Withering Away of the State

When there are no classes. . . then "the state... ceases to exist."

--Karl Marx

Neil Reynolds of Canada’s Globe and Mail has raised a subject that makes as much sense as my declaration that we are approaching “non-elite rule.” Reynolds believes we are beginning to see the “withering away of the state,” not in the Marxist sense of triumph of the proletariat, but rather as a reaction to the failure of bureaucratic rule.

Here are excerpts from Reynolds’ article:

Controversial Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld argued (in his brilliant The Rise and Decline of the State, 1999) that government . . . peaked in the 20th century and [is now] withering away.

The state peaked militarily, van Creveld said, on Aug. 6, 1945 – the “fine summer day” when an atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima. The state had gone too far. Any greater deployment of military power would have required the annihilation of nations. People’s trust in government eroded. The armies of the superpowers proved ineffective in small-scale wars.

governments turned inward after the Second World War, adopted socialist economic models and built cradle-to-grave welfare states. They began by nationalizing industry, then vastly expanding bureaucracies to care for the old, the poor and the sick. Once established, these bureaucracies grew relentlessly. . . The welfare state, van Creveld said, peaked in 1977, when governments realized the only way to expand programs was to pay for the expansion with borrowed money.

van Creveld blamed the state’s decline on the nature of bureaucracy. “Considered as individuals, bureaucrats may be mild, harmless and self-effacing people. Collectively, they have created a monster whose powers far exceed the mightiest empires of old. By merely waiting, a bureaucrat can outlast any individual. For the first time in history, victory goes to the buttocks rather than the fist.” [emphasis added]

Reynolds notes, however, that van Creveld in his book anticipated the state’s decline would produce “calamitous consequences” that “will affect every living person, producing upheavals as profound, and probably as bloody, as the upheavals that propelled humanity out of the Middle Ages.”

Uh-oh.