Welcome to the Shallow State
Flattening the U.S. government is one of the Trump administration's imperatives
I hope everyone had a happy and healthy Labor Day weekend. It was quiet, which is a good thing these days. We barely heard from our president, which is a rare treat. It was so quiet, that the Internet started eating itself, asking questions like “Is Trump still alive?” and then attempting to provide the answer. I even got a little time at the driving range, teaching my 16-year old son to hit as badly as me. (I haven’t hit a ball in several years, and he’s only hacked for fun at Top Golf.)
The House of Hapsburg still rolls on, despite not having ruled for 107 years. Karl von Hapsburg still pals around with European heads of state; his sister Archduchess Gabliela was the Georgian ambassador to Germany. Karl’s son is an endurance race car driver, who won the FIA World Endurance Championship in 2021. Being royalty—even exiled, technically powerless royalty—has its benefits.
But the House of Hapsburg’s greatest lasting achievement is not the fact that they managed to keep their heads (literally) after two world wars in Europe. Unlike the descendants of Kaiser Wilhelm II, the Hapsburgs don’t have, let’s call them unfortunate, ties to the past. The greatest achievement, which we still see today, is the development and nurturing of a professional, competent, and trustworthy bureaucracy. In Eastern Europe, this makes the legacy of the Hapsburg Empire unique, even today.
A recent academic study of the topic showed that “the Habsburg Empire is indeed still visible in the cultural norms and interactions of humans with their state institutions today.”
Comparing individuals left and right of the long-gone Habsburg border, people living in locations that used to be territory of the Habsburg Empire have higher trust in courts and police. These trust differentials also transform into “real” differences in the extent to which bribes have to be paid for these local public services.
The study concluded: “Nearly a century after its demise, the Habsburg Empire lives on in the people living within its former borders – in their attitudes towards and interactions with local state institutions.” The feelings toward a well-functioning bureaucracy described by historians “fairly honest, quite hard-working, and generally high-minded,” despite the fact that the 17 countries that used to be part of the Hapsburg Empire at one time or another now face immense political change and much of it corrupt, is actually pretty heartening to me.
In what became their final years, the Hapsburgs worked hard to maintain a peaceful, well-functioning state. Of course, we know what happened: the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand tore Europe to shreds as World War I raged. The ruling Hapsburgs, the Ludwigs, the Ottomans, the Romanovs—basically all the Great Powers on the continent—their thrones did not survive the war. But the institutions, even those that fell under Nazi or Soviet rule, carried the seeds of good government. I suppose you could call that the “deep state” effect.
I’m nerding out on history, well mostly because I love history, but also because it is helpful to understand the current onslaught on our federal institutions by President Donald Trump. What many Americans have long seen as a benevolent bureaucracy, sometimes too intrusive, but at least along the lines of the Hapsburg “fairly honest, quite hard-working, and generally high-minded,” if not always so, in its foundations not subject to personal bribes and inherent corruption.
Trump has always valued personal control, and unyielding loyalty from his minions. In his first administration, this became the biggest sticking point that caused so much strife. In his second administration, Trump has moved to greatly flatten the lines of communication and power in the federal leviathan. By putting in his pet people, regardless of their qualifications, or their own contempt for the institutions they oversee, Trump is more or less trying to guarantee his words would be held like the decrees of Franz Joseph, Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary from 1848 to 1916. Franz Joseph was said to have awoken at 4:00 a.m. each day and worked well into the evening tending to his duties.
Trump also awakens early and stays up late, attending to the news and television. He constantly demands news clips, carries his black Sharpie pens, scrawls notes and personal messages to people both friend and foe, and closely follows social media. None of that is really part of the official duties of the president, but it is what Trump has made the office to fit himself. To Trump, politics is not what ruling was to Franz Joseph or any of the Hapsburgs, who saw their duty as to their people, without bothering to add to their (considerable) wealth. Trump is committed to building his own royalty, in the mold of the European Great Powers, except in America.
He has endeavored to shallow the deep state. But after the shallowing, I think the institutions will survive, and like a crepe myrtle tree, even bloom after being severely pruned. For one example, let’s look at the CDC. (I’d choose the EPA, but I don’t think it should be pruned, it should be wholesale split up back to whence it came: the Department of the Interior, the USDA, and HUD.)
The Centers for Disease Control was commissioned by Congress and opened on July 1, 1946 in the aftermath of World War II. Its first task was to control mosquitoes, which spread diseases. In 1947, it moved to its current headquarters in the Druid Hills section of Atlanta near Emory University, and took on the task of battling all communicable diseases. During the Cold War, this meant preparation for biological warfare. In the early 1990s, the CDC added “and Prevention” to its official title. The agency is primarily responsible for data collection, identification, and planning for communicable diseases and other health issues. That being the mission, immunization (meaning vaccination) is inherent to its duties.
But during the COVID-19 pandemic, the CDC became the focus of a public health system that had wagged its way into politics and clubby relationships. The American public was manipulated, outright lied to, and given poor direction, though the rank and file of the CDC did what they always did, acting in the interest of public health. But it drew the ire of Donald Trump, and now it is being flattened under the idiocy of the scion of the Kennedy clan, which is the closest thing this country has to the Hapsburgs, except RFK Jr. wields more power than they do, and he lacks most of their carefully maintained restraint.
Though more Americans have abandoned their complete trust in the CDC (and the FDA), I’d say most of this is the result of COVID-19, and the shift of MAGA away from institutional values held by those agencies. In other words, it’s temporary and fleeting.
For well over 100 years, since the most underrated man to inhabit the White House, President Chester A. Arthur, 21st president, reformed the civil service, our nation has benefitted from a bureaucracy that would be recognized by Franz Joseph as something to be admired. If the Eastern European states that are now plagued by ultra-right wing politics, pro-Russian sentiment, and immense corruption, can still sing the tunes of the Hapsburg Empire’s good government, I think America can get over this hump and get back to good government again.
In fact, I think some of what is being done to flatten our bureaucracy and create a shallow state out of the deep state is going to help us get back on track better in the future. If not our current crop of voters, it will be done by the next crop, which will have more incentive to fix things given what we’re handing them as a starting point. But they will benefit from our national bias against outright corruption. Even in the face of the pay-to-play government we have, I have hope.
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It's worth noting that Arthur continued and accelerated the reforms of the civil service after his predecessor and ticket-mate was assassinated by a fellow who believed that President Garfield owed him a reward in the form of a French ambassadorship.
"Guiteau was an American man who had distributed copies of a speech he wrote aimed at promoting Garfield in the 1880 United States presidential election. Guiteau believed his campaigning had been vital to Garfield's eventual victory, and that Garfield owed him a diplomatic post in Europe for his assistance. After months of failed attempts to solicit such a reward from the Garfield administration, he purchased a revolver and began stalking Garfield with the goal of assassinating him."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_James_A._Garfield