The Bureaucrat’s Dilemma When Dealing with a Charismatic Autocrat
There is a dilemma the bureaucrat dealing with an autocrat may face. Leaders and followers always interact within a specific context. In democratic societies, the strongman or autocrat is typically elevated to office in periods when the populace is experiencing social anxiety, economic uncertainty or external threat. They are primed for the message of a charismatic autocrat who promises them easy answers to difficult problems and targets the existing government as the problem for inaction.
While the charismatic populist is using and inflating the existing anxieties, there is often an element of truth to what they are saying. The people may be wondering why the government can’t do something to ease their anxieties or deprivations. The government can in fact do so, but it rarely moves quickly and dramatically. Its established processes, some mandated by law, some by rules and regulations, others by custom, often require the input of many constituencies and coordination between a number of different agencies and layers of government. This requires meetings, hearings, comment periods, collaboration, compromise and documentation, all of which take time.
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A short-term value of the populist autocrat is that they do not hold themselves to these protracted processes. With little respect for diverse perspectives or conventional norms, they tear through the maze of obstacles and seek to ram through solutions. This is a two-edged sword. On one side of the blade, this cuts through cumbersome process and accelerates muscular responses to the conditions creating anxiety, earning the support of the populace. On the other side of the blade, ramming through solutions weakens the institutions designed to equitably assign resources to programs and populations, and opens the process to large scale corruption that is difficult to document.
The principled bureaucrat is committed to preventing the latter, but must be politically astute about not thwarting the former, which has the support of the populace. This is not a task that responds well to purists. The bureaucrat will need to walk the line to support rapidly easing the burdens of the populace while maintaining the integrity of the institution and its processes.
Refusing orders that violate human rights
The greatest responsibility for correct followership to political leaders resides in a special class of bureaucratic followers — the military, law enforcement, and intelligence services. There is a conundrum here. Those who serve in these authorized vehicles of State power must be willing to use force, and at times lethal force, at the command of legitimate political leadership, yet also need to be the most willing to disobey if the order is illegitimate.
In liberal democracies, the oath taken is to defend against all enemies of the constitution, internal and external. But in the case of a de facto or actual coup, both sides will claim legitimacy regardless of objective reality. How will military personnel, intelligence, or law enforcement officers recognize the true defender from the usurper?
The usurper of political power violates the essential values that protect individual freedoms and collective decision making, supposedly in defense of the State, while undermining their very core. The classical meaning of the term “liberal values” must be understood and differentiated from attempts to distort and degrade its meaning. Classical liberal values are the sacrosanct protections of individual freedom to think, speak, write, associate, congregate and live free of arbitrary government coercion. The only legitimate constraints on these rights are where their use denies or abrogates the same rights for others.
Interestingly, these rights conferred upon all human beings living within a society are not fully given to the bureaucrats themselves, or to the armed enforcers of the law and protectors of national defense. In those capacities, individual rights are subordinated to the constraints and responsibilities of the role they are serving. It would be chaotic if everyone in a government agency were freely giving their opinion to the media of the correct interpretation of events, policies and preferred strategies. Or enforcing their own interpretation of laws and regulations. There is merit to norms and rules that require government policy positions to be systematically developed, communicated and executed.
To thwart or support?
Bureaucrats know there are a variety of tools that can be used to thwart policy changes or implementations. Morally, this is again a two-edged blade. If being used to delay or block patently immoral policies one can argue the justifications for these tactics. But in a liberal democracy this is also a problem. The government is elected to formulate policies. If this is done in reasonably fair, transparent and lawful ways, it is not the place of the bureaucracy to thwart those policies.
But what about when the elected government operates in deceitful, secretive and unlawful ways — in other words as a proto-tyrannical government? What is the bureaucrat’s responsibility?
If the politics are still largely democratic, the offending government can be turned out of office in the next election cycle. Bureaucrats aware of this, may choose to slow walk, stall and delay policy approval or implementation to mitigate damage. The ethics of this can be argued, but the use of procedural power is part of the politically savvy tool kit. If the government retains power in a fair election, bureaucrats are faced with complying or, in egregious situations, resigning on principle. Continuing to sabotage the government undermines the representative government they are seeking to defend.
If the democratic political process has been eviscerated by an autocratic regime, reducing it to a mere fig leaf, how does the ethical equation change? It is in this situation that “just following orders” is a crime and followership is tested at its moral core.
It is in the window where the abuse of power is evident and documented, but before power is consolidated, that the bureaucrat needs to act. Once power is consolidated, senior positions will be filled with cronies, adjudication processes will be nullified or packed with lackeys, media channels will be suborned or shuttered, political opposition will be silenced.
The bureaucrat who has played it safe in their career is thrust into a moral role that is anything but safe. Their core principles tightly interwoven with political awareness, are needed if they are to walk with head held high (and still attached), through the minefield being lain by the proto-tyrant.
Taking the liberty to degenderize the words of the great playwright, political dissident, and former President of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Havel, they remain highly salient:
Ira Chaleff is a speaker, innovative thinker and the author of “To Stop a Tyrant: The Power of Political Followers to Make or Brake a Toxic Leader.”
But they also met a conservative backlash seeking to rein back government as a source of security for working Americans and realign it with the interests of private business. That backlash is the central thread of the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025” blueprint for a second Trump Administration.
Alternatively disavowed and embraced by President Donald Trump during his 2024 campaign, Project 2025 is a collection of conservative policy proposals – many written by veterans of his first administration. It echoes similar projects, both liberal and conservative, setting out a bold agenda for a new administration.
But Project 2025 does so with particular detail and urgency, hoping to galvanize dramatic change before the midterm elections in 2026. As its foreword warns: “Conservatives have just two years and one shot to get this right.”
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The standard for a transformational “100 days” – a much-used reference point for evaluating an administration – belongs to the first administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs the Social Security Bill in Washington on Aug. 14, 1935. AP Photo, fileIn 1933, in the depths of the Great Depression, Roosevelt faced a nation in which business activity had stalled, nearly a third of the workforce was unemployed, and economic misery and unrest were widespread.
But Roosevelt’s so-called “New Deal” unfolded less as a grand plan to combat the Depression than as a scramble of policy experimentation.
Roosevelt did not campaign on what would become the New Deal’s singular achievements, which included expansive relief programs, subsidies for farmers, financial reforms, the Social Security system, the minimum wage and federal protection of workers’ rights.
Those achievements came haltingly after two years of frustrated or ineffective policymaking. And those achievements rested less on Roosevelt’s political vision than on the political mobilization and demands made by American workers.
A generation later, another wave of social reforms unfolded in similar fashion. This time it was not general economic misery that spurred actions, but the persistence of inequality – especially racial inequality – in an otherwise prosperous time.
President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society programs declared a war on poverty and, toward that end, introduced a raft of new federal initiatives in urban, education and civil rights.
These included the provision of medical care for the poor and older people via Medicaid and Medicare, a dramatic expansion of federal aid for K-12 education, and landmark voting rights and civil rights legislation.
As with the New Deal, the substance of these policies rested less with national policy designs than with the aspirations and mobilization of the era’s social movements.
Since the 1930s, conservative policy agendas have largely taken the form of reactions to the New Deal and the Great Society.
The central message has routinely been that “big government” has overstepped its bounds and trampled individual rights, and that the architects of those reforms are not just misguided but treasonous. Project 2025, in this respect, promises not just a political right turn but to “defeat the anti-American left.”
After the 1946 midterm elections, congressional Republicans struck back at the New Deal. Drawing on business opposition to the New Deal, popular discontent with postwar inflation, and common cause with Southern Democrats, they stemmed efforts to expand the New Deal, gutting a full employment proposal and defeating national health insurance.
They struck back at organized labor with the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, which undercut federal law by allowing states to pass anti-union “right to work” laws. And they launched an infamous anti-communist purge of the civil service, which forced nearly 15,000 people out of government jobs.
In 1971, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce commissioned Lewis Powell – who would be appointed by Republican President Richard Nixon to the Supreme Court the next year – to assess the political landscape. Powell’s memorandum characterized the political climate at the dawn of the 1970s – including both Great Society programs and the anti-war and Civil Rights movements of the 1960s – as nothing less than an “attack on the free enterprise system.”
In a preview of current U.S. politics, Powell’s memorandum devoted special attention to a disquieting “chorus of criticism” coming from “the perfectly respectable elements of society: from the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians.”
Powell characterized the social policies of the New Deal and Great Society as “socialism or some sort of statism” and advocated the elevation of business interests and business priorities to the center of American political life.
A copy of Project 2025 is held during the Democratic National Convention on Aug. 21, 2024, in Chicago. AP Photo/J. Scott ApplewhitePowell captured the conservative zeitgeist at the onset of what would become a long and decisive right turn in American politics. More importantly, it helped galvanize the creation of a conservative infrastructure – in the courts, in the policy world, in universities and in the media – to push back against that “chorus of criticism.”
This political shift would yield an array of organizations and initiatives, including the political mobilization of business, best represented by the emergence of the Koch brothers and the powerful libertarian conservative political advocacy group they founded, known as Americans for Prosperity. It also yielded a new wave of conservative voices on radio and television and a raft of right-wing policy shops and think tanks – including the Heritage Foundation, creator of Project 2025.
In national politics, the conservative resurgence achieved full expression in President Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign. The “Reagan Revolution” united economic and social conservatives around the central goal of dismantling what was left of the New Deal and Great Society.
Powell’s triumph was evident across the policy landscape. Reagan gutted social programs, declared war on organized labor, pared back economic and social regulations – or declined to enforce them – and slashed taxes on business and the wealthy.
Publicly, the Reagan administration argued that tax cuts would pay for themselves, with the lower rates offset by economic growth. Privately, it didn’t matter: Either growth would sustain revenues, or the resulting budgetary hole could be used to “starve the beast” and justify further program cuts.
Reagan’s vision, and its shaky fiscal logic, were reasserted in the “Contract with America” proposed by congressional Republicans after their gains in the 1994 midterm elections.
This declaration of principles proposed deep cuts to social programs alongside tax breaks for business. It was perhaps most notable for encouraging the Clinton administration to pass the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996, “ending welfare as we know it,” as Clinton promised.
Project 2025, the latest in this series of blueprints for dramatic change, draws most deeply on two of those plans.
As in the congressional purges of 1940s, it takes aim not just at policy but at the civil servants – Trump’s “deep state” – who administer it.
In the wake of World War II, the charge was that feckless bureaucrats served Soviet masters. Today, Project 2025 aims to “bring the Administrative State to heel, and in the process defang and defund the woke culture warriors who have infiltrated every last institution in America.”
As in the 1971 Powell memorandum, Project 2025 promises to mobilize business power; to “champion the dynamic genius of free enterprise against the grim miseries of elite-directed socialism.”
Whatever their source – party platforms, congressional bomb-throwers, think tanks, private interests – the success or failure of these blueprints rested not on their vision or popular appeal but on the political power that accompanied them. The New Deal and Great Society gained momentum and meaning from the social movements that shaped their agendas and held them to account.
The lineage of conservative responses has been largely an assertion of business power. Whatever populist trappings the second Trump administration may possess, the bottom line of the conservative cultural and political agenda in 2025 is to dismantle what is left of the New Deal or the Great Society, and to defend unfettered “free enterprise” against critics and alternatives.
"Trump’s Project 2025 agenda caps decades-long resistance to 20th century progressive reform" was originally published on The Conversation.
Colin Gordon writes on the history of American public policy and political economy.
