The insidious power of the unelected administrative state

In National Review, Victor Davis Hanson writes,

The insidious power of the unelected administrative state is easy to understand. After all, it governs the most powerful aspects of modern American life: taxes, surveillance, criminal-justice proceedings, national security, and regulation. The nightmares of any independent trucker or small-business person are being audited by the IRS, having communications surveilled, or being investigated by a government regulator or prosecutor.

...Lois Lerner, director of the Exempt Organizations division of the IRS, more or less got away with targeting mostly conservative groups before the 2012 election. She had ensured that dozens of nonprofits would not receive prompt tax-exempt status and ostensibly oppose Obama’s agendas. Eric Holder’s Justice Department surveilled various Associated Press reporters and especially Fox News’s James Rosen on the suspicion that they were receiving leaked information from Obama administration sources.

The so-called deep state is often weaponized to reflect current orthodoxies. In the past 30 years its operating premises have embraced multiculturalism, feminism, and identity-politics diversity — more or less the sacred tenets that Trump has targeted. Between 2009 and 2016 the Obama administration, to take one example, had recalibrated the war on terror and had hoped to change its reality through the use of state-sanctioned euphemisms. Obama sought to use the apparat to institutionalize the notion that radical Islam had no intrinsic connection with terrorism, and that adherents of Islam had no greater propensity to incite violence against Westerners than did followers of other religions — political correctness that Donald Trump campaigned against throughout 2016.

For which he’d never be forgiven.

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