Who is "The Establishment"?
And why are they behind everything wrong with our society?
“The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.”
- Attributed to Oscar Wilde
In my podcast episode last week I tried to define the term conservative so that we might have an idea of what we are talking about when we say someone is not a true conservative. I believe we need to do the same thing with the establishment.
I have noticed the word being thrown around a lot more often lately, always as a pejorative. I have seen it used to simply describe any politician that the speaker does not like, making it as useless as RINO or (when the left uses it) racist for transmitting information.
So, what makes someone part of the establishment?
I often mention the establishment, though I usually qualify it - the Republican establishment, the political establishment, establishment politicians, etc. When I use the term that way, I am referring to politicians who have been in office for years or even decades, who have built strong networks of donors and lobbyists, and who are cozy with the big business interests as well as the entrenched bureaucracy.
The establishment is the political system that runs our society. In theory, we have three branches of government: Congress makes our laws, the president carries them out, and the Supreme Court ensures they are followed.
In reality, there are several more unofficial branches:
Congress has outsourced much of its legislative authority to an ever-expanding Executive Branch, which now consists of hundreds of departments with close to a million employees, each of whom can make your life miserable in a dozen different ways.
Our news media exerts tremendous control over how we see the world, and they put their thumbs on the scales of elections to benefit themselves.
Big business, especially Big Tech, has unlimited power over our daily lives.
These supernumerary branches of government have grown very close to each other, to the point where they operate in synergy with each other to direct the course of our society. This is the swamp, the deep state. The people who run these organizations are unelected, and therefore unaccountable to the American people. There are revolving doors between the corporate news media, Big Tech, and the federal bureaucracy. When the president and Congress are aligned with the priorities of the swamp, then they are able to nudge us toward the behaviors they want out of the citizenry. On the other hand, when President Trump attempted to drain the swamp, they acted in concert to destroy him.
The State of Idaho has its own establishment, made up of the legislature, the state bureaucracy, and big business interests such as IACI and the healthcare lobbies. Sometimes a rogue sneaks into the legislature, but the leadership in both houses make sure that the system is protected.
If I had to come up with a concise definition of an establishment politician, it would be someone who is part of the system and sees their primary duty as the continuation of that system. Establishment politicians often resist efforts to reform the system.
I think the race for State Superintendent of Public Instruction provides a great example for this heuristic. As I wrote in February, I had a chance to listen to all three candidates in turn as well as read about their ideas and positions. Both the incumbent, Sherri Ybarra, and one of the challengers, Debbie Critchfield, struck me as being part of the establishment. Their strongest priorities were all about running the department efficiently and properly. Ms. Critchfield had been on the State Board of Education when they hired ultra-leftist Marlene Tromp to run Boise State University and claimed that she had no idea that Tromp would use her position to push Marxist social justice. Critchfield simply did not think to ask; all she cared about were Tromp’s qualifications as an administrator.
That was why I endorsed Branden Durst for the position. As an outsider, he sees what is wrong with the system and wants to be elected so he can disrupt it. That is exactly why we elected Donald Trump in 2016: we saw how establishment politicians like George W. Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney had no intention of changing the bureaucratic system, the so-called deep state, and even if they wanted to, they had no idea how. They were all swamp creatures from the start; they were all born into the political system.
Sometimes it is easy to see who is part of the establishment and who is trying to disrupt the system. House Speaker Scott Bedke rakes in huge donations from big businesses and lobby groups, while his opponent in the lieutenant governor’s race, Representative Priscilla Giddings, is supported by small donations from individual citizens. In this case, it is obvious to see who the Idaho swamp wants in office, and it is not Lt. Colonel Giddings.
Sometimes it is not so easy. Sometimes the most effective fighters on behalf of we the people are politicians who have been in office for a long time. Ron Paul represented the people of Texas in Congress for many years, but he was definitely not part of the establishment. If there are legislators in Boise who have been there a long time, but are fighting for the people day after day, then it would be foolish to try and oust them for no other reason than their longevity.
On the other hand, freshmen legislators are sometimes sucked into the swamp right off the bat. Attorney General candidate Raúl Labrador was elected to Congress in 2010 as part of the Tea Party wave. At the State Convention a few years he told us how he and the other freshmen met with House Speaker John Boehner who told them that they might have campaigned one way, but now that they were in Washington they would be voting another.
When we talk about the establishment it has to be more than a simple pejorative. Saying that “everyone I don’t like is the establishment” is meaningless babble. We must figure out which politicians and candidates are willing to fight the entrenched interests in our government, and which are part of that system, seeking only its continuation and expansion while resisting efforts to reform it. Fighting the establishment is always difficult, because the system protects itself and its own. The first step is to define our terms and be clear about who and what we are fighting.