Too Much Bureaucracy, Not Enough Democracy: The Battle for Abundance

What Weber, Dewey, and Reuther teach us about abundance and democratic control of bureaucracy

Americans are frustrated with a government that can’t seem to build anything, and Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson have given that frustration a name and a program: abundance liberalism, a politics dedicated to dismantling the regulatory barriers choking housing, health care, energy, and transit. The diagnosis is largely right. But the prescription mistakes a symptom for a cause. Bureaucratic obstruction doesn’t arise from nowhere. It reflects a specific set of political settlements about who controls economic decisions — and clearing procedural friction without changing those settlements doesn’t produce abundance for everyone. It produces abundance for whoever had the most leverage when the new rules get written.

This was the central argument of early twentieth-century progressive thought, and the thinkers who grappled with it most seriously were far clearer about the difficulty than we usually credit them for. Max Weber, writing in the shadow of Wilhelmine Germany’s administrative state, identified the core tension: modern governance requires bureaucratic expertise, but bureaucracy by its nature insulates itself from democratic direction. It optimizes for internal consistency and procedural correctness rather than responsiveness. In “Politics as a Vocation,” Weber worried that elected officials would increasingly become figureheads, ratifying decisions made by specialists who answered to no constituency in particular. He saw the populist alternative clearly too — charismatic leaders promising to smash bureaucratic constraints tended to produce not more democracy but bonapartism. Weber left this as a genuine dilemma, which is either intellectual honesty or a failure of nerve depending on how you read him.

Walter Lippmann resolved the dilemma in the wrong direction. In Public Opinion (1922) and The Phantom Public (1925), he argued that the sovereign citizen was a useful fiction that modern complexity had made obsolete. Policy had grown too technically demanding for ordinary people to meaningfully evaluate. The answer was professional insulation: expert agencies staffed by people trained to get things right, with democratic politics operating at a safe remove from the actual levers of power. Lippmann wasn’t cynical about this — he genuinely believed expertise was the only reliable check on demagogy. But the conclusion was technocracy, and Herbert Croly, his co-founder at The New Republic, resisted it. Croly worried about administrative self-perpetuation — that expert bureaucracies would use their insulation not to serve the public but to entrench the interests that had captured them. “No plebiscite,” he wrote, “can bestow authenticity upon an ostensibly democratic political system which approximates in practice to the exercise of executive omnipotence.” For Croly, bureaucracy existed to provide information and execute democratic will, not substitute for it.

John Dewey answered Lippmann directly in The Public and Its Problems (1927), the most underrated book in the American political canon. Dewey didn’t dispute that modern problems were complex. He disputed the conclusion Lippmann drew from that complexity. Democratic community hadn’t failed because citizens lacked the capacity to govern themselves. It had been allowed to wither — hollowed out by industrial capitalism and the administrative arrangements that served it. The task wasn’t to manage around ordinary people but to rebuild the conditions under which they could meaningfully shape the decisions affecting their lives. His shoemaker analogy is still the clearest statement of what technocracy consistently gets wrong: “The man who wears the shoe knows best that it pinches and where it pinches, even if the expert shoemaker is the best judge of how the trouble is to be remedied.” Expertise and democratic direction aren’t alternatives. Optimizing for one at the expense of the other produces either unresponsive technocracy or uninformed populism. Dewey’s argument was that the solution to complexity wasn’t streamlined administration but deeper democratic capacity.

Walter Reuther is where this debate stops being theoretical. As Nelson Lichtenstein documents in The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit, Reuther emerged from World War II with a precise understanding of what Dewey’s argument meant in practice. America wasn’t facing a scarcity problem. The productive capacity built up during the war was extraordinary. The question was who controlled it and toward what ends. Reuther’s reconversion proposal was simple and radical: rather than returning war plants to their corporate owners, government should retain ownership and convert them to civilian production — housing, appliances, transportation — through tripartite boards where labor, management, and government each held a seat. His underlying logic, shaped by the experience of the Depression, was that high wages and broad purchasing power were preconditions for sustained production rather than obstacles to it. You couldn’t sustain abundance if workers couldn’t afford what they made.

The corporate response — coordinated through the Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers — framed Reuther’s proposal as socialism. What it actually was was an attempt to give organized workers a structural role in economic decisions that had always been made unilaterally by executives answering only to shareholders. Reuther lost. The Treaty of Detroit in 1950 gave UAW members generous wages and benefits in exchange for surrendering any claim to co-determine investment and production decisions. Lichtenstein calls it a historic defeat disguised as a victory. Capital retained exclusive control over what to build, where to build it, and who would benefit — and the social democratic imagination of the immediate postwar years was progressively narrowed to bargaining over shares of decisions that workers had no part in making.

The lesson isn’t that Reuther’s specific mechanism is the answer to today’s problems. It’s that he understood what Klein and Thompson’s framework tends to elide: the bureaucratic barriers obstructing abundance aren’t autonomous irritants that accumulated through inertia or institutional entropy. They are, most of them, political settlements — products of specific fights between organized interests, frozen into law and regulation by whoever won those fights. Clearing procedural friction without changing the underlying power relationships doesn’t democratize abundance. It accelerates decisions toward whoever already had informal leverage when the friction was removed.

Klein and Thompson’s “Everything Bagel liberalism” critique has real force. The procedural accumulation that allows any organized constituency to veto any project carries genuine costs, and progressive politics has sometimes treated process as a substitute for outcomes. But Dewey’s point holds: pluralistic societies generate real conflicts — between development and displacement, between universalism and targeted redistribution, between decisive action and local democratic control. These conflicts don’t dissolve when you eliminate procedural friction. They get resolved less transparently, by whoever shows up with the most power once the formal barriers are gone. Weber feared bureaucratic isolation. Croly feared administrative capture. Dewey insisted the answer was deeper democratic engagement, not less of it. Reuther tried to build institutions that made that engagement structural and durable rather than episodic and dependent on the goodwill of those in charge.

What all of them understood, and what abundance liberalism has not yet fully reckoned with, is that the question of state capacity cannot be separated from the question of whose capacity. An efficient government that builds things quickly is not the same as a democratic government that builds the right things for the right people. Getting from the first to the second requires not just removing obstacles but constructing countervailing power — in workplaces, in communities, in the institutions that translate democratic demand into policy decisions. Reuther lost his fight to build those institutions in the 1940s, and we have been living with the consequences ever since. That history isn’t a reason for pessimism. It’s a map of what the actual problem is.