Both, in my view, but mostly good, definitely necessary, and dangerous.
The Good
Son of a union organizer, with working class, labor roots and affinities,. I adhere to to Catholic Social teaching, especially on solidarity (but also on subsidiarity). A staunch moral conservative, I have never been Reaganite Republican or libertarian on economics as I am critical of business, labor and government...especially when they are big...and immensely suspicious if they are not countervailed against each other. If you have big business, you will need to have big unions and big government.
Especially over the last 15 years as director of a boarding home for women, I have found Jersey City and New Jersey regulations to be reasonable and the inspectors to be practical and helpful. Regarding police, fire and medical emergency personnel I cannot adequately sing enough their praises!
With a strong Catholic sense of subsidiarity (which means the smallest possible social unit competent for the task is preferable), I favor smallness, localism, and minimalism. I worked for 25 years as a supervisor for UPS, happily and gratefully, proud of our mission, but always aware of the dehumanizing dynamics of its bigness. Finely attuned to the negativities that attend bureaucracy, I nevertheless appreciated its blessings. In a few hours I will board a plane from here (Antigua) to Miami: I am indebted to the pilots, security guards, engineers, inspectors and hundreds of thousands of others...to the mega-techno-bureaucracy!
My son, formerly a JAG lawyer with the army, is a manager in the Veteran's Administration; my son-in-law is principal of a large high school; my nephew and his wife are high profile prosecutors with the DOJ. About half of my large Irish family work within large private or state bureaucracies; we are, for the most part, not farmers, artisans or entrepreneurs. They are intelligent, competent , dedicated and of sterling moral character. Our urban, Irish-American tribe has always served heavily in the military, police/department, FBI, politics, unions and the entire network referred to as the administrative or (disparagingly) as deep state. I do not share that contempt. With exceptions (below) I have the highest respect.
Our market, competitive, meritocratic, class, free society systematically privileges the positioned and the competent in thousands of ways. Voluntary charity on the part of the more privileged is not adequate to address this. A strong state is required to protect the vulnerable and restrain the powerful and predatory.
Yuval Levin reminds us that not only are strong, durable, fluid institutions required for the wellbeing of society, but they serve to form us, as singular persons, in virtue. Long term commitment, even to a monotonous job, elicits loyalty, patience, solidarity, cooperation and a host of virtues; it is a trainig in virtue.
There are valued, essential communal goods that inherently cannot be provided by the market itself: safety, security, healthy environment, economic infrastructure, and countless others. We need a strong state, but not a malignantly expansive one.
The value of civil service, long recognized, is to have a stable, reliable network of institutions not vulnerable to the whims of political fashion. This is strikingly pertinent in this age of Trump and extreme polarization. The remarkable thing about the Trump administration is that, notwithstanding his incompetence, impulsiveness and incoherence, he had little effect on the workings of government. This was due to his obsession with attention, disinterest in and capacity for governance, but also the stability and resilience of the administrative state. Given the extremism active in both parties, we are well served by a network of agencies that are only partially reactive to the party in power.
The Bad
As noted above, the principle of subsidiarity prefers the small, the local, the convivial, the personal over the immensity and impersonality of mega-technological-bureaucracies. And so, our gigantic government, especially federal, share with big business and labor a pattern of pathologies, which coexist with the goods they provide.
The agency, competence, and dignity of the person is compromised by the regime of expertise, technology and bureaucracy as the individual, even more so if successful (in some specific skill) and affluent, is dependent upon professionals in all things and disabled, even paralyzed, in the performance of small, concrete actions which order the immediate environment and form character.
The techno-bureaucracy carries within itself a powerful, inexorable logic or form: to control, for efficiency, avoidance of risk and danger, and therefore suppression of freedom, creativity, conviviality, not to mention contemplation as interior to action. It tends of its very nature to oppress the personal as interior and the spiritual as the root of agency to a disguised totalitarianism.
Smaller communities of value and agency, above all the family, but the entire universe of intemediate organizations (small business, local non-profits, Churches, etc.) have been systemically deconstructed, leaving the lonely, monadic individual at the mercy of the mega-organizations of market and state.
Every agency and organization, directed by a coherent set of goals and values, carries within itself specific values, and so has to be countered with society by contrasting actors. People with specicfc values are drawn to certain agencies. Zoning board members may share an urgency to protect the status quo and exclude or heavily regulate newcomers; social science and humanities departments of universities are overwhelmingly liberal; police departments maybe not so much. And so we do well to suspect an imbalance in agencies that are very large. We are wise to be critical and countervail such forces with competing agents.
Culturally, the current dominance of moral progressivism and sexual liberation over our elite organizations but specifically the Democratic Party leaves us moral conservatives defensive before an expansive government weaponized against our cherished values: powerless and incompetent human life, sexuality-marriage-family, religious freedom in particular. This is the diabolical face of the administrative state: it will coerce us to cooperate with abortion, reproductive technologies, desecration of the gendered human body, deconstruction of masculinity'/femininity into androgyny, and disguised imposition of a secular, individualistic/collectivistic technocracy.
Conclusion
The techno-bureaucracy, in our world, is conjoined to a cultural progressivism in isolating, sterilizing, and disempowering the lonely individual, uprooted from family-tradition-community, and dependent upon itself. But we cannot simply abandon or destroy the beast. Rather, we can emulate our fathers ("the great generation") in the labor movement of the 1930 when Catholics battled Marxists for control of the unions (concurrently as they fought capital for the rights of workers.) Happily, they prevailed. We can aspire to the same.
In favor of the local, the personal, the concrete, the personal we do well to restrain the malignant growth of big state and big business both as we nourish small community at every level and overcome the loneliness of individualism (as progressive sexual liberation and "conservative" economic neo-liberalism) in pursuit of virtuous personality, embedded in family/faith/society.
The rage of the far right against "The Administrative State" is not without cause, but it has inflamed itself into anxious, hysterical, violent anarchy, desperate to tear down, but bereft of anything positive to offer. We cannot merely destroy this network, trusting naively in the unretrained market or an imagined return to an imagined past. We have no choice but to wrestle with the beast, resisting the bad, grasping the good.
I myself am heartened by the emergence within the conservative party of a "new right" which defends our Catholic moral values but retrieves the Catholic-friendly liberalism of the New Deal and the post-war Democratic Party: a critical but overall positive view of labor unions and government active on behalf of the disadvantaged and working classes. Sohab Ahamri, J.D. Vance, Adrian Vermule, Michael Lind and a small, but insightful and passionate cadre offer a viable alternative to the raging anarchism of the far right, the crude and vicious resentment of Trump, and the moral nihilism of the Left.
The administrative state is a necessity. Is in itself, its form or essence, a good thing. But vulnerable to bad actors and larger-than-life dynamics. We do well to cherish it, as we scrutinize it with clarity and fight for it passionately and confidently.
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