being wholly reactive and in the moment, will be willing to act swiftly and boldly, and are prepared to delegate power. It goes unsaid, but this is not a skill set for which political leaders are especially well-known.

No one can accuse Sitaraman of being a Pollyanna. The article is not uplifting. If it were a book and followed pervasive subtitling conventions, it would be called something like The Great Hollowing Out: How Everything Leads to the Loss of State Capacity and What We Can Do About It. Except the “what we can do about it” part is essentially absent. That is not Sitaraman’s fault. There is no quick fix. That is part of his point. But by compellingly reminding us that the problem cannot be fixed by one election and identifying the larger forces at work, he has, one hopes, at least pointed to the path of reconstruction.