Remember Occupy Wall Street? Initially, it seemed to have broad support, but then they started pushing non-left people out, creating assemblies, squabbling about identity politics, and generally went nowhere while the powers that be pushed them out.
I think it was David Graeber- I was reading something that was quite enthusiastic about those assemblies and all the 'democracy' the activists were trying to do. Apparently he couldn't see the fact that this nonsense alienated most of Americans and ultimately sapped the energy even of the very people who did it.
So we can figure giving everyone a 'voice' in 'democracy' really means destroying the capability of said 'democracy' to get anything the people want done. Bureaucratic rule/malfeasance can just continue on while the 'democracy' crumbles under the weight of 37 genders, racial conflicts, and long sermons about who this land was allegedly stolen from along time ago.
So the first use is distraction. Derail the people from getting the parasites off our backs.
The second use is justification. Everyone knows theft is bad, which is why we have various forms of ideology that justify it based on past injustice. Incidentally, ideology is not enough here- bureaucracies also need to grow the economy to make the theft less dire for the masses. The bureaucrat must redistribute something, after all- if he can't it becomes obvious he is the dangerous one.
Since this is not a conspiracy theory, but an emergent phenomenon of a complex system, what tends to happen is the left (often composed of people who believe their own bullshit) pushes the parts of ideology too far and topples the economy to the point where people might begin to notice the bureaucracy is a problem.
It is now time for the third use- consolidation. This is done by conservatives. If we look closely, we see this is not an ideology per se- it is nostalgia. Conservatives remember a time when things were 'better' but at the same time many of them get paid by the bureaucracy, so they can't destroy the bureaucracy.
So, they tend to temporarily fix some of the problems so that the economy can grow again. But they seldom stop anything. As an example- all the processes of 'transitioning' a child are clearly child abuse, yet the most you will get from conservatives is the proposal of new laws. What's wrong with the old laws? Do you actually need new laws to fight a mere narrative- one that's been shown to be false even among the adults who go through this procedure? It does not help in any shape or fashion- it doesn't stop suicide or destructive behavior and it definitely harms people.
But conservatives tend to leave these things- unconstitutional things. FBI is in the news, and it's telling that DeSantis is damaging his election chances by saying a raid is not a raid. Clearly, he is intending to be a conservative bureaucrat and keep this important piece of machinery around for the bureaucracy to use. Trump may say he is a conservative, but he was a New York democrat for most of his life, and he is considered anathema by the bureaucracy because he might tell them they are fired.
The fourth use is obfuscation. Bureaucracy is not just in the government- it is corporate too. Many 'free market' reforms merely shift focus from one bureaucracy to another, and they are usually very tightly linked. They co-operate as one more often than they fight with each other. If anarcho-capitalists suddenly took over the world, bureaucracy would be rife in these insurance companies the ancaps seems to be so fond of, and we would end up with the same sort of poor governance we get now.
That's why we need to see the bureaucracy, and not pretend it is the same as the institution that it is in.
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