California Shows What Happens When Nobody Checks The Administrative State: Everything Burns Down

Chuck DeVoreOctober 26, 2022

In California, the embarrassing disconnect between the state’s whole-of-government approach in the fight against climate change versus the smoking reality of spectacular failure is seen where it counts: in the real world.

A Wall Street Journal editorial on Oct. 23 cited a University of California study finding that California’s 2020 wildfire emissions “were two times higher than the state’s greenhouse gas reductions from 2003 to 2019.” The study cited “decades of fire suppression and underinvestment in preventive measures such as mechanical clearing or prescribed burns.”

I noted as much several times, including here and here.

The Journal’s editorial concludes, “Democrats in Sacramento seem incapable of political self-reflection. But it’s deeply ironic that their monomaniacal focus on cutting greenhouse gases emissions has resulted in more greenhouse gas emissions.”

Now, many Democrats in Sacramento know what to do — they’re trying. But they find themselves increasingly bound by a metastasizing version of government set into motion a little more than a century ago, drawing from both Charles Darwin and John C. Calhoun.

Woodrow Wilson was our first and only political scientist president. Before his election in 1912, the Democrat was president of Princeton University and governor of New Jersey for two years. Wilson was also an insufferable racist and supporter of the Ku Klux Klan whose views that whites were a superior race were rooted in Social Darwinism.

But Wilson famously invoked Darwin in other contexts as well, most notably regarding government as bound by the Constitution, saying during his 1912 campaign:

[G]overnment is not a machine, but a living thing. It falls, not under the theory of the universe, but under the theory of organic life. It is accountable to Darwin, not to Newton. It is modified by its environment, necessitated by its tasks, shaped to its functions by the sheer pressure of life. No living thing can have its organs offset against each other as checks, and live.

Wilson’s statement wasn’t isolated. Only four years earlier, he made the same point in his treatise “Constitutional Government in the United States.”

Thus, Wilson, and the early progressives with him, argued that the Constitution was an anarchic document fit only for an agrarian America and was wholly inadequate to the challenges of a modern, industrial society.

In tandem with their belief in a living Constitution flexible enough to allow the ready shaping of the government it once bound, early progressives sought to create an administrative state. This theory of managerial government envisioned a system administered by dispassionate professionals with elected officials only providing general guidance.

Now, 110 years after Wilson’s criticisms of the Constitution, his war socialism, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society, and the explosive growth of federal regulations under Richard Nixon have fundamentally altered the national government in both power and practice. Wilson’s vision of a government as a living thing has been fully realized — though perhaps with different results than he would have intended.

Convergent Evolution of the Administrative State

Thus, in an odd