Beware Temptation of Administrative State

At a George Washington University Law School Federalist Society–sponsored event earlier this week, Conor Casey of the University of Liverpool, an Adrian Vermeule ally, made the conservative case for a robust administrative state rooted in natural-law theory and the common good.

At the gathering, speaking at a high level of generality, Casey eloquently contended that rather than inefficaciously trying to tear it all down, conservatives should exploit the levers of the administrative state for their own noble ends. The premise behind his assertion is that modern bureaucracy’s specialization and expertise is a potent but ultimately “intrinsically neutral institutional technology,” as Vermeule put it, that will inevitably be endowed with substantive content, explicitly or implicitly, whether we like it or not. This is why he believes that the Right ought to stop being afraid of its own shadow and seize the reins of the state, as the Left has done time and time again since the New Deal era, rather than shying away from them the next time a conservative administration controls the executive branch.

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Bobby Miller

Bobby Miller is an ISI Fellow at National Review and a graduate student at Georgetown University.

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At a George Washington University Law School Federalist Society–sponsored event earlier this week, Conor Casey of the University of Liverpool, an Adrian Vermeule ally, made the conservative case for a robust administrative state rooted in natural-law theory and the common good.

At the gathering, speaking at a high level of generality, Casey eloquently contended that rather than inefficaciously trying to tear it all down, conservatives should exploit the levers of the administrative state for their own noble ends. The premise behind his assertion is that modern bureaucracy’s specialization and expertise is a potent but ultimately “intrinsically neutral institutional technology,” as Vermeule put it, that will inevitably be endowed with substantive content, explicitly or implicitly, whether we like it or not. This is why he believes that the Right ought to stop being afraid of its own shadow and seize the reins of the state, as the Left has done time and time again since the New Deal era, rather than shying away from them the next time a conservative administration controls the executive branch.