Declawing the Administrative Leviathan

Dismantle the D.C. Company Town

It’s time that Americans faced up to the reality that their governing apparat is a corrupt, self-engorging Leviathan.

Gertrude Stein famously warned that it was important to know how far to go when going too far. 

It pains me to admit that Democrats seem to have a far better sense of all that than do Republicans. Perhaps it’s because Democrats have a visceral appreciation of William Hazlitt’s observation that “those who lack delicacy hold us in their power.” The Democrats, that is to say, long ago became expert at the game of holding their opponents to standards that they themselves violate not just with impunity but with ostentatious glee. 

The news last week that Michael Sussmann was found not guilty by a D.C. jury of his ideological peers was another thumb in the eye of the American so-called system of justice. Scary-looking super-cop John Durham had indicted Sussmann for the same thing that brought down Trump’s flash-in-the-pan National Security Advisor Mike Flynn—lying to the FBI—but no one who has been paying attention thought the two men would be treated the same way. Flynn was close to Donald Trump, therefore he must be considered a sacrificial beast, someone to be made an example of, a pariah. And so he was. 

By Roger Kimball