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I agree with much that you said, and you also left me with many things to think about some more. In other words, great piece.

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Thanks for inspiring me in the first place.

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I've always argued the growth of the administrative state is tied to the rise of the so-called professional civil servants. Go back to the patronage system, which amply solves the principal-agent problem currently plaguing the government.

A president would only have so many trusted lackeys and cronies (I mean them in a positive sense) he can count on, and would be loathe to let anybody outside that trusted circle hold any significant power, and by default, that means these functions outside of their control would be abolished.

Would there still be bureaucrats and parasites? Of course. The trick is that instead of blaming problems and poor policies on a nebulous 'deep state', the patronage system effectively ties everything back through the assigned cronies to the boss - the president, who holds ultimate accountability.

In theory, this would effectively shrink the government.

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Problem is we need a government slightly bigger than the hundred or so lackeys that a new president has. Also we need continuity of tribal knowledge. If the cronies get replaced every 4 or 8 years then the knowledge of how to do things is lost. Some (most?) of that knowledge is actually important

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I think decentralisation is the key to keeping bureaucracy down, its hard to build a large empire if you're area of control only includes a few thousand people. Power should flow up, taxes should be collected and spent locally wherever possible. Central governments should only control national issues like defence, international relations etc.

We also need to argue constantly against the left's narratives, especially in schools and universities where they have a near monopoly of thought. How to do this is harder though.

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Decentralization is definitely part of the solution. There's a huge chunk of stuff that the federal government does that it shouldn;'t and that the states should handle and a huge chunck of stuff that the states handle that counties/municipalities etc, should handle.

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I agree with your analysis but you do make one categorical error. You wrote "Catholics were, AIUI, generally absent from Reagan voters." In fact, "Catholics," which is to say, ethnic (Irish, Italian, Polish, Slovak, and so on) blue-collars in the Northeast and Midwest, were transitioning out of the Democratic party of their forefathers as far back as the 1960s. Those blue-collars figured prominently in the Wallace movement, largely in response to their abandonment by the Democratic Party in favor of blacks. Blue-collars then became part of Nixon's 1972 landslide, in part because of the endorsement of the Teamsters, which in turn was triggered by the Hardhat Riot (look it up, well worth it) and its aftermath. Later they helped propel Reagan into office as "Reagan Democrats" and spawned a decade of Midwest Republican governance in Michigan, Wisconsin, and even Minnesota. In fact Northern and Midwestern Catholics were on a parallel trajectory with Southern Evangelicals and for many of the same reasons.

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I am happy to be corrected. As I was but a small child in a foreign country during the 1970s I base my statement on what I've read.

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Well you are most welcome, and no criticism intended! :-) For a deeper set of insights--and I freely concede my indebtedness to these works--I suggest the following:

1. The Emerging Republican Majority by Kevin Phillips

2. The Real Majority by Richard Scammon and Ben Wattenberg

3. The Inheritance by Samuel Freedman

4. The Hardhat Riot by David Kuhn

Phillips and Scammon & Wattenberg attempted to explain Nixon's 1968 victory, along with many others. As I observed more than 30 years ago, Scammon & Wattenberg's views became the de facto playbook of the 1992 Clinton campaign.

Freedman's book examines the transition of blue-collar Catholics from the FDR coalition to the Reagan coalition at a retail level, examining three families over three generations.

And I've already mentioned the events documented in the Kuhn book.

Happy to discuss further but humbly suggest you take a look at these works.

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