The Two Social Compacts
Power, legitimacy, and the administrative state in a system the public misremembers—and one they never agreed to
Mark Blyth recently wrote that capitalism is rebooting its operating system. The ideas and institutions that once held the economy together no longer function as promised. What comes next is uncertain, but the shift is already happening.
The same is true of governance. Something fundamental has changed. But most people are pointing to the wrong culprit.
For decades, the American administrative state operated within a Lockean compact: limited government, lawful authority, delegated power, and institutional checks. Even as the state expanded during the New Deal and postwar period, its foundation remained grounded in the protection of rights and the consent of the governed. It wasn’t perfect, but it was legible. Principled. Built around restraint.
And yet, the modern public increasingly sees it as something else: bloated, intrusive, coercive. In the popular imagination, it’s Leviathan—faceless, unaccountable, and hostile to liberty. That perception has taken root over decades of political messaging, institutional drift, and cultural fragmentation.
But here’s the problem: the administrative state hasn’t abandoned the Lockean compact. It still operates—structurally and philosophically—within it. What’s changed is the political project now trying to seize control of that system.
What’s emerging is a new compact altogether. It centralizes authority under the executive, undermines neutral administration, and treats institutional independence as a threat. It promises to “take back control” but delivers loyalty tests, purges, and politicized enforcement. This isn’t a restoration of constitutional governance. It’s a rupture from it.
This new compact is not just post-liberal. It’s post-consensual. It no longer seeks legitimacy through elections, deliberation, or law. It asserts power through proximity, repetition, and the erosion of constraints. And it didn’t arise organically. It’s being engineered—deliberately, and with increasing speed.
So here’s the tension:
The public believes they’re still living under one compact.
The administrative state, as designed, still operates under it.
But another compact is being enforced, and the public was never asked to agree.
This isn’t a procedural crisis. It’s a philosophical one.
A growing mismatch between the stories we tell about public authority and the systems that actually wield it.
We’re not running the old operating system anymore. The question is whether we’re ready to name what replaced it—and who’s still writing the code.