I've seen this term popping up with increasing regularity on Twitter, mainly associated with conservative discourse around the influence of "woke" ideas on State institutions. It appears to be a mostly Anglophone phenomenon, following in the wake of culture wars around gender, so-called critical race theory in schools and universities, and issues around immigration and crime. It initially struck me as something of a misnomer since the two terms, activist and bureaucracy, usually denote two distinct relationships to institutions and two distinct positions within Liberal democratic politics.
The Tweets above in part continue a longstanding tradition on the Right of associating State bureaucracy with both the Left generally and with anti-democratic tendencies within the Liberal State itself. Perhaps the classic statement of this position was made by arch free-marketeer and Ordoliberal, Ludwig Von Mises in his On Bureaucracy (1944), where this father of Neoliberalism blamed government suppression of the profit motive through regulation (and New Deal style welfarism) for the rise of bureaucracy in the US. The association, however, with political activism adds a contemporary spin, perhaps emanating from out of recent US social conflicts, such as the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. The association of activism and established state bureaucracy might also reflect the dominance of Post-War US political culture more generally, in which the Left has traditionally been most effective in the form of activist movements rather than organised party type structures which have had greater impact in the UK and Europe.
The idea of activist bureaucracy also signals a number of currents in Western political culture around the legitimacy of institutions and fears around an ideological or anti-democratic 'capture' of State functions which are meant to be nominally neutral. In the UK it's now commonplace to hear of universities, the health service, or other such public body being "captured" by activists. What this claim seem to imply is that the public body in question has ceased to function as an expression of the general will or common good and instead espouses an ideological position (i.e. particularistic), with consequent policies negatively affecting those who do not subscribe to the ideology in question. This view is strongly associated with criticisms around Cancel Culture and the influence of diversity, inclusion and equality initiatives within those same institutions.
Despite the above now being a fairly well understood current in contemporary Western politics there is still something intuitively jarring about the articulation of activism and bureaucratic modes of organisation, especially in the context of struggles around gender and race, which given their emotional, and - in the case of gender - highly speculative nature, would not seem to lend themselves to the form of rational, rules based managerial techniques associated with bureaucracy. Then again if the Party/State bureaucracy of the USSR or contemporary China are expressions of those States interpretations of Marxist/Leninist thought (something the Right never ceases to deride as the epitome of ideologically driven politics), then the necessary association of rational management with neutrality would appear less secure.
But perhaps this is the central point and the reason the notion of an activist bureaucracy garners so much online rancour from garden variety conservatives and right leaning Liberals hankering after the good old days of free speech and "rigorous debate". In short, the appearance of an ideologically driven, evangelical (I actually think this better expresses the phenomenon than the term activist) bureaucratic State apparatus within the framework of liberal democracy puts into question long standing assumptions about the rational, scientific, and value neutral quality of modern State administration. It reveals to the based dissident or red pilled conservative that there is really no such thing as neutrality, and the collapse of the centre ground, rather than eclipsing universalist one-nation government, actually reveals that government as always-already partial, partisan and particularistic in nature. This is the reasoning at the heart of so much chatter about the deep State and the limits of electoral democracy to really influence the course of events.
Marxists have long understood that what the ruling class calls common sense is only the ideologically driven worldview of the dominant property owning classes. Free market Liberal economic doctrine had this character to it, at least until the financial crash of the late 2000s, and is still pushed by elements within mainstream political parties, despite the last fifteen years of near flat growth as a result of the casino going broke. Imputing an 'ideological' character to the beliefs of one's political enemies is a commonplace strategy as much on the Right as it is on the Left. We always wish to believe our side has a better grasp of reality, whereas our opponents only deal in pipe dreams and mystification. In doing so we immediately devalue the political aims and methods of the other side, so much so that any attempt to find common ground would be futile. Thus the common sense / ideology opposition is a real political antagonism that cannot be resolved within the deliberative mechanisms of the Liberal State.
Consequently this adds a sharp edge to the accusations around activist (read ideologically driven, partisan) bureaucracy. Since what is at stake is a battle over different visions of reality, there can be no debate or political resolution which might find a mutually acceptable compromise. There simply isn't enough common ground. We see this absolute polarisation at work in all the major social struggles of the day, whether it's trans activists claiming critics of "gender affirmative healthcare" are supporting genocide; or opponents of mass immigration accusing lawyers and human rights activists of engineering the replacement of white Europeans. The lack of a leading political culture to suppress these extremes while mediating between different value claims and forms-of-life is one of the reasons all social conflict now looks like a life or death struggle.
One thing all sides have in common, which rises to the surface in fears about activist bureaucracy - and to a lesser extent Leftist paranoia about institutional bias and hidden Fascist agendas, is the latent Western myth of a neutral and benign civil power which somehow rises above the multitude of value claims and competing forms-of-life to resolve, like a beautifully engineered machine of governance, all those conflicts that threaten to dissolve the commonwealth. Everyone wants the administrative state to rule according to principles of sound rational governance, for its authority to be generally recognised, and its decisions to be accepted as Just. But this is a fantasy, because at a time of crisis above all what we want is for the administration to rule in our favour, and if it doesn't then it simply can't be rational or neutral or Just.
We live at a time when all authority is being put into question by the pace of technological and sociological change, its foundations creaking and crumbling, its officials impotent against forces they cannot control and seem not to understand. Human scale authority, in which individuals recognise themselves and their communities, and is accepted as legitimate by a majority of the governed, no longer exists in the West. In its place has appeared the figure of the digital swarm and of global civil war, a conflict where the belligerents traverse national boundaries, can consist of a single lone wolf or an army of tens of thousands, and where weapons range from words on social media, to legal suits, to HR policies, to Kamikaze drones and ballistic missiles.
All the old certainties and boundaries are dissolved, the myths by which we formerly governed ourselves no longer hold sway. One thing is sure, that no-one anymore cares much for democracy. Whether you're a gender critical campaigner trying to get "gender ideology" out of schools, or a racial justice activist wanting compulsory unconscious bias training in all government departments, your aim is not to win at the ballot box or put forward a program for public scrutiny. Your aim is to bend the vast invasive power of modern State administration to implement your will without recourse to the messy and less certain process of consensus building. Everyone wants their Caesar in HR. We are uncontrollable societies of disaffected individuals, as the late Bernard Stiegler put it. It is only in this context can the seeming misnomer of activist bureaucracy be understood.
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