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?

This is beautiful, scolds the mind

Posted on April 21, 2025 by Peter

This is beautiful, scolds the mind,
Seeing the mind wandering.
It ransacks its lexicon to find
Other words, pondering
Lovely, rare, or perhaps sublime
As sounds with which to hold the mind
That skitters anxiously through time
And which the things in view remind
Of other things undone, unfixed.
Disapproving, the mind regards
Itself distracted, not transfixed.
The whole it had glimpsed: now in shards.
The mind a problem for the mind,
A solid door has shut behind.

envisioning a new model for higher education

Posted on April 18, 2025 by Peter

Harvard is prominent in the news because of its battle with the Trump Administration. The model that Harvard epitomizes is worth fighting for, but fragile. While defending it, we should also be thinking about radical alternatives.

Harvard spends more than $6 billion per year, drawing its revenue from philanthropy (45%), tuition, including executive education (21%), research grants (16%), and an “other” category (18%) that includes clinical fees and intellectual property.

Harvard spends very large sums on scientific research and depends on the federal government and wealthy donors for a majority of its budget. It’s largely an illusion that philanthropy provides financial aid. With an endowment of $2.1 million per student, Harvard could charge zero tuition for all. Instead–and, I think, understandably–it charges a high sticker price for those who are able to pay, offers steep discounts for others, and uses a large proportion of its net revenue for research.

The advantages are whatever benefits society obtains from the research. The vulnerability is the university’s dependence on national politicians and the donors who dominate its board of trustees. From an outsider’s perspective, another drawback is that the university rejects an extraordinary proportion of the people who might want to study or work there. Its exclusiveness makes it a rewarding political target.

Such universities also face internal conflicts when federal grants or endowment funds are threatened, because their funding models vary drastically within the institution. For example, the Harvard Divinity School is really financed by endowment returns, obtaining few grants and little tuition revenue. The much larger Harvard Medical School gets a majority of its funds from grants or clinical revenues and only 27% from endowment. The Law School relies on tuition for 43% of its revenue, as compared to 10% in the Medical School. If the trustees stop donating, the market falls, or the federal government suspends all grants, the repercussions will be very uneven. At Columbia, internal conflicts between STEM programs and the liberal arts contributed to its weak response to the Trump administration.

Of course, the Harvard model is not relevant across academia. Wesleyan, which has been courageously opposing the Trump Administration, received a total of $11 million in government and private grants in 2024, representing four percent of its revenues. Wesleyan does not generate the kind of labor- and capital-intensive research that Harvard produces, so it is much less vulnerable.

Most US college students attend public institutions that are not research-intensive or endowed, where tuition really dominates revenue. If Trump’s assault on higher education succeeds, it will cause massive damage on some campuses and have little effect on others.

Traditionally, one way that Americans have responded to crises is by creating new types of colleges–from Calvinist beacons in the 1600s, to Black institutions in Reconstruction, to the California public system after WWII (and many other examples). However, I have shown that the rate at which new institutions are launched has fallen to an all-time low. And, despite the prevalence of several different basic models, the degree of similarity across categories of universities is striking. Each research-intensive university operates largely like all the others.

Here is an alternative that we might consider today:

A new institution would be a cooperative owned and run by its employees, with considerable involvement by students.

The college would incorporate as a nonprofit but only accept donations into its general fund (no earmarks), and its governing board would be elected by its employees plus some student representatives. Employees and students could accept grants and contracts, but there would be no sponsored research office, so the college would be ineligible for most federal grants.

It would minimize costs. It would not provide housing or many services to students outside of the classroom. (As a result, it would be less appropriate for students who have various kinds of needs.) Faculty, staff, and students would do a lot of the management by rotating on committees.

The base tuition price might be set at $12,000, with a faculty/student ratio of 15:1, producing about $180,000 per instructor, which would be divided between instructors’ salaries, benefits, and additional staff (such as accountants, facilities workers, an IT department, etc.). Financial aid would, for the most part, consist of salaries for student workers who would provide essential support. So more financial aid would equal lower staff costs.

The location would have to be urban or suburban, because this would be a commuter school. It could be located in an underserved city, perhaps one of the cities that ring Appalachia. Or, for symbolic reasons–and because there are educational advantages to studying in Washington–it could take residence in the Nation’s Capital.

This design is meant to maximize autonomy and accessibility and serve as a refuge if the existing models succumb to political pressure.

affective partisanship and young people

Posted on April 16, 2025 by Peter

Affective partnership means disliking people who belong to a competing party. This attitude can be defensible in certain circumstances, but it certainly poses an obstacle to regular democratic processes.

To measure it, I use the American National Election Study’s “partisan thermometer” question, which asks people to rate members of the other party from 0-10.

The graph below shows the proportions of Democrats and Republicans who rate the other party at zero. These proportions have risen rapidly and basically symmetrically, although in 2020, Republicans were somewhat more hostile to Democrats than vice-versa. (Data from 2024 are not yet available.)

The bar graph with this post adds detail about young adults from the 2020 election. That year, young Democrats and Republicans were equally likely to rate each other at zero. Democrats’ levels of affective polarization did not change with age, but older Republicans were more polarized than younger ones. Indeed, a majority of Republicans over 60 rated Democrats at zero that year, and older Republicans accounted for the difference between the parties that is evident in the line graph.

In short, if affective polarization is a problem, it is not particularly a youth problem, which means that solutions cannot depend on civic education alone.

Reading Arendt in Palo Alto

Posted on April 14, 2025 by Peter

During a recent week at Stanford, I reread selections from Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution (ON) and The Human Condition (HC) to prepare for upcoming seminar sessions. My somewhat grim thoughts were evidently informed by the national news. I share them here without casting aspersions on my gracious Stanford hosts, who bear no responsibility for what I describe and are working on solutions.

I can imagine telling Arendt that Silicon Valley has become the capital of a certain kind of power, explaining how it reaches through Elon Musk to control the US government and the US military and through Musk and Mark Zuckerberg to dominate the global public sphere. I imagine showing her Sand Hill Road, the completely prosaic—although nicely landscaped—suburban highway where venture capitalists meet in undistinguished office parks to decide the flow of billions. This is Arendt’s nightmare.

For her, there should be a public domain in which diverse people convene for the “speech-making and decision-taking, the oratory and the business, the thinking and the persuading, and the actual doing” that constitutes politics (OR 24).

Politics enables a particular kind of equality: the equal standing to debate and influence collective decisions. Politics also enables a specific kind of freedom, because a person who decides with others what to do together is neither a boss nor a subordinate but a free actor.

Politics allows us to be–and to be recognized–as genuine individuals, having our own perspectives on topics that also matter to others (HC 41). And politics defeats death because it is where we concern ourselves with making a common world that can outlast us. “It is what we have in common not only with those who live with us, but also with those who were here before and with those who will come after us” (HC 55).

Politics excludes force against fellow citizens. “To be political, to live in a polis, meant that everything was decided through words and persuasion and not through force and violence” (HC 26). Speech is not persuasive unless the recipient is free to accept or reject it, and force destroys that freedom. By the same token, force prevents the one who uses it from being genuinely persuasive, which is a sign of rationality.

Musk’s DOGE efforts are clear examples of force. But I also think about when Zuckerberg decided to try to improve the schools of Newark, NJ. He had derived his vast wealth from developing a platform on which people live their private lives in the view of algorithms that nudge them to buy goods. He allocated some of this wealth to a reform project in Newark, discovered that people were ungrateful and that his plan didn’t work, and retreated in a huff because he didn’t receive the praise or impact that he expected to buy.

From Arendt’s perspective, each teenager in Newark was exactly Zuckerberg’s equal, worthy to look him in the eye and say what they they should do together. This would constitute what she calls “action.” However, Zuckerberg showed himself incapable of such equality and therefore devoid of genuine freedom.

Musk, Zuckerberg, and other tech billionaires understand themselves as deservedly powerful and receive adulation from millions. But, says Arendt, “The popular belief in ‘strong men’ … is either sheer superstition … or is a conscious despair of all action, political and non-political, coupled with the utopian hope that it may be possible to treat men as one treats other ‘material'” (HC 188).

There is no public space on Sand Hill Road. Palo Alto has a city hall, but it is not where Silicon Valley is governed. And the laborers “who with their bodies minister to the [bodily] needs of life” (Aristotle) are carefully hidden away (HC 72).

Arendt describes how economic activity has eclipsed politics in modern times. Descriptions of private life in the form of lyric poetry and novels have flourished–today, thousands of fine novels are available on the Kindle store–a development “coinciding with a no less striking decline of all the more public arts, especially architecture” (HC 39). In her day, corporations still built quite impressive urban headquarters, like Rockefeller Center, which continued the tradition of the Medici Palace or a Rothschild estate. But Sand Hill Road is a perfect example of wealth refusing to create anything of public value. Unless you are invited to a meeting there, you just drive by.

Arendt acknowledges that people need private property to afford political participation and to develop individual perspectives. We each need a dwelling and objects (such as, perhaps, books or mementos) that are protected from outsiders: “a tangible. worldly place of one’s own” (HC 70). But we do not need wealth. Arendt decries the “present emergence everywhere of actually or potentially very wealthy societies which at the same time are essentially propertyless, because the wealth of any single individual consists of his share in the annual income of society as a whole” (HC 61). For example, to own a great deal of stock is not to have property (the basis of individuality) but to be part of a mass society that renders your behavior statistically predictable, like a natural phenomenon (HC43). All those Teslas that cruise silently around Palo Alto are metaphors for wealth that is not truly private property.

Much of the wealth of Silicon Valley comes from digital media through which we live our private lives in the view of algorithms that assess us statistically and influence our behavior. For Arendt, “A life spent entirely in public, in the presence of others, becomes, as we would say, shallow” (HC 71). She is against socialist and communist efforts to expropriate property, but she also believes that privacy can be invaded by society in other ways (HC72). She expresses this concern vaguely, but nothing epitomizes it better than a corporate social media platform that becomes the space for ostensibly private life.

Artificial Intelligence represents the latest wave of innovation in Silicon Valley, producing software that appears to speak in the first-person singular but actually aggregates billions of people’s previous thought. Arendt’s words are eerie: “Without the accompaniment of speech .., action would not only lose its revelatory power, but, and by the same token, it would lose its subject; not acting men but performing robots would achieve what, humanly speaking, would be incomprehensible” (HC 178).

The result is a kind of death: “A life without speech and without action … is literally dead to the world; it has ceased to be a human life because it is no longer lived among men” (HC 176).

CIRCLE report: How Does Gen Z Really Feel about Democracy?

Posted on April 9, 2025 by Peter

My colleagues at CIRCLE have issued a report with Protect Democracy that is based on a nationally representative sample of citizens between 18 and 29 that they conducted soon after last fall’s election.* At the heart of the study is a categorization of young American citizens into three groups. In the words of the report, these groups are characterized by:

Passive Appreciation: The majority of youth (63%) value the basic values and practices of democracy, but they are relatively disengaged from civic action and may be passive in the face of current threats to democracy.

Dismissive Detachment: Nearly a third of young people express lower support for core democratic principles; they are “checked out” of a democracy that has not served them well or met their needs.

Hostile Dissatisfaction: A small (7%) but significant number of young people believe in the principles of our system of government, but are extremely dissatisfied with our democracy as it exists today, and they are willing to consider political violence in order to achieve change.

The first group is relatively likely to be conservative (or perhaps less likely to be on the left) and less likely to be queer. Members of this group not very involved with civic actions like volunteering and protesting.

Those who exhibit “dismissive detachment” tend to have less education and are more likely to be people of color. They “are less likely to value the basic principles of democracy such as free and fair elections, the protection of civil rights, and bipartisan cooperation.” They are more hostile to people who disagree with them and feel less efficacious in politics. They have the lowest media literacy and other civic skills.

People in the “hostile dissatisfaction” group are more likely to be on the left and more likely to be queer. “Youth with this profile do tend to value the principles and rights of our democracy, scoring slightly above average in those areas. But they have very low confidence in democracy as they are experiencing it today.” They express strongly negative views of people with the opposite political ideology, which could be labeled “affective polarization.” They are the most engaged in political action and also the most favorable to violence.

You can read the whole report here. It offers important insights for anyone who provides civic engagement and civic learning to young people in this moment.

*Apau, D., Suzuki, S., Medina, A., Booth, R.B. (March, 2025). How Does Gen Z Feel About
Democracy? Insights from Three profiles of Youth and Democracy. CIRCLE (Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement) & Protect Democracy.

Gen Z and rebuilding the federal workforce

Posted on April 3, 2025 by Peter

In The Nation, Sena Chang reports that young people who might have sought (or already had) federal jobs are looking elsewhere. That is bad for the government and for young adults, who will miss opportunities to develop skills and networks. Chang quotes University of Michigan Prof. Robin Jacob, who says, “I think it is quite likely that we will see a decline in youth participation and representation in the federal government and in government more generally over the next several years.”

That’s true, but I also want to look forward. Chang quotes me: “Levine believes that restoring the civil service may fall to the next generation. ‘At some point, the executive branch will have to be rebuilt with hundreds of thousands of new workers, many of whom will be young,’ he said. ‘Rebuilding the government is going to be the opportunity and the calling of Generation Z.’”

I know this is optimistic in the sense that it presumes a relatively good scenario–a successor to Trump who is a Democrat or a more conventional Republican and who wants to rebuild the civil service. That outcome is by no means guaranteed. But it is very possible. We must contemplate the relatively good scenarios as well as the worst ones.

Whatever he wants to accomplish, one thing that Trump achieves by talking about 2024 as the last time you’ll have to vote–or when he hints at running again in 2028–is to discourage opponents from planning for a recovery. If we apply frameworks of democratic decline or collapse, whether drawn from the 1930s or from recent examples around the world, we can convince ourselves that the end of democracy is inevitable. But Brownlee & Miao (2022) find that governments that have slid into authoritarianism fairly often move back to democracy. More generally, history is not inevitable; it depends on us.

A profound struggle over the nature of America is underway. That struggle is not over and is not lost. One ingredient of success is envisioning the consequences of victory. Gen Z has a particular role to play.

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