When Democrats want to slam their political opponents, they resort to a kind of linguistic reductionism. Everyone to their right is a neocon, or alt right, or MAGA, or a Christian nationalist, or whatever the popular term of art is at the moment.
Republicans have the opposite problem. For years, they’ve used “liberal,” “leftist,” and progressive” interchangeably. Today things are even further obfuscated by more specific but still somewhat vague concepts like “DEI,” and of course, the ever-evocative but incredibly diffuse “woke.”
This isn’t a good rhetorical strategy. Liberal hasn’t meant what it really means in a century, and it’s such a useless term that even the liberals don’t want to claim it. Leftist is probably the most accurate, but it’s still so dripping with the blood of 1968 that Democrats will sooner call themselves socialists before they proclaim themselves leftists.
That leaves progressive, which has more or less been the go-to epithet for partisan Democrats since Barack Obama.
But what is progressivism, and why is it bad? Progress in and of itself seems like a good thing: we like that our cars are safer and our phones are faster, and that we no longer have lead in our paint or children in our factories. Those on the Right, of course, know that “progress” as a political concept is something altogether more sinister, a Hegelian tidal wave that if left unchecked will wipe out the nuclear family and Judeo-Christian values in one fell swoop.
What relevance does any of this have, though, for contemporary politics?
If ever there were a man who could answer this question, it’s Ronald J. Pestritto. A graduate dean and professor of politics at Hillsdale College, Pestritto has been writing, researching, and teaching about progressivism throughout his career, which began at Claremont McKenna College in 1990 and continued through his graduate work at Claremont Graduate University, where he earned his Ph.D in 1996.
I’ve had the pleasure of hearing Pestritto lecture on the progressives, by which he means the early 20th-century American political movement defined by presidents like Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson and thinkers like John Dewey and Herbert Croly. Unlike some of his colleagues at both Hillsdale and Claremont, who — due respect — love to sound off on contemporary political debates, Pestritto is a thinker and teacher through and through.
This is reflected not just in his engaging classroom demeanor and professorial aesthetic, but in his body of work. His first book, Woodrow Wilson and the Roots of Modern Liberalism, is a sustained engagement with the controversial progressive president. He has edited a fine collection of Wilson’s political writings as well as American Progressivism: A Reader, both indispensable volumes for anyone interested in progressivism or turn-of-the-century American political history.
It is precisely these academic bona fides that make it all the more exciting when Pestritto starts talking about contemporary politics — which he did in a wide-ranging interview with The Daily Wire.
The occasion of our conversation was the publication of Pestritto’s latest offering, “Government by the Unelected: How It Happened, and How It Might Be Tamed.” The ninth installment in the Claremont Institute’s “Provocations” series, Pestritto describes it alternately as a long essay or a small book.
It is, according to the précis, “a comprehensive, historically-grounded account of how America moved from the founders’ vision of republican self-government to a regime governed by a permanent, unaccountable class of administrators.”
But the book’s goal is less lofty than that makes it sound. Pestritto says he wrote it with the 2026 midterm elections firmly in view, and in the hopes of providing Americans with a deeper understanding of precisely what is at stake when they go to the polls.
“The point is to help people understand the current controversies, because the way that they’re explained in the press is often not useful,” he says. “These are things that have been boiling for 80, 90 years, and we’re now finally at a point where there’s going be a fight over it. So, that background is necessary to hopefully help explain what’s been going on legally to bring us to this point.”
By this, Pestritto means the administrative state and its discontents. Better known as the bureaucracy or the “deep state,” this unelected leviathan is both the outgrowth and steward of American progressivism. Now a popular conservative bugaboo, the administrative state, as Pestritto admits, “something that most folks did not pay much attention to until probably Obama.”
If Mr. “Pen and Phone” raised hackles about the deep state, it was his onetime vice president who really laid bare what was at stake. From mandating coronavirus vaccines to banning gas-powered stoves, Joe Biden’s administration made clear to Americans what happened when elected officials ceded all authority to government bureaucrats.
A quick refresher for anyone who fell asleep in Deep State 101: federal agencies like the EPA, CDC, FCC — pretty much anything with a three-letter acronym — aren’t in the Constitution. They were largely created by congressional action, and the idea was that Congress would fund them, the president would control them (as part of the Executive Branch), and the courts would intervene when necessary.
If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the system of checks and balances most of us had drilled into our heads in school. But things changed in 1984, when the Supreme Court ruled in a case called Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council. The result of the case was, in short, that administrative agencies were allowed to interpret and enforce federal guidance about themselves however they saw fit.
In other words: screw the branches, we can do whatever we want.
The result of that case, which came to be called “Chevron Deference,” led to a bloated and powerful administrative apparatus with no fear of legislative or executive oversight. It also fueled the neutering of Congress, and, until the election of President Donald Trump in 2016, made it seem like the rule of unelected bureaucrats over the United States was simply a forgone conclusion.
That, to Pestritto, is unacceptable.
“Government by bureaucracy contradict our principles of law and constitutionalism,” he says, in addition to violating “the basic democratic idea, that the people are supposed to govern themselves.”
“We have guards against majority tyranny, but basically you have people making rules, you have people governing who aren’t accountable to voters, and that’s not kosher in a republic.”
This is not merely a partisan gripe. It’s not that the federal bureaucracy is often staffed with liberals because liberals tend to gravitate toward government work. No, the liberal bias is built into the machinery — a machinery that seeks to shred the foundations of the country.
The original progressive idea, he notes, was that “the circumstances are different today than they were at the Founding. Progress means new circumstances, and requires a new kind of government.”
In other words, “our constitution’s outdated.” This, more than anything, Pestritto sees as the progressives’ lasting legacy.
“I would say the main way in which, uh, you see the Progressive legacy today is in the deference to the administrative state,” he says. “I am not naive enough to think that contemporary Democrats who call themselves progressives are true believers in the way that the original progressives were.”
While the original progressives at least had some kind of political program — workplace safety protections, things like that — “the contemporary Left is all about power.”
But that doesn’t mean that the bureaucracy the progressives built isn’t a useful tool for the Left.
“The bureaucracy, given the nature of what it does, is inherently Left ideologically,” Pestritto tells The Daily Wire. “It’s not conducive to conservative priorities.”
Here, Pestritto sounds increasingly like the odd man out among conservatives. It’s popular on the Right these days to say that the problem with the federal bureaucracy is simply that the wrong people are running it. Put patriots in charge, the argument goes, and things will turn around.
Pestritto isn’t buying it.
“You’re never gonna get an entity like the Federal Trade Commission but conservative, or the EPA but conservative,” he says. “That’s where I get off the bus.”
But this hardly means Pestritto is the kind of conservative intellectual who waxes poetic about Congress reasserting itself as a coequal branch of government — quite the contrary.
“Congress has basically ceased to become a legislative body,” he says. “It’s not a legislative institution anymore. It’s a kind of public media company.”
Asked how he would rate congressional efforts to rein in the administrative state, he pulls no punches.
“I’d give the congressional Republicans an F,” he says, noting that lawmakers are “failing to take advantage of a historic opportunity.”
That opportunity, of course, is the re-election of Trump, who has made “draining the swamp” one of his top priorities. On this front, the president is succeeding, Pestritto says.
“Trump’s really trying to go after the kind of inherent ideological bias in the federal government that’s sort of seated there in the bureaucracy, and that’s why they’re fighting like hell right now,” he says.
While Congress gets an F, “The current Trump administration I would give almost an A+,” Pestritto says, “because they are peddle to the floor trying to take advantage of every opening to rein in the bureaucracy, with the agency firings, with DOGE, and with a lot of the executive orders pertaining to rescinding regulations pertaining to bringing the independent agencies under the control of the president.”
Pestritto is quick to distinguish between his kind of robust executive authority and an effort to make the bureaucracy conservative.
“I’m much more an advocate of making the agencies directly accountable to the president by a total removal of power that he has, and then by paring back their authority and returning governing to actual elected officials, not so much in the federal government but probably in the state governments.”
Trump isn’t the only reason Pestritto is optimistic about the future of representative government. The Supreme Court, he says, has over the past decade begun “to try to turn the tables on the bureaucracy.”
The Court took a major step in this direction earlier this month during oral arguments for Trump v. Slaughter, which deals with the president’s ability to remove independent agency heads. The Court’s conservative majority appeared to side with President Trump, who contends he had the ability to remove Rebecca Slaughter from the Federal Trade Commission.
In January, the Court will hear oral arguments in Trump v. Cook, a similar case that hinges on Trump’s attempt to remove Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook.
“This stuff is kind of filtering up to the grownups in the judicial system,” Pestritto says.
Though Pestritto is optimistic about all of these developments, he is clear that we never should have gotten to this point.
The best way to dismantle the administrative state, he says, “would be for Congress to reverse all of the discretionary authority it has delegated to bureaucratic executive agencies.”
But of course, “they’re not going to do that — that ship has sailed.”
“Congress is never going to be what it should be,” he says. That’s a pity, because in the not-so-distant past, congressional appropriators from both parties (he names Democrat John Dingell as one example) were so bullish about protecting their own power that they would fight the bureaucracy if only for territory.
“Nowadays, ideology has transcended all of that,” he says. “So the Democrats in Congress essentially know that the bureaucrats are their proxy.”
“And so, they are perfectly happy to let the bureaucrats disparage and ignore and resist congressional efforts for oversight,” he adds. “Because they understand that the bureaucracy will do the hard legislative work of legislating for the Left.”
.png)
.png)
