Anthony Fauci Buries the Progressive Movement’s Fatal Conceit
When a person becomes a bureaucrat, does he then cease to be a human being?
Is a technocratic expert still subject to political passion, partisan bias, and personal conceit, or does he gain, through the arcane ministrations of “Science,” the ability to transcend human limitations and govern the affairs of men dispassionately?
Dr. Anthony Fauci, former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, exemplifies the failing of Progressivism’s central premise.
As I wrote in “The Woketopus,” the preference for technocratic government is a key aspect of the Left’s agenda. Whenever they complain about threats to “democracy,” you should understand them to be defending their “bureaucracy,” the institutional structures that prop up leftist ideology—because the Marxist march through the institutions seeded their ideas into these commanding heights of culture.
Progressivism, championed most notably by President Woodrow Wilson, favors a technocratic elite who, armed with “science,” can supposedly make better decisions than democratic self-government. This movement gave birth to the administrative state, which often acts as an unelected fourth branch of government, forcing its agenda through regulations rather than laws passed by Congress and signed by the president.
This bureaucracy helps explain how the federal government under President Joe Biden became such an aggressive tool for “woke” activism. Only as President Donald Trump systematically dismantled the leftist activism of the Biden administration did the American people fully understand how deep it went.
Trump’s executive orders reversing racial quotas erected under so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion didn’t just prompt many major employers to stop discriminating on the basis of race—it exposed how the administrative state systematically overlooked the invidious racial discrimination that existed, which was already explicitly illegal under federal civil rights law.
Trump’s executive orders reversing advocacy for transgender ideology didn’t just allow people to finally speak the truth about a man being a man and a woman being a woman—it revealed just how corrupt the federal government had grown under the previous administration.
The Department of Government Efficiency, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Treasury Department, and other agencies have been systematically investigating and rooting out the waste, fraud, and abuse of the prior administration, revealing how so much of our taxpayer dollars went to prop up divisive leftist causes.
Of course, Progressivism wasn’t sold to the American people as an engine for a leftist makeover of our institutions. It was sold as the scientific answer to the push-and-pull of small-d democratic politics.
Rather than having the people and their elected representatives hash out the complicated concerns of federal policy, why not hand over the reins of government to an expert class that will actually understand which marginal tax rate raises the most revenue while harming the economy the least? What could go wrong?
It sounds good in theory, but it reintroduces the same problem James Madison addressed in Federalist 51: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.”
This fundamental insight led the Founders to develop a system of government that checks sinful human impulses, rather than concentrating authority in experts. The Constitution intentionally pits politicians against one another, aiming to check their ambitions and prejudices in order to protect the people from tyranny.
Contrary to Progressivism’s fatal conceit, bureaucrats are also human beings, and we get no better example of that than Anthony Fauci.
When Senator Rand Paul, R-Ky., released pages of Fauci’s diary, he exposed the human condition—swayed by flattery and corrupted by the belief that he is superior to other men.
While Fauci publicly insisted he didn’t start the COVID-19 lockdowns, he privately took credit for them. While he publicly insisted that COVID-19 originated in a Wuhan wet market, he privately confessed, “now we know the market was not the source, it was the amplifier.”
Perhaps most notably, he reveled in his sudden fame, noting that legacy media outlets provided fawning coverage and fantasizing about who would play him in a movie on the pandemic.
These revelations confirmed what Americans already knew about Dr. Fauci. Early on in the pandemic, he told the public that personal protective equipment wouldn’t help fight the spread of COVID-19, only to later reveal that he lied—in order to prevent people from buying so many face masks that doctors wouldn’t be able to get them.
This sort of “noble lie” was the beating heart of COVID-19 abuses, and people like Fauci didn’t just think it was the right thing to do—they expected to be applauded as heroes for it.
FROM MY DESK
📚Reading: Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson
Why I recommend it: This is the second book in Sanderson’s “The Stormlight Archive.” As I wrote last week, it’s a fantastic medieval fantasy series, and I highly recommend it.
📰Worth your time: ‘This is Classified’: What Biden Told His Ghostwriter, and What Redactions Tell About Materials He Shared by Fred Lucas
🎲Playing: 7 Wonders is one of my all-time favorite board games. In it, you start as one of the ancient cities that hosted the wonders of the ancient world, and you use various resources to construct your wonder. It’s engaging, pretty quick to play, and well-designed. I love games that offer many paths to victory, and this one is fantastic for that.
Fauci and the other “experts” believed that misleading the public wasn’t just necessary but heroic, so long as it produced the outcome he wanted. This is the deep temptation of technocracy: the conceit that only “experts like me” know what’s best for people. When coupled with a singular focus on preventing every single death from COVID-19, this mentality produced a society-destroying monster.
Of course, the experts didn’t always know better than the rest of us, and when schools were shuttered and kids forced to wear masks to fight a virus that—thankfully—didn’t endanger them, the people started to question these “scientific” authorities.
Faced with criticism, Dr. Fauci and his allies insisted on their authority. Of his critics, he infamously said, “they’re really criticizing science because I represent science. That’s dangerous.”
Fauci reveals that power corrupts, bureaucrats are not angels, and checks on government are still necessary.
Fauci has a great deal to answer for, but his diaries reveal one central fact, and that fact is the ruin of Progressivism.
For all his training and knowledge, he is human, all-too-human.
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