Civic Engagement course in Kyiv on June 3-5

Posted on May 16, 2025 by Peter

Thanks to the Kyiv School of Economics (KSE), I have the opportunity to offer a short version of our Summer Institute of Civic Studies in-person in Kyiv on June 3-5. It is open to people in the vicinity as well as KSE students. I will also offer a public talk on the theme of happiness and will post more about that once the promotional materials are ready. Meanwhile, courtesy of KSE, here is information about the civic engagement course:

Do you want to understand how societies can change for the better—and how you can help lead that change?

This exciting, hands-on course is designed for:

Civil society leaders and activists – current and aspiring
Students with a passion for politics, ethics, and making a difference

Why attend?

You’ll dive into real-world examples of civic action and gain practical tools to:

Organize people around a shared goal
Communicate across political divides
Respond to exclusion and injustice
Learn from global success stories of activism and nonviolence

What’s inside the program?

Simulation games like the Prisoner’s Dilemma
Case studies of civic movements
Discussions on propaganda, polarization, and dialogue
Lessons in nonviolent and military resistance
Certificate option with short reading assignments

All participants will receive a certificate upon completing the course.

This is not just a lecture—it’s an invitation to think, act, and engage.

Led by one of the world’s most prominent thinkers in civic philosophy:

Professor Peter Levine – Senior Professor at Tufts University, visiting scholar at Stanford, former fellow at Harvard & Johns Hopkins, renowned expert in civic life and democratic engagement

Dates: June 3–5, 3:00–7:00 pm each day

Location: KSE, Room 4.07

Register here

Contact: Mariia Yurina — myurina@kse.org.ua

the historical trend for discretionary federal spending

Posted on May 15, 2025 by Peter

Until today, I had not understood the trends shown in the graph above (from Aherne, Labonte, & Lynch 2024).

As a proportion of the economy, total federal spending has been fairly constant since 1962. Entitlements (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid) and defense keep the whole cost pretty stable. The cost has risen during recessions because bad times increase eligibility for entitlements. This means that the early Reagan years saw a temporary peak in total federal spending (notwithstanding Reagan’s anti-government rhetoric), and the Great Recession and COVID caused big temporary increases.

Meanwhile, federal discretionary spending quite steadily declined from 1965 and 2000. It has fluctuated since then from a lower baseline.

That means that the basket that includes highways and air traffic control, prisons and border control, diplomacy and foreign aid, agricultural subsidies, Food Stamps, etc. represents a smaller percentage of the economy than it did in the 1960s.

Looking more closely at components, we can often find anomalous patterns. For example, total federal spending on education (k12 and college, including financial aid and research) was 1 percent of GDP in 1975 and 1.1 percent in 2024, with spikes during recessions.

Since the economy has grown each decade, a shrinking proportion of GDP could still purchase more goods and services. But that has not really happened during the 21st century. Another telling graph from the same report (below) shows discretionary spending in billions of dollars, adjusted for inflation. It separates defense from non-defense spending. Until COVID hit, neither component had risen (or fallen) in real terms compared to 2005. The Obama stimulus did cause a temporary boost, but that went away. Then COVID spending and the Biden stimulus boosted non-defense spending, which has come down but remains about 25 percent higher than it was in 2019.

These graphs explain why the kinds of public goods that we expect from the national government in the United States often seem to have shrunk or deteriorated, even while the total cost and size of the federal government has remained at least constant.

These data challenge certain assumptions popular among conservatives–that federal spending has risen and that Republican presidents have cut government while in office. (By the way, Elon Musk’s recent rampage will hardly be visible on these graphs when the lines are extended into 2025. Total federal spending rose during the first quarter of 2025.)

These graphs also challenge progressives’ assumptions that government has been shrinking in the era of neoliberalism. Indeed, even discretionary domestic spending is quite a bit higher than it was in 2005 or 2012-19, when adjusted for inflation. What progressives observe is not a shrinking government but a decline in non-defense discretionary spending (as a proportion of the economy) between 1965 and 2000, which has left many national government functions weaker than they were in the mid-1900s.

Source: Aherne, Drew C., Labonte, Marc & Lynch, Megan S., “Discretionary Spending in 10 Graphs” (2024), Congressional Research Service https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R48164. See also taxing and spending are more compatible with democratic values than regulation is; how public opinion on social spending has changed: a generational approach

Educating for American Democracy: the work continues

Posted on May 14, 2025 by Peter

Educating for American Democracy sent the following message yesterday:

We write with the good news that the work of EAD very much continues, even in these rapidly changing times.

As of June 1, the Educating for American Democracy Consortium will transition from being housed at iCivics to the Adams Presidential Center, based in Quincy, MA. The Adams Presidential Center works to share the history of a great American family, to promote their ideals of citizenship and selfless public service, and to inspire future generations to serve their communities and our nation. Hosting the EAD Consortium aligns with the Adams Presidential Center’s goal to foster lifelong civic learning.

EAD will continue to be guided by a Steering Committee, currently chaired by Peter Levine of Tufts University. Adams Presidential Center President, Kurt Graham has joined the Steering Committee. EAD is also proud to recognize Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello as a founding partner in the work. Monticello’s President Jane Kamensky also continues to serve on the EAD Steering Committee.

This move to APC comes after six years that iCivics has hosted EAD. We offer our great appreciation to iCivics for playing that role and for the organization’s partnership in creating and stewarding EAD. Louise Dube, CEO of iCivics, will continue to serve on the Steering Committee and fully supports the transition to APC. The Steering Committee’s members unanimously agreed that the transition is important for EAD to continue to thrive. The work will benefit from more focused attention and resources independent of any one provider in the civic education field.

Also, thanks to private philanthropy, the EAD Consortium is now able to search for an Executive Director, and the process is underway. In the meanwhile, questions about EAD can be directed to the EAD Consortium Steering Committee at EAD@adamspc.org.

These are difficult times for all civic educators in and beyond the classroom. Across this great country, countless teachers and civic leaders continue to bring the nation’s K–12 students and its lifelong learners rich lessons in the pluralistic narratives of American history and in the reflective patriotism needed for informed, engaged, and responsible citizenship. We are so proud of the work that you are all doing, and we look forward to celebrating it in March 2026 in Philadelphia at the National Forum of Civic Learning Week, co-hosted by iCivics and the Democratic Knowledge Project. Please save March 9–10, 2026, to join us in the nation’s birthplace.

With appreciation,

Peter Levine, on behalf of the EAD Steering Committee

what is the basis of a political judgment?

Posted on May 9, 2025 by Peter

I believe that Donald Trump is an example of a right-wing populist authoritarian, akin to Orban, Modi, and even Putin. I see looser affinities with 1930’s fascists–not Hitler, but Vichy France or Hungary after 1931. I believe that Trump and leaders like him threaten democratic and (classical) liberal values.

This post is not about those claims but about how we should justify and assess any judgments of this type. My view of Trump is certainly contestable. Some of his defenders emphasize his democratic legitimacy. Some of his critics observe prominent continuities with previous US presidencies, which have also extended executive power and mistreated migrants and people overseas. On the other hand, some people are even more alarmed than I am and equate the current administration with an actual fascist regime.

I found a great letter from Hannah Arendt to Karl Jaspers in which she suggested that McCarthyism, which was then in full swing, resembled fascism. Her letter is on the website of The Brooklyn Rail, which comments on the “astonishing similarities between the McCarthy era and the present.” I agree–if the present is 2025. But The Brooklyn Rail posted this letter in March 2006. I would not have described the final quarter of the George W. Bush administration as a time when legality was breaking down “disastrously.” I am not even sure that Arendt was right in May 1953, because the McCarthy era would peak the next year, and the Civil Rights Movement and Free Speech Movement were on the horizon.

The question is how we should make and assess any such judgments. I perceive that I am doing the following things when I make a judgment of Donald Trump:

I am describing and interpreting the particular phenomenon. This is not deductive reasoning (applying a known definition to a case) nor inductive reasoning (generalizing across many cases). Both are relevant to a degree, but the key question is how to characterize the particular case, which is unique in many respects. The reasoning is “particularist.”
I am thinking about the whole case and how Trump’s various actions, appointments, and statements fit together. When ICE abducted our beloved student at Tufts, that action was cruel and wrong but not, per se, right-wing authoritarianism. What made it politically alarming was the intention behind it and how it fit with other assaults on political dissent. Because I am connecting concrete things into one larger structure, my reasoning is “holistic.”
I am considering Trump in the context of previous US presidents and similar leaders around the world. He is both similar and different from other cases, and the analogies and differences are relevant. They display family-resemblances rather than belonging to sharply defined sets. Thus my reasoning is “contextual.”
I consider other people’s impressions of Trump. I am not mainly interested in a statistically representative sample of opinions (although I do follow polls), but rather in selected views that I judge to be insightful. They tilt strongly against Trump but encompass some diversity. If I alone thought that Trump posed an existential threat to democracy, I would have a reason to doubt my eccentric view. I find reinforcement in sober, well-informed commentary by others, but also occasional challenges. My reasoning is “social.”
I am drawing on experience. For instance, since institutions like universities and medical systems have treated me well, I am prone to trust them and to oppose attacks on them. I am one of many for whom the abduction of Rümeysa Öztürk triggers deeply ingrained images of secret police and concentration camps, which are not personal memories for me but transmitted lore. I realize that I would react differently if my experiences had been different–for instance, if I had always been excluded from universities or if the US government had already mistreated my community before Trump. I try to treat my accumulated experiences as valid yet incomplete. Judgment is inevitably and helpfully “experiential.”
I am concerned with this case because I want to know what I should do as a US citizen and what I should think about others’ behavior. The question is what is right for me and us to do. Judgment involves moral concerns and motivates action. Even my concepts have normative bases. For instance, it is from a liberal value framework that I present Trump as illiberal. If I were less committed to liberalism, I would describe him differently. In these ways, my reasoning is “ethical.”

So I would propose that political judgments should be Particularistic, Holistic, Contextual, Social, Experiential, and Ethical. (PHEESC, if you like pronounceable acronyms.)

My judgment is not subjective in the sense that I just happen to have certain opinions. I am accountable to others for my judgments–for whether they are wise and whether my actions match them. In a debate about my judgments, I would have many things to say, although I am also obliged to listen.

This is not science, in the sense of deductive and inductive reasoning or the testing of falsifiable empirical hypotheses. Empirical evidence is relevant but is only one aspect of judgment. Indeed, I think that a narrow understanding of rationality as science is one impediment to developing wise judgments. In a later letter to Jaspers (Dec. 29, 1963), Arendt wrote, “Even good and, at bottom, worthy people have, in our time, the most extraordinary fear about making judgments.” This is partly because they equate judgment with mere opinion.

The wisdom of judgments becomes clearer after history unfolds. For example, I think that events after 2006 challenged The Brooklyn Rail’s suggestion that the US was then sliding into fascism. Of course, they couldn’t know what would happen next.

Unfortunately, we must make judgments in the stream of history. In turn, history will judge us for what we thought and, more importantly, for what we did or failed to do.

primer on free speech and academic freedom

Posted on May 7, 2025 by Peter

In US law and in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, free speech means rights of individuals and associations against their governments. If you have a right to a given form of speech, then your government may not block, ban, or punish that speech.

Free speech is very extensive in the USA. In 1969, in Brandenburg v. Ohio, the Supreme Court found that a KKK leader had the right to advocate publicly for “revengeance” against “black peoples” and “Jews.” This decision clearly protected hate speech and remains the law.

One important exception has involved non-US citizens. Periodically throughout US history, the federal government has barred people from entry or deported them on the basis of their speech. This is an unsettled area of constitutional law that is before courts right now.

Notwithstanding their constitutional free speech rights, Americans generally lack the right to speak as they wish at work. An employer can usually fire you for what you say, or even for speaking at all.

There are some exceptions. Many employees have a right to advocate unionization under the National Labor Rights Act, although that right is poorly enforced. Some public employees have free speech rights because their employer is also the government, but they are not protected when they are speaking in their governmental role. For instance, a state attorney does not have a constitutional right to dissent publicly about a case being handled by his office (Garcetti v. Ceballos, 2006).

Since the late 1800s, some have argued that students and faculty need freedom of speech to advance the mission of an educational institution. An early statement was by the University of Wisconsin in 1894: “Whatever may be the limitations which trammel inquiry elsewhere, we believe that the great state University of Wisconsin should ever encourage that continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found.”

This is academic freedom in the form of rights for individuals and groups of students and faculty in relation to their own educational institutions. Today, it is encoded in the form of policies adopted by specific schools and colleges, employment contracts, student disciplinary codes, prevalent norms and expectations, and some state laws that afford rights to students or faculty in state schools and colleges.

For the most part, academic freedom is not a constitutional right derived from the First Amendment. A college or a state system can choose not to offer it. When individuals sue for academic freedom, it is usually for breach of a contract that was voluntarily adopted by their employer.

It is tempting to envision academic freedom as just like freedom of speech, except that an educational institution is like the government: prevented from censoring or punishing individuals’ speech. But this model quickly falls apart, because educational institutions are fundamentally and intrinsically involved in choosing, evaluating, rewarding, and penalizing speech. For example, a department will select the prospective instructor who offers the best writing and oral presentation among all the applicants. That person is hired to teach courses in the approved curriculum. Professors award grades based on the quality and relevance of the students’ writing and speaking.

Thus the idea of neutrality or non-interference, which applies to governments, simply cannot govern schools or colleges.

Instead, academic freedom is a patchwork of provisions that vary by institution. Many universities have adopted explicit policies of not restricting faculty or student speech based on its point-of-view or position, usually within limits. (For example, the right to express opinions on political issues does not allow a faculty member to take extensive time in the classroom to discuss issues unrelated to the course content.) Colleges generally adopt procedures for faculty hiring, promotion, and tenure that are meant to enhance freedom along with quality. We talk about a “tenure case” because it has the feel of a legal process, with rights afforded to the applicant. Receiving tenure then prevents professors from being fired for the content of their speech.

Further, universities assign many decisions to groups of students or faculty instead of the central administration. For example, student groups often have broad rights to invite speakers of their choice. Departments are influential in choosing faculty and determining curricula. The whole body of faculty of a college votes on key curricular matters. These are examples of academic freedom as a kind of freedom of association for specific categories of people within the institution. The Supreme Court has also sometimes acknowledged a free speech right for each university to determine its own programming (Justice Powell in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, 1978).

The norm not to interfere with speech on the basis of viewpoint or content is quite strong in higher education (much less so in K12), yet the prevalent rules leave many gaps. In particular:

Only students and “instructors” are typically protected. At my university, just under 30% of the employees are faculty, broadly defined. In general, if you cut the grass at a college, you have no more free speech than if you cut the grass at a condominium. And if you are a dean or vice-provost, a laboratory technician, a clinical physician, or a counselor, you may not be covered by academic freedom.
Academic freedom is quite strong in a setting like a philosophy seminar, where the participants probably enrolled by choice, the professor had a lot of scope to choose the curriculum, and everyone can choose their own positions. But switch your example to a laboratory in the medical or engineering school. This is a highly capitalized enterprise with expensive equipment and many at-will employees. It probably exists thanks to government grants and private philanthropy. These two go together because private donations are what allow universities to hire the faculty, attract the graduate students, and build facilities that make them competitive for federal funds. Harvard wins $8 billion in federal grants annually because it has $53 billion in private money. In the lab sciences, key decision-makers include donors (often members of the board of trustees) and government officials. Now switch back to the philosophy class and bear in mind that overhead from STEM research may subsidize the professor’s salary. From this perspective, a university is not a community of citizens in a republic of letters who each decide what to say. It is an expensive, top-down enterprise whose research agenda is negotiated with outsiders.
Title VI of the Civil Rights Act prevents discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, and national origin. For decades, it has been interpreted to mean that schools and colleges have a legal obligation to prevent speech by their own students and employees that causes discrimination. This principle is in tension with academic freedom as the right to choose and express one’s own view.

I do not regard this tension as simply unfortunate. In an educational institution, which is an employer, a gatekeeper to professions, and usually a landlord as well as a venue for “continual and fearless sifting,” both academic freedom and anti-discrimination are important. But I have long worried that penalizing speech and treating it as a disciplinary concern violates valid speech rights, hampers debate, and creates opportunities for bad actors to suppress valuable speech.* The Biden Administration investigated at least a dozen universities for potentially failing to protect Jewish students’ civil rights by stopping anti-Israel protests. I strongly disagreed with those actions, but far worse are the Trump Administration’s arbitrary and vindictive attacks on specific universities, which use Title VI as a weapon. (Interestingly, the latest letter from the Trump Administration to Harvard drops the pretext that the issue was ever antisemitism.)

Alex Gourevitch makes an important point that the whole framework of preventing harm to students especially threatens the right to protest, because protests involve “public expressions of hostility toward political views and often the people who hold them.” I would add that protests are collective actions, during which individual participants can say a range of things. If a whole protest is shut down or punished because of what some people say, then all the other people’s right to protest has been curtailed.
There is a live debate about whether educational institutions, as opposed to individual faculty and students, may or should speak. Proponents of the Kalven Report argue that speech by university leaders may chill individuals’ dissenting speech and purport to represent employees and students who cannot determine what the college says in their name. Critics of the Kalven Report argue that universities should be able to speak freely in the public sphere and doubt that these institutions could or should be neutral. I served on Tufts’ committee that considered these issues, and I am proud of our report, but I can’t describe it yet because it hasn’t been released. I would only say that this is a complex topic because institutions communicate in so many ways. Statements by university presidents are just one example.

Philosophy Learning and Teaching Organization (PLATO) conference

Posted on May 1, 2025 by Peter

We are hosting the biannual PLATO conference this June 27-28 at Tufts University’s Tisch College of Civic Life. PLATO is mostly devoted to teaching philosophy in K12 schools.

Philosophy is not a priority in the USA, unlike in many European countries where it is taught (by that name) to large numbers of students in standardized or even mandatory courses. Nevertheless, the PLATO network is robust, attracting many educators (including some from overseas) who incorporate ethics and other aspects of philosophy in their courses and in extracurricular programs, such as ethics bowls.

From my point of view, philosophy is an aspect of civic education, which is my main professional cause.

The program is online and early registration is still open.

rule of law means more than obeying laws: a richer vision to guide post-Trump reconstruction

Posted on April 29, 2025 by Peter

The Trump Administration flouts the rule of law by denying its obligation to obey statutes and court rulings. On April 22, two TIME magazine reporters drew Trump’s attention to a portrait of John Adams that he had “put in” the White House. They quoted Adams to the effect that a republic is a government of laws, not men. Trump had never heard of this quote and said, “I wouldn’t agree with it 100%. We are a government where men are involved in the process of law, and ideally, you’re going to have honest men like me.”

This is the present crisis. However, rule of law means more than obeying explicit laws, and it had been weakening for many decades. Here I will present Trump’s current administration as the most recent stage in a disintegrative process that began in the 1960s.

Law should take the form of rules that are general, durable, transparent, coherent, chosen in legitimate processes, consistently applied, and anchored to principles. The principles that motivate laws may be good or bad, which is why rule of law is insufficient for justice. (We also need good laws). However, rule of law permits people to plan, it provides important forms of fairness, it frustrates outright corruption, and it makes government accountable. When rule of law prevails, but the actual laws are unsatisfactory, we can work to change them. When there is no rule of law, we have little recourse.

Generality, durability, transparency, legitimacy of process, coherence, consistent application, and principle are relative terms. It is impossible, for example, for laws to be perfectly general. They should not be so durable that they persist when circumstances change. Instead of exemplifying any single principle, laws may balance conflicting principles along with practical constraints.

Nevertheless, rule of law is a guiding ideal for republican government. More importantly, a good political system creates incentives for the players to promote rule of law. In contrast, a corrupt system rewards biased enforcement, ad hoc exceptions, back-room deals, short-term arrangements, impunity, and other violations of rule of law.

You can tell that 21st century America neglects rule of law from our dependence on executive orders instead of laws, regulatory rulings instead of statutes, and budget deals instead of legislation. As I’ve noted before, the federal government still addresses carbon emissions under the Clean Air Act of 1970 and social media under the Telecommunications Act of 1996. This is because Congress has been incapable of passing major statutes, liberal or conservative.

Trump lacks any compunction about governing by decree (often on the social media platform that he owns) and has signed fewer statutes than any modern predecessor in his first 100 days. His attitude is unprecedented, yet he represents the third of three stages of decline.

Theodore Lowi’s great book The End of Liberalism: The Second Republic of the United States (first edition, 1969) already described the first two stages.

The first stage was exemplified by some of John F. Kennedy’s speeches. JFK was neither original nor very influential, but he expressed the prevailing midcentury modernist view of US politics. Kennedy declared that Americans had reached consensus on the grand questions. Both national parties were ostensibly committed to Keynesian economics, Social Security, desegregation, and the Cold War. However, said Kennedy, issues had become complex, and therefore governance should be delegated to non-ideological agencies with lots of expert staff who could manage all the particular issues that would arise.

As the New Frontier turned into the Great Society, the executive branch vastly expanded, but Congress stopped passing landmark statutes, and power shifted to appropriations committees and budget negotiators, rulemakers in the executive branch, Senate confirmation hearings that determined who could serve as regulators and judges, and courts, not only in the judiciary but also within the executive branch. Donohue & McCabe (2021) write, “as of March 2017, more than 1,900 administrative law judges (ALJs) were serving in at least 27 adjudicatory bodies, with their specific roles and responsibilities reflecting those of the agencies and departments in which they were located.”

Meanwhile, the 1960s had exploded the Kennedy-era consensus about basic issues. Social movements of left and right mobilized, competing to change society through the expanded federal government. From the 1960s through the Biden Administration, urgent debates roiled civil society, but the mechanisms of government remained negotiation and regulation rather than lawmaking.

For Lowi, the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA) of 1970 exemplified this shift. Congress did write and pass OSHA, but “it did not attempt by law to identify a single specific evil that the regulatory agency was to seek to minimize or eliminate.” Instead, Congress vaguely endorsed the idea that, “so far as is possible every working man and woman in the nation [shall have] safe and healthful working conditions.” Congress gave the Department of Labor the power to issue actual regulations, subject to constant revision and negotiation, some of it before the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission, which is a tribunal in the executive branch. This is not rule of law.

One result is that social movements have usually broken like waves on the shoals of the administrative state, leaving lots of small and inconsistent regulatory actions to reflect their ideals. The women’s movement, the gay liberation movement, and the Movement for Black Lives made discernible impressions on executive branch policies without enacting major laws. A side-effect is that social movements now benefit more from expertise inside the Beltway than from grassroots mobilization.

The third stage is Trump’s. Until he won office, a system that had neglected rule of law was nevertheless, in my opinion, usually used for benign purposes, at least for domestic policies outside of some aspects of criminal law. But this system was waiting to be hijacked by someone without principles. This is what we observe right now.

As Trump’s popularity plummets, the odds of a post-Trump reconstructive period are rising. We should not be thinking about how to restore the processes of 2022 (or 1990) but how to revive rule of law, properly understood.

For me, the three main strategies would be:

expand the capacity of Congress to legislate;
restrict the discretion of the president and executive branch; and
codify the procedures of the administrative agencies and the rights of the civil service so that these become appropriate and coherent.

These strategies must be accomplished together, because, for example, to restrict administrative agencies without enabling Congress to legislate will just hamper government.

More specifically, I would favor: substantially more funding and staffing for congressional offices and committees; state-level electoral reforms, such as ranked-choice voting, which may encourage members of Congress to legislate instead of grandstanding; court rulings or (if necessary) a constitutional amendment clarifying the president’s obligation to execute statutes and making that obligation enforceable; substantial reforms of administrative law and the civil service; a general shift to taxing-and-spending instead of regulation to accomplish progressive goals; and legal repercussions for the Trump appointees who are currently violating laws.

reaching the opt-outs

Posted on April 28, 2025 by Peter

In today’s New York Times, Rob Flaherty, who was Kamala Harris’ deputy campaign manager, argues that Democrats lose “opt-out voters,” people who distrust all politicians and all traditional media and who obtain their politically relevant information from other sources, such as online influencers or real-life contacts who follow the influencers. These “opt-outs” may start out looking for tips on health or nutrition or relationships or gaming (not politics), but they find their way to right-wing propaganda.

I can support some of these generalizations with data from the 2020 American National Election Study. (I don’t think 2024 data are available yet). For example:

61.5% of strong Republicans and 5.5% of strong Democrats expressed no trust in the media.
26% of strong Republcans and 8% of strong Democrats fully agreed that “Much of what people hear in schools and media are lies by those in power.”
6% of strong Republicans and 30% of strong Democrats trusted experts much more than ordinary people for public policy.
Of those who said they did not follow the 2020 campaign using any source listed on the survey, 57% said they intended to vote for Trump; 27% for Biden.

It would be possible to overstate this problem. If most Americans only got information from unreliable influencers, then Trump’s approval rating would not have declined across most of the population in 100 days, before his tariffs and cuts had directly affected many people. If influencers had persuaded everyone to hate civil servants and researchers, then DOGE’s personnel cuts would not be as unpopular as they are. Evidently, many non-Democrats are seeing hard news. Nevertheless, Flaherty’s diagnosis is important.

His recommendation is to build an alternative media environment that carries people from “culture” (their interests in regular things like health or relationships) to liberal political ideas.

I doubt this approach is realistic, and it creates more of conflict or even contradiction for the institutionalist center-left than it does for the MAGA right (or, indeed, for the radical left). Basically, it asks liberals who believe in institutions to use anti-institutionalist means, which looks hypocritical and may prove impossible.

Here is an alternative: People have reasons to trust big, impersonal systems only when the human representatives of those systems relate to them well. For example, I trust the mainstream scientific views of vaccines and climate change not because I understand all the science, but because human beings who represent science as an institution–my own k12 and college teachers, doctors and nurses, and now my academic colleagues–have generally earned my trust. They relate to me with respect, as a fellow citizen.

Actually, not even scientists understand the science, because the necessary knowledge exceeds any person’s capacity (and much of it is built into instruments and software and datasets that each user must simply trust). But some of us have confidence in the whole process because we have benefitted from most of the moments when it has touched us directly.

The sociologist Anthony Giddens calls this process “re-embedding”: contacts between abstract systems and ordinary people via professionals who represent the systems. To be honest, I have never read a significant amount of Giddens, but I take his vocabulary from a relevant article by Mills and St Clair (2025).

The employees who are points of contact between abstract systems and regular people include teachers and professors (and educational administrators), doctors and nurses, lawyers and police officers, local elected officials, and reporters.

Americans have widely differing experiences with these professionals and varying grounds for trust. If you are at risk of being stopped and harassed by the police on account of your race, you do not have a reason to trust the criminal justice system. If your doctor dismisses your concerns, or you can’t even afford to see one, then you have less reason to trust the health sciences. If you can’t get into college, can’t afford the tuition, or experience contempt for your home culture in a college classroom, then our trust in academia is bound to fall. If your kids’ k12 school is failing–or if it seems driven by standardized curricula and tests and there’s no way for parents to engage–then you have reasons to be skeptical of schools.

For center-left institutionalists, I don’t think there’s any shortcut. In an environment where it pays to attract outrage by attacking abstract systems, we must make these systems as accountable, caring, and interactive as possible so that people will have reasons to trust them more.

The goal is for people’s “influencers” to be their own kids’ teachers, their doctors, and the reporters for their local newspaper (among others). This requires not just encouraging them to trust people who often have more education, power, and income than they do, but also making these professionals more consistently trustworthy.

Source: Mills, M. Anthony, and Price St. Clair. “The Strange New Politics of Science.” Issues in Science and Technology 41, no. 3 (Spring 2025): 40–48. https://doi.org/10.58875/NDTQ1755. See also to restore trust in schools and media, engage people in civic life; my own trust in institutions; it’s no accident that people distrust institutions (2017); and many other posts.

remarks on partisanship

Posted on April 25, 2025 by Peter

(Columbus) These are my notes for a talk today at Ohio State University on the assigned topic of “civic partisanship”:

If “partisanship” means active membership in a political party, then it is desirable. Parties can be worthy components of our civil society, especially when parties are internally diverse and meaningfully organized at the local and state levels. However, participation in party organizations is very rare today. Parties have become labels for entrepreneurial politicians, and sometimes for voters, rather than organizations that do anything at the local, state, or national level.

For example, in my state of Massachusetts, which is heavily Democratic, the state Democratic Party has 6 employees and an annual budget of $7 million in an election year. In her uncompetitive reelection race the same year, one candidate, Elizabeth Warren, spent $28 million. Most people who volunteer in politics will work for candidates, not a party.

If a political party is not an organization but a label that people attribute to themselves and others, then partisanship is at least somewhat problematic. It discourages deliberation and cooperation with people who hold a different party label.

First, partisanship can encourage hostility. Affective polarization means disliking people of the opposite party. It has risen symmetrically for Democrats and Republicans to alarming levels. In 2020, the ANES asked people to rate the parties on a 10-point scale. Giving the other party a zero score suggests that one is affectively polarized. By that standard, just eight percent of Democrats and five percent of Republicans were affectively polarized in 1978. These rates rose steadily in both parties during the 2000s, reaching 48% of Republicans and 39% of Democrats in 2020. That year, more than half of Republicans over the age of 60 rated Democrats at zero.

Note that youth were not especially polarized compared to older people. About 38% of people under 30 who identified as Republicans or Democrats rated the opposite party at zero. So if affective polarization is a problem, it is not especially a youth problem, and it’s hard to see K12 or college education as the main solution.

Second, even if it’s not hostile, partisanship can replace independent thinking about issues. There is no a priori reason that beliefs about Ukraine, vaccination, tariffs, abortion, and immigration should cluster in two ways, labeled Democratic and Republican. People should combine these issues in diverse ways. But there is evidence that many people put their beliefs together in packages based on cues from party elites.

That would be OK if it represented a valid division of labor. We could imagine that responsible and accountable professional leaders think carefully about issues and propose combinations of beliefs to busy citizens, who benefit from the professionals’ guidance. However, the influence of party leaders is problematic if they are self-interested and unaccountable, which is how I would broadly characterize elites today. Besides, in a two-party system, the choice of elites is badly constrained.

Third, when partisan labels are associated with left and right, this encourages a mental model in which everyone can be located on a spectrum. The very idea of polarization presumes that the left and right are located far apart or are moving further apart. This is a metaphor, not a fact, and it is misleading. People actually hold many beliefs that are more or less connected to each other with reasons. For example, I support Ukraine because I oppose authoritarianism. That is a pair of connected beliefs. Combinations of beliefs and reasons form networks. In any given group, individuals’ networks prove diverse when you map them. I have found that people who identify with the same party and leaders have unique networks.

When we think of people as polarized, we erase their individual thinking, which, in turn, discourages deliberation. There can be a vicious cycle in which we describe people as polarized, ignoring their uniqueness, which encourages them to become less individual and critical.

These points imply that we should teach students to appreciate actual parties but to be suspicious of partisan labels as heuristics. I also want to raise one other issue related to partisanship and civic education.

We have a civic religion in the USA, whose scripture is the Constitution. It is often used as the outline for studying government and politics. But the US Constitution does not mention parties, and its authors saw parties as grave threats to republican government. In a curriculum shaped by the text of the Constitution, political parties belong under the First Amendment as associations. This is misleading because they are integral to the political system.

What’s more, parties may be fatal to a constitution that establishes a presidential republic. In 1990, Juan Linz observed that every presidential republic except the USA had failed because the president sooner or later came into conflict with the legislature and was either defeated or became an authoritarian. One explanation of the survival of the US Constitution is that our two parties long encompassed opposing factions, notably white supremacist southern Democrats and progressive northern Democrats. Therefore, presidents were able to govern like prime ministers, assembling majority coalitions in Congress. That option ended during the Clinton Administration, when the parties sorted. Arguably, the Linzian nightmare has since played out.

94% of the time that the government has been shut down because of a conflict between the president and Congress has occurred since 1995. Three out of four presidential impeachments have taken place since then, but they have had no consequences for the president. Presidents of both parties have governed via executive order. Most recently, Trump has signed fewer laws but issued more consequential executive orders than any predecessor in the first 100 days.

If Linz’ theory is playing out, then it is political miseducation to teach students that the Constitution is an excellent design that, among other things, allows parties to flourish as voluntary associations. Perhaps the Constitution is, after all, a suicide pact. Students should at least be able to wrestle with that possibility. That would mean, not so much criticizing partisan attitudes or habits of thinking, but critically assessing a constitutional order that cannot handle parties as we know them.

summative questions after a semester of 20th century political philosophy

Posted on April 22, 2025 by Peter

I’ve been discussing these texts all semester with a very intense and dedicated group of students. In our final discussions, we are considering the following questions (or as many as we have time for):

What are the roles of reasoning and/or deliberation (Mill, Dewey, Arendt, Habermas), as opposed to unconscious emotions and/or interests (Freud, Adorno) in modern politics?
How do complex mass societies manage information, and how should they? Options include bureaucracies (Weber), free speech (Mill), price signals (Hayek), organic intellectuals (Gramsci), corporate propaganda (Horkheimer & Adorno), small-scale politics (Arendt), surveillance (Foucault), or institutions of civil society (Dewey, Habermas).
What causal factors are important in history? E.g., class struggle (Marx, Gramsci), Darwinian selection among ideas and institutions (Hayek, Weber, Foucault), intentional deliberation and learning (Mill, Dewey), great men (Mussolini), or conflicts among enemies (Schmitt, Mussolini, perhaps Fanon).
What is the potential of direct democratic self-rule as understood by Marx (in “The Civil War in France”), Luxemburg, duBois, Dewey, Arendt, or Fanon? What are its likely limitations, according to Schmitt, or Weber, or Habermas? How does decentralized democracy compare to market decentralization (Hayek)?
How should we think about positive and negative liberty (Berlin) in the light of other accounts of freedom by, e.g., DuBois, Foucault, or de Beauvoir?
What defines “liberalism” and how does it look from the perspective of a class revolutionary (Gramsci), a Black American thinker (DuBois), a revolutionary colonial subject (Fanon), or a woman (de Beauvoir)?
In 1945, Arendt wrote, “the problem of evil will be the fundamental question of postwar intellectual life in Europe.” What, if anything, does evil mean in the context of earthly politics? Should we talk about evil?
What can political thinkers contribute? E.g., a prophetic voice (Marx, Benjamin, possibly Dewey, possibly de Beauvoir), detached analysis (Weber, early Foucault, perhaps Horkheimer and Adorno), or concrete involvements in public life (Dewey, Gramsci, DuBois, Fanon, late Foucault).
Are the questions of the 21^st century different from those of the 20^th?