The State, Permanent and Impermanent
Can the state cultivate impermanence?
There exists a Permastate.
Presidents come and go, but public servants and their systems remain. While the public watches the churn of democratically elected leaders at the top, beneath this flurry of activity the invisible machinery of government continues to roll ever onward — budgets are approved, policies are implemented, fines are issued, and paperwork is processed.
The President may issue executive orders or set policies, and Congress may draft and passes law, budgets, and directives, it falls to the employees of the Permastate to interpret these laws and policies. This standing reserve of the state’s capacities busies themselves with translating these laws into procedures and decisions which directly bear upon citizens and their communities, ultimately design and enacting those apparatuses which will make up the stuff of every American’s interaction with their government.
If we accept Schmidt's dictum that 'sovereign is he who decides on the exception,' is not the director of the local Social Security office sovereign in some very real sense, perhaps even more so than the legislators who allocate the funds for this person's salary?
When the shift lead decides how to change or implement a policy, or whose application to deny or approve, are they not exercising sovereignty is a way which is entirely opaque and unaccountable to the public?
What about the FEMA program manager whose actions determine the life and death of citizens, or the grant administrator and their review team who determine which organizations get funding or not?
This is not to cast low level bureaucrats as uniquely sinister or as better targets of political ire than the CEOs or financiers who exploit our labor for profit, but my questions here do aim to provoke questions of how we should understand the function of the permanent apparatus of state functioning.
Does the one who decides how to concretely implement policy exercise political power in a real and important sense? If so, how do we adjust our theory of the political accordingly?
To briefly put some flesh on these conceptual bones, consider that the Federal government currently employs about 2.9 million civilian employees (including 600,000 Postal service employees), with that number rising to over 4 million with the inclusion of 1.3 million active duty military personnel.
Of this 4 million, only 550 employees of the Federal government are directly elected by American voters (the president and vice president, members of congress, including 5 non-voting delegates and a resident commissioner).
Within the remaining federal workforce, roughly 4,000 positions involve direct appointments, of which 1,500 are presidential appointments (and only 1,200 of these require Senate approval). If we exclude the military and postal workers then, the federal government’s civilian workforce consists 99.9998% of people who have not been elected by voters, and that only drops to 99.998% when we add in political appointments (which are indirectly influenced by voters).
If you were to break into the DC scene, you’d find officials and auspicious personages who have haunted the halls of power for decades, sometimes in formal roles, but often in a revolving door of political appointments, academic posts, program manager or director positions, and lobbying or policy gigs.
This extended network of people who produce and enact policy in a way entirely unaccountable to the public forms a Permastate which persists beyond the four- or eight-year time horizon of any presidential administration, consolidating the true exercise of sovereign state power into a class of credentialed professionals from an increasingly narrow set of schools, cities, and backgrounds.
After all, it was precisely at this permanent state apparatus which Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) squarely aimed its sights during the first 120 days of Trump's presidency, slashing and tearing at the state with a sense of fanatical zeal, reveling simply in the act of destruction itself.
Nor was Musk a lone actor — Trump was elected by popular vote in 2024, in part, because of his promise to gut the administrative state. Trump offered the average voter the opportunity to take their revenge on the professional managerial class which many see as a source of oppression, especially in the wake of the social strictures and school closures enacted by public professionals during the Covid-19 pandemic response.
In this way, Musk's budget-cutting frenzy enacts a carnivalesque spectacle of reprisal whereby the American people may enjoy themselves as overcoming their managerial oppressors.
Bread and circuses, while notable for their pacifying effects, also hold another possibility — the overturning of the present order. The festival creates a liminal space in which existing structures may be relativized, and new spontaneous orders might emerge for only a little while before falling back into the void.
Men become women, women become men, men become monsters, monsters become real, and the gods walk among us.
The imaginary dreamscape of the festival harbors within it a celebration of impermanence, but this very real risk unnerves those who cling to the permanent state of things. Those who have some vested interest in the current order, standing to lose salaries, prestige, amenities, and even identities, all view this violent flux
Does not then the festival of DOGE which vents the pent up frustration of the American people indicate the deep psychological costs of this permanent state apparatus? And doesn't it further attest to the missing element of impermanence within the exercise of sovereign power in our current society?
Sovereign... for a time.
There is a time for everything under heaven, says Qohelet (Ecclesiastes 3) -- a time for governing and a time for abdicating, a time for building up the state and a time for tearing it down, a time for ruling and a time for retiring, a time for making policy and a time for undoing policy, a time for hiring and a time for firing, a time to gorge ourselves and a time to fast.
How might we recapture this element of impermanence within the state, opening it up to the creativity of the destructive urge, making a place for a continual overturning of the Permastate so that the people's frustration doesn't build up and manifest itself as the vengeful spirit of DOGE?
How can the state integrate and cultivate the reality of impermanence within its own ongoing reality? What practices would allow impermanence to structure and restructure the state’s capacities and habits?
Exploring these questions will demand of us more strange and radical experimentation than we had ever thought possible. There are more political arrangements in heaven and earth than have been dreamt of in our philosophy.