Should a villainous bureaucratic class be brought back down to earth?
The right in the US and UK are seeking to clip the wings of the "bureaucratic class". Will that work as a politics and policy agenda in a risk society?
All thrillers need a villain. Increasingly, the high-paced movie emerging on the right of US and UK politics, having defeated the “liberal elite” villain, now faces a more formidable foe: the bureaucratic class. This is the group of workers, a few million in total, who administer things, manage risk, ensure we comply. They are lawyers, accountants, HR people, managers, and government officials there to sap our energy, our vigour, our spirit. Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy in the US and the new Leader of the Opposition in the UK, Kemi Badenoch, all have a similar target in their sights. How convincing is this story?
If you haven’t yet read the pamphlet published by Kemi Badenoch over the Summer, Conservatism in Crisis, it is to be highly recommended. Given she returned to its themes in a Sunday Times oped last week we can take it as a set of positions she holds deeply. The politics are somewhat vexed for reasons I will come onto so we can take it as read that she actually firmly believes that our ills derive from the expansion and ascension to power of a “bureaucratic class”.
It has a very clear line of attack. There’s lots of absurdities - to give one example, she claims the “bureaucratic class” are responsible for declining NHS productivity despite the fact that the managerial workforce has trailed other job categories in the service pointing to the opposite of her thesis (though perhaps managers have become more productive at slowing everyone else down? You have to do cartwheels to get the data to fit the argument and she performs many). And her comments on autism have rightly drawn strong criticism. But it is written like a thriller with a crime (loss of developed world vigour), a villain (the bureaucratic class) and a saviour (“modern conservatism”).
On an intellectual level, the argument is fascinating and has a lineage on both the left and right. It has echoes of Herbert Marcuse and his One-Dimensional Man, Michael Young and Small Man, Big World, and David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs. The left critique of the bureaucratic class bemoans its soporific effect on the critique of capitalism. Then there are theses from Irving Kristol (1978), James Burnham (1941), and Michael Lind (2020): a managerial or professional or metropolitan class was self-serving and likely to divert the economy and society into the sidings. This Marxist/new conservative crossover should be no surprise. In fact, James Burnham, the key theorist in this arena, was a Trotskyist then converted to the New Right as a major voice in the National Review. Right wing Marxism is a thing and the “bureaucratic class” thesis is most definitely in that category.
Where Badenoch is right is in the notion that the regulatory state does, over time, tend to overload itself. There is no doubt, for example, that our ability to build the houses, energy system and infrastructure we need is impaired by this overload. It comes as a result of lots of small decisions over time each of which makes sense but creates lots of sludge at a system-wide level. Periodically, this sludge has to be dredged.
You don’t have to believe in the argument that we should just pull back the state and let speculative housing development rip regardless of the environmental consequences (I don’t) to acknowledge that there is an issue with the planning process as the Britain Remade campaign argues. Though 44,000 pages on environmental impact assessment for a new nuclear power station hardly seems excessive. It is only “clean” technology if you ignore toxic waste but on that basis coal is clean too if you just ignore its emissions. More broadly, I’m sure this sludge is present in regulation of all types. It certainly is when it comes to accessing public services and social security but that tends to be hidden in the right’s critique of the bureaucratic state- not least as they are largely responsible. “Bonfires” of red tape are hardly new or particularly politically energising. So how will the politics play?
It’s important to state first of all that the Badenoch case has very sharp political contours. It will cut through and there is a book to follow which will drive home the message. There are two challenges: one about political context and one to do with where we are as a society. In terms of context, the “bureaucratic class” narrative will have its test against a real-world live example. The Trump administration, for the time being, will, through the Department of Government Efficiency, be cutting deeply into the bureaucratic state. The degree to which that is seen as success or chaos will be a backdrop for the Badenoch case. This ties her into perceptions of the Trump administration which may not be a comfortable place to be politically.
More profoundly, contrary to the thesis that the “bureaucratic class” is a historical actor which has been pursuing its own interests against the public good, something rather different has been taking place and this is a long rather than recent process. Social theorists such as Ulrich Beck writing on the risk society, Anthony Giddens on ontological security, and Manuel Castells on the rise of the network society and identity backlash, have long identified the fallout from the modern world and its economies, technologies, cultures and politics. Just think about the past two decades: terrorism, environmental catastrophe, breakdown in institutional trust, financial crash, pandemic, political violence, re-ignition of global geo-political conflict, an inflation crisis and so on. Is it any wonder that in such a risk-laden society there is public demand to manage these risks and so we see the rise of a “bureaucratic class”?
What the Badenoch thesis asks people to do is, as was the case with anti-lockdown/anti-vaccine politics, is just accept that we have to individually face modern risks, that they are part and parcel of living in the modern world. And indeed, to do otherwise is to surrender our societal dynamism. She might be right that we are at a turning point, that people are just about to be ready to live with new levels of risk. It’s not the bet I would make but she could be right- there may be a politics in just wanting to go back to a simpler, less complex times even if that involves greater individual risk. You also have to wonder if this mood, should it rise, would benefit conservatives or the conspiracy loving far-right.
My policy bet is on the adaptive, innovative state being a more sustainable way of managing and mitigating societal risks. In his study of lost accountability in a form of capitalism that became about maximising shareholder value, Dan Davies, actually underlines the importance of managers as preservers of good information flows around the systems that surround us. Instead of an “unaccountability machine” of extractive profit, there needs to be attention to creating public and private systems more attuned to adaptability and resilience and that, in part, means people who can respond to risks and opportunities in agile ways (he notes that management layers were harmfully removed in the maximising revolution most notably catalysed by Milton Friedman). You don’t have to want to build a complex machine like Stafford Beer’s Cybersyn to see how people, managers and bureaucrats, more attuned to acting and responding to information can enable adaptation in a complex world. And in fact, see my piece on public service reform earlier this week, to see how this could look in reality in one case- the NHS.
And readers of previous blogs in this series will know that I’ve become increasingly obsessed by Yuen Yuen Ang’s book on the evolution of China’s economy and society over recent decades, How China Escaped the Poverty Trap. In relation to the “bureaucratic class” thesis her argument takes an entirely different path. Development comes not from entrepreneurs (non-bureaucrats we could say) or from good governance (good bureaucrats) but through their co-evolution over time in a system not vastly different conceptually to Stafford Beer’s five systems (from front-line implementation to system vision). China’s model is directed innovation where the top-level sets the vision and priority with innovation and implementation at the local level which then influences back up the system. It has been remarkably successful as a development model.
China is a very different political society to the UK but as previous blogs on the three economies - frontier, everyday and care - elaborate I can’t help but think there is something in this model of co-evolution between national and local, market and state, hierarchy, innovation and collaboration that might ultimately be a better way out of stagnation than turning on the “bureaucratic class” - whether in the public or private sectors. We need different skillsets within the managerial class rather than to turn on them as some form of social de-Ba’athification. I will explore further what this might mean soon.
The problem with co-evolution of markets and state as a response to stagnation and uncertainty is politics. The “bureaucratic class” broadside has a very clear politics of hero and villain but one that creates political challenges it may not be able to answer. System adaptation as a response to complexity makes policy sense but the cycle of change doesn’t necessarily fit well with the political cycle as demands on the Labour Government and angry protests after just a few weeks in office show.
I’m not sure that short term gifts for swing electoral constituencies will quite square the circle. If the dividing line over the next few years is class war or deep reform then it may just come down to the public’s appetite for risk and their broad sense of their lives having improved or at least stabilised after years of turbulence. Far from a foregone conclusion, this is a race against time.