Civilised societies depend on institutions. The more complex the society, the more vital those institutions. Institutions provide stability, predictability and security. Companies, schools, universities, and courts are all institutions. But the most important institutions are those of the state. This is why Donald Trump’s assault on what his supporters misleadingly call “the deep state” is so dangerous. Some of them think the state should be servile to the whims of the great leader. Others think it should be at the service of the wealthy. Both sides agree that its ability to meet the needs of the wider public is of little significance. These views are dangerous. They are harbingers of autocracy, plutocracy and dysfunction.
In an important series of articles, Valuing the Deep State, Stanford’s Francis Fukuyama examines why the evisceration of the state will prove so destructive. Fukuyama has devoted much of the past two decades to explaining that “a high-capacity, professional, and impersonal state is critical to the success of any society”, including notably modern liberal democracies. This view is one that many Americans abhor: they see the state — or simply “government” — as the enemy. But anybody who has worked on economic development, as I have done, knows that without a competent, professional and neutral public service nothing in society really works. The more sophisticated and complex a modern society and economy becomes, the more true this is. As Fukuyama rightly notes, the extraordinary success of east Asian economies is largely due to the fact that they had understood how to run such a state long before the west. Even more relevantly, he argues that a “successful democracy . . . needs a strong modern state, but it has to be a state that is constrained by a rule of law and democratic accountability”.
In the US, the creation of such a state began in 1883, he argues, with the Pendleton Act, which created the Civil Service Commission and established merit-based criteria for hiring and promotion in the federal service. This is what the Trump administration — or, as the historian Timothy Snyder labels it, the “Mump regime”, giving due credit to the unique role of Elon Musk — wishes to overturn.