Why voters and courts are supporting a bureaucratic slim-down

If you beamed in from Mars, you could learn everything about the state of the West and its politics through a split screen last week.   On one half is an unhinged b-rated street-theater, suicide-march of mostly geriatric Democrats protesting Elon Musk’s effort to cut fraud, waste, and abuse — dandies like an EPA grant of $50 million to a group that believes “climate justice travels through a Free Palestine,” $8 billion to teach Sri Lankan journalists how to use proper gender-fluid pronouns and grants for drag queen shows in Ecuador.  Across the Atlantic at the same time were the pursed lips and stone faces of the priggish European Union bureaucratic elites warned by Vice President J.D.Vance about their increasing illiberalism — in particular their censorship and criminalization of political views in conflict with the EU’s yawning bureaucratic decrees.     At its core then, the political fulcrum in the West seems to be the girth and accountability of the bureaucratic state. For the progressive left in both the US and EU, bureaucracy is their everything because it has ushered in its cultural revolution on an unwilling public: Open borders, race preferences, and quotas achieved through standard-lowering, gender-transition surgeries for minors, EV mandates that are killing German automakers and undermining those in the US. The problem for progressives is the bureaucracy is increasingly counter-majoritarian: voters on both sides of the pond do not approve of the cultural revolution or the layers of bloat and waste that accompany it. By large margins, Americans are against open borders, critical race, and gender theologies, and want all of the above strategies on energy challenges. In Europe, millions of unassimilated migrants have often resulted in huge criminal sub-classes, gang violence, and violent anti-West protests in the UK, Sweden, France, Germany, and elsewhere. On the eve of Vance’s visit to Europe, an extremist proclaiming “Alla...