To Kill A State

Ripping the Wires Out of The Institutions (Part I)

Luv killing Joi, Blade Runner 2049, Villeneuve, 2017

States are incredibly resilient organizations. States have proven to be such remarkably effective vehicles for the continuation of political communities that Hegel once called the State the march of God on Earth. They have managed to stay intact through the course of disasters, plagues, and total wars that killed tens of millions—in large part due to the existence of institutions.

Institutions built up over decades (if not centuries) can withstand cataclysms thanks to the creation of redundant rational systems of organization. Any single person is replaceable by anyone else, assuming you understand the system's logic. Entire holes can be blown into the structure of an institution—and things will continue.

The military illustrates this point well. The rationalized process of standardized and predictable doctrine means that as long as you understand how to follow a prescribed method of operating—you can do a job. If your battalion commander goes down, it doesn’t take any special expertise to fill that position. Assuming you know the process for creating an OPORD, and can follow the MDMP, you can fulfill the bureaucratic role.

I’m not saying that individual talent and expertise won’t produce better outcomes when those people are in the right positions—a better battalion commander will lead more effectively. The brilliance of institutions, however, is that you don’t need any one person to be particularly talented. Institutional knowledge built up over time combined with rationalized processes suffices to produce positive outcomes in the absence of talented individuals leading.

The United States Marine Corps—for instance—did not prevail in the Pacific because Chesty Puller was a talented leader (although he was); the USMC prevailed in their fights because they had built up institutional lessons that were disseminated and embraced from prior campaigns (Guadalcanal).

Recruits could be brought into a structure that gave them knowledge and culture retained from prior experience in a way that did not depend on any one leader being an effective teacher. These recruits in turn could then step into team and squad lead positions based on prescribed bureaucratic processes—all of which would give the institution a competitive advantage on average.

Taken at a macro scale, armies can sustain horrific casualties over years of fighting and maintain a relatively high level of competence from the nature of how these systems operate.

What I’m trying to get at here, is that as long as the structure and culture stay in place, you can effectively do this endlessly; there’s no limit to the ability of an institution to replace individuals.

The one structural flaw of an institution—and I don’t think I’m saying anything particularly revolutionary here—is that it cannot be created overnight. The same factors that make a bureaucracy nigh-impossible to kill through attrition (knowledge being disseminated and formalized through rules and procedures) make them extremely difficult to create.

If what I wanted to do was to flout the laws governing executive power in the United States and eliminate an agency without congressional consent—firing everyone and freezing the programs would be my way of doing it.

While doing this is illegal, and the courts will move to block this, it doesn’t matter what the courts do. It’s sort of brilliant what they’re doing to USAID (and probably the Department of Education next). By the time the courts act on this, the institution will have ceased to be able to function, as the institutional knowledge will have vanished.

If you only fired the senior leadership—that wouldn’t matter since the civil servants below that level would inevitably carry on their processes through sheer institutional inertia. If you just canceled programs, you would cause irreparable human damage, but you would still have expertise in executing these programs in the workforce that’s left.

But if you take the entire agency and place everyone on “administrative leave?” Oh that you can’t come back from. The courts may be able to eventually rule that USAID cannot be unilaterally dismantled by executive fiat, but there will be nobody to understand the processes of that agency.

It would be akin to firing every single person in the 82nd Airborne, then attempting to recreate the Division with conscripts who had never held a gun before. It simply would not be possible as nothing of the institutional culture would still exist. You may have the skeletal structure of the Division, but there would be no ingrained sense of how that institution functioned.

The other brilliant aspect of this plan is that you can do it wherever you want. Assuming congressional GOP members don’t stand up to the current administration, Elon Musk can go from agency to agency and replicate the USAID playbook with effectively no recourse to stop him.

The courts can rule that things are illegal, but the courts move in the pace of years. By the time they block these actions, these agencies will be dead.

It is (I think) important at this point for liberals to emphasize the generational harm of institutional destruction. It’s not just that these actions are bad for the effects they cause now, but these actions will cause at least a decade of disruption to how the United States Government functions.

If liberals cannot get in front of this, and make the political costs too high for the Trump Administration to bear, it will take successive administrations to repair the harm.

Otherwise? Elon Musk is going to accomplish something that strategic bombing couldn’t even manage—dismantling the American State.