The proper purpose of political science is education for government. Since in America any citizen of age can be authorized by an election or an appointment to exercise an office and discharge its powers, it is proper and necessary to educate everyone about the character of American politics — the way the Constitution is intended to work and the purposes it serves, as established in the Declaration.
That is the intention of John Marini in his new book, Unmasking the Administrative State, the culmination of four decades of study on the unconstitutionality of the administrative state, the dangers it poses to self-government, and its mounting crisis, culminating in the election of Donald Trump. Marini teaches political science at University of Nevada, Reno, and is a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute. Along with the book's editor, Ken Masugi, Marini was a special assistant to Justice Clarence Thomas when he ran the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in the Reagan administration. This brings us to the first practical effect of Marini's teaching — Justice Thomas repeatedly credited them as his first teachers on the natural-rights doctrine of the Founding. Consequently, their Straussian (through Harry Jaffa) theory of the Founding now has a hearing at the Supreme Court.
More broadly, Marini is part of the group of students of Leo Strauss who have become the most dedicated opponents of progressivism, at least within political science. The Claremont Institute and Hillsdale College are the most famous centers of this opposition now but by no means the only ones. In a sense, as these scholars often cite the example of Donald Trump as an outsider attacking the establishment in Washington, they themselves are outsiders who have mounted a theoretical attack on the post-FDR consensus, but in academia.
Marini has two aims. First, to retell the history of American political ideas in the 20th century, in order to offer an alternative to the institutional progressive consensus. Second, to show the practical problems of the progressives' administrative state and then make the theoretical case against it. Progress as a political project is Marini's enemy, alongside its underlying theory, historicism, according to which we have achieved, throughout history, radical progress in thinking and in understanding humanity. The historicist assumption is that people today are morally and intellectually superior to people in previous generations, especially to the Founders under whose arrangements we nevertheless live for the most part. Any respect for the Constitution presupposes that we are not wiser than the Founders.
