David Harvey: The Distant Yet Pervasive State

The Shepherd and the Flock: De Tocqueville’s Warning and the New Zealand Condition

This article arose after I had read a number of different pieces. One was Bryce Edwards’ “Democracy Briefing: The Establishment joins the electricity insurgency”. That in turn led me to Danyl McLuchlan’s Listener article “Fuel for a Crisis”. Then from out of the blue arrived a piece about the state of social media discourse and how volatile, vicious and elemental it can be. All this gave rise to some thinking about how remote Wellington seems to be, how out of touch the bureaucrats (who control the decision making process) actually are and yet by the same token when the going gets rough the howl goes up “The Government must do something.” These general themes prompted some research and and some thinking. The results follow.

There is a pattern to New Zealand’s political life that is so familiar it has ceased to surprise us — and that, in itself, ought to give us pause.

Something goes wrong. Power prices spike. A hospital fails. The housing shortage deepens. A school produces students who cannot read. A river turns green. The public is outraged. Social media erupts. Talkback radio seethes.

And then — almost without pause — the same outraged public turns to the same state that produced the failure and demands that it fix the problem.

The thought that individuals, families, communities, or voluntary associations might address the matter themselves rarely surfaces. The Government must do something. This has become less a political slogan than a cultural reflex. It deserves considerably more scrutiny than it ordinarily receives.

A Coexistence Worth Examining

What makes this reflex particularly arresting is its coexistence with the contemptuous distrust of government that characterises the same culture.

New Zealanders do not, on the whole, admire their politicians. They do not trust the public service. They sense — often correctly — that Wellington operates at a great remove from their lives, shaped by interests and ideologies that are not their own. And yet the demand that Wellington act — that it spend more, regulate more, intervene more — does not diminish. If anything, it intensifies.

The state is simultaneously the source of the problem and the only conceivable solution. This is not incoherence. It is something more troubling: it is what dependency looks like from the inside.

Tocqueville’s Prophecy

Alexis de Tocqueville, the French political philosopher who visited the early American republic in 1831 and spent the remainder of his intellectual life considering what democracy would become, predicted this condition with uncanny precision. He called it soft despotism — and it remains the most important political concept that almost nobody in New Zealand’s public life discusses.

De Tocqueville’s soft despotism is not tyranny in the conventional sense. There are no jackboots, no secret police, no disappeared dissidents. It is something altogether more comfortable and, in his analysis, more dangerous.

He described an “immense tutelary power” that covers society in a network of rules — not crushing the will of citizens, but softening it, bending it, guiding it. The state does not shatter individuality. It renders it unnecessary.

The passage in which he sets this out has lost none of its force:

“After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate.” — Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1840

The result, de Tocqueville predicted, would be a population reduced to what he called “a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.” Citizens would not be coerced. They would be made passive — gradually losing the faculties of thinking, feeling, and acting for themselves, falling, as he put it, “below the level of humanity.” And crucially, they would do this voluntarily, even gratefully, trading freedom for security and the promise of managed comfort.

The mechanism he described is precise. Citizens, confronted with the complexity of modern life, find it easier to delegate decisions to the state than to manage them through the older channels of family, community, voluntary association, and local self-government. Each delegation seems reasonable. Each is, individually, a small thing. Cumulatively, they constitute the surrender of a civilisation’s capacity for self-governance.

And once surrendered, that capacity is not easily recovered — because the institutions that once carried it, the friendly societies, the civic associations, the self-reliant communities, the churches, the local bodies with real authority, have been crowded out by their state replacements, leaving nothing to fall back on.

New Zealand’s Welfare State and the Crowding-Out Problem

New Zealand was among the first countries in the world to establish a comprehensive social security system, doing so under the first Labour government in the 1930s. The system was constructed around a particular model of society — the nuclear family, full male employment, universal entitlements — that began to fracture within decades of its construction.

What replaced it was not a return to voluntary and community institutions, but an expanded, more complex state apparatus that attempted to manage the consequences of social change through targeted intervention.

The crowding-out dynamic that de Tocqueville anticipated was documented early. The welfare state displaced the friendly societies, charitable organisations, and mutual aid networks that had previously provided community support — not through malice, but through competition on unequal terms. State provision is free at the point of use; voluntary provision requires effort, organisation, and community trust. Once the habit of turning to the state is established, the alternative institutions wither for want of use.

The figures tell a stark story. By 2024, working-age welfare dependency had reached levels that prompted the incoming National-led coalition to declare a formal reset. Benefit sanctions — the principal instrument for encouraging work obligations — had collapsed from over 60,000 applications in 2017 to fewer than 26,000 in 2023, even as jobseeker numbers rose by 70,000.

The previous government had instructed officials to use sanctions only “sparingly” and as a “last resort.” The result was predictable: the message that dependency carries no consequences was transmitted clearly, and dependency deepened accordingly.

The Paradox of Democratic Fury

Here the analysis becomes uncomfortable, because it requires holding two things in mind simultaneously.

The first is that New Zealanders are correct to be angry at what might be called the Stakeholder State — at the captured bureaucracy, the distant policy machinery, the revolving door between industry and government, the consultation processes that launder the preferences of organised interests into the language of neutral administration. The state does not belong to ordinary people. It belongs to those who have made themselves indispensable to it.

The second is that the demand for more of this state — more spending, more programmes, more intervention, more government action — is not the solution to this capture. It is its precondition.

Every expansion of state activity creates a new domain for the stakeholder class to colonise. Every new programme generates a new consultation process, a new regulatory framework, a new set of advocacy organisations positioning themselves as essential intermediaries between the state and the people it is nominally serving.

The demand that government do something produces, reliably, a government doing things for interests other than those that demanded action.

This is the trap. And de Tocqueville saw it coming. He observed that citizens in democratic societies, having chosen to rely on the state for the management of their common affairs, find themselves simultaneously dependent on and alienated from it.

They emerge from dependency for a brief moment to vote — to “select their master,” as he put it with characteristic acidity — and then relapse into it again. The election changes the face at the top. It does not change the architecture of dependence. And so the cycle continues: fury at the state, demand for the state, expansion of the state, deepening capture of the state, more fury — rinse, repeat.

The Dependency That Dare Not Speak Its Name

What has changed in New Zealand — and this is the culturally specific dimension that a purely structural analysis misses — is the extent to which dependency has ceased to carry any social stigma and has instead been reframed as entitlement.

This is partly the work of an ideological public service: a bureaucracy shaped by progressive commitments that defines the receipt of state support not as a temporary condition to be overcome but as a right to be affirmed, a dignity to be protected, a framework to be institutionalised.

The conservative critique of this reframing is not a claim that people in genuine need should be abandoned or shamed. It is a claim about consequences. Welfare dependency is impoverishing and unfulfilling for those who have become dependent on it.

People cannot be expected to feel good about themselves if they are not living meaningful lives that benefit themselves and others. The problem is not merely fiscal. It is human. A person whose decisions about work, housing, family, and community have been progressively managed by state agencies has been diminished in ways that a benefit payment cannot compensate.

The deeper problem is precisely what de Tocqueville called the erosion of the “faculties of thinking, feeling, and acting for themselves.” The welfare state crowds out individual responsibility, voluntary effort, and charitable organisations.

This process cannot be reversed simply by cutting benefits. It requires rebuilding the intermediate institutions — the civic associations, the community organisations, the local bodies with real authority — that de Tocqueville identified as democracy’s essential antibodies against soft despotism. New Zealand has been dismantling these institutions, through neglect and through the centralisation of authority in Wellington, for decades.

Does the Distant State Create the Dependent Citizen?

The question is precisely the right one: does the Stakeholder State contribute to the culture of dependency it then claims to manage?

The answer, drawing on both de Tocqueville’s analysis and the New Zealand evidence, is yes — and the mechanism is more specific than it might appear.

The distant state does not merely fail to solve problems. It actively disables the alternative. When Wellington decides — through regulation, through funding, through policy design — that a particular problem is a government responsibility, it removes that problem from the domain in which community self-organisation might address it.

The housing crisis becomes a matter of waiting for the government to build houses, rather than a challenge for local communities, building societies, and cooperative models to address.

The educational failure of particular communities becomes a matter of waiting for the Ministry’s next initiative, rather than a challenge for parents, local schools, and community organisations to tackle directly.

The energy problem becomes a matter of waiting for the next policy announcement from ministers who are themselves captured by the very industry they are supposed to govern.

Each state intervention, however well-intentioned, sends the same message: this is not your problem to solve. It is ours. Wait.

The accumulated effect of thousands of such messages, delivered over decades, is a population that has genuinely lost the habit of self-governance — not because it was stupid or lazy, but because the habit atrophies without exercise, and the state has been systematically removing the occasions for exercise.

De Tocqueville warned that citizens made so dependent on the central power would gradually lose the ability to think, feel, and act for themselves:

“The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting.”

The social media fury — the demand for the government to do something about the very conditions that government action has produced — is the sound of citizens restrained from acting, furious at their restraint, but unable to imagine acting otherwise. They are not hypocrites. They are the products of a system that has, over generations, made their own agency feel implausible.

The Way Back — If There Is One

De Tocqueville’s analysis was not merely diagnosis. He identified the antidotes: local self-government, voluntary associations, an independent press, a civic culture in which citizens understood that their personal well-being was bound up with the condition of their community and their active participation in its governance.

These were not romantic fantasies about a pre-modern past. They were practical institutional arrangements that distributed power, built the habit of responsibility, and prevented the concentration of authority that makes soft despotism possible.

For New Zealand, the prescription follows. It requires not merely reforming the central state — though confronting captured bureaucracies and breaking up regulatory cartels is necessary — but rebuilding the intermediate institutions that the centralised state has displaced.

It means genuine devolution of authority to local government, not the Wellington-managed process-devolution that currently passes for localism.

It means restoring the conditions in which community organisations, voluntary associations, and individuals can address their own problems without first seeking permission from a ministry. It means being honest with New Zealanders that the government cannot, in fact, fix everything — and that the belief that it can has been one of the primary instruments of their disempowerment.

This is a harder political message than any party currently offers. It does not promise that the next government will finally get the state right. It suggests that the expectation that any government can get the state right is itself part of the problem.

One cannot preserve a free society merely through legal reform or economic deregulation — one must cultivate citizens capable of living freely. That means fostering a culture in which the rights and responsibilities of self-governance are not merely acknowledged but exercised — daily, locally, without waiting for Wellington’s permission.

De Tocqueville’s shepherd and his flock: the image endures because it is accurate. The flock is angry at the shepherd’s indifference, his corruption, his favouring of other animals. But it does not leave the fold.

The task is to persuade people that the fold itself is the problem — and that the pasture beyond it, though less managed and less comfortable, is where genuine self-government, and genuine human flourishing, actually lives.

David Harvey is a former District Court Judge and Mastermind champion, as well as an award winning writer who blogs at the substack site A Halflings View - Where this article was sourced.