At the CPAC conference, Stephen Bannon announced a bold new strategy for taming the federal bureaucracy. Given that:

1.  “swamp monster” appears to be a qualification necessary to obtain a security clearance; and
2. the federal bureaucracy is hypocritically feeding public prosecutors evidence of criminal wrong-doing by administration officials,

the President’s “Chief Tragedist” is calling upon Academia to “deconstruct” the administrative state. In layman’s terms: the mission of the press-ganged philosophers will be to discover the contradictions inherent in the laws and regulations that legitimate the operation of the executive branch.

The prior exemplar of this approach to governmental process was Justice Antonin Scalia, whose approach to constitutional law was “strict deconstructionist.” Under this policy, it was possible to argue both that gun rights are absolute and that corporations have the rights of citizens. Such positions are reconciled in deconstruction by allowing that every law reflects the attempt by society to solve problems that it cannot articulate due to the biases of its language. In application, deconstruction has allowed analysts to justify every policy and action.

This blogger offers an aphorism: “The Ends Justify the Meanings.” There was a book by Nabokov on this subject: something about a poet’s elegy for his daughter, dead of a suicide, and an attempt by a political hack to interpret it as a call to restore a Scandinavian monarchy. Bannon’s substitution of “deconstruction” for “destruction” is a masterful application of the principle.