In February 2017, Steve Bannon—at the time, President Donald Trump's chief strategist—made something of a splash at the Conservative Political Action Conference when he identified the third of the Trump Administration's three core “lines of work,” after national sovereignty and economic nationalism, as the “deconstruction of the administrative state.”
The media and its taskmasters in the intelligentsia and universities were at once horrified and baffled. Deconstruction is all well and good in English departments, and (more broadly) when the things being deconstructed are “white privilege” and Western civilization. But something as sacred as the state? How dare he! And what's with the qualifier? Aren't all “states” in some sense “administrative”?
That confusion launched a thousand “explainer” articles, none of which got the answer even remotely correct (not that they were intended to). The other thing notable by its absence was the name of John Marini.
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