competing political science perspectives on Trump

Posted on November 6, 2025 by Peter

Political science is a heterogeneous discipline, and the various subfields are prone to interpret the Trump Administration and MAGA very differently.

Comparativists compare and contrast political systems around the world. This approach could yield various interpretations of MAGA, but an influential interpretation assigns Trump to the category of modern authoritarianism, which is on the rise (Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018). We learn that personalist, populist authoritarians in many countries have a toolkit that works for them. They don’t cancel elections or ban parties but manipulate the system from the executive branch, subject their critics to costly investigations, apply pressure to media conglomerates to influence journalism, etc. Not every current authoritarian has succeeded–consider South Korea and Brazil. But many have prevailed, and therefore comparativists tend to be alarmed about the situation in the USA.
Scholars of American political development think about this country historically, often looking not only at our government and politicians but also at culture and social movements (Smith & King 2024). They are likely to notice precedents and echoes from American history and observe that prominent current debates are about how to interpret the past. Trump may remind them less of Hungary’s Victor Orban than of segregationist politicians. They may focus less on Trump as an individual actor and more on persistent strands of nativism and white nationalism in the USA.
Political theorists are intellectually diverse, but most of us spend at least some of our time reading works from a wide variety of eras and perspectives that pose fundamental questions about government and politics. A disproportionate number of these classic works discuss revolutionary change, and some of them advocate it. Consider Plato and Aristotle, Hobbes and Rousseau, or Marx and the Nazi theorist Carl Schmitt, as examples. Even philosophers who oppose revolution are often primarily concerned about it. Therefore, political theorists are quick to imagine that our regime may be on the verge of breaking down. And we are prone to assign MAGA an ideological label, whether we name it populist, nationalist, neo-fascist, neoliberal, or something else.
Scholars of social movements may ask whether MAGA is a bottom-up movement, but mainly they study anti-Trump movements, asking whether they will prevail and what may increase their odds of success. For example, Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan (2011) noticed that every nonviolent social movements that has mobilized at least 3.5% of its nation’s population has succeeded in modern times. Chenoweth recently discussed the “3.5% rule” with Paul Krugman, giving a nuanced answer to the question whether an anti-Trump movement will defeat the current administration if it can activate 3.5% of the US population. Note that in this framework, the main path of social change is not via elections but on the streets.
Scholars of American government and political behavior use empirical tools of social science (analysis of voting records, surveys, and interviews or focus groups) to identify trends and patterns in US politics. They are likely to view Donald Trump as a lame-duck second-term president with approval ratings in the low 40s (and falling just lately). They see regular patterns playing out, such as the tendency for the electorate to move in the opposite ideological direction from the incumbent president. Most trends suggest that Democrats will win in 2026 and probably 2028. This framework predicts that Republicans will become burdened by an unpopular, term-limited Republican president and will begin to distance themselves from him. More basically, it assumes that elections will unfold as normal, that we will have two parties, that both will compete for the median voter, that the main vehicle for public opposition is an election, etc.

In my own writing and extracurricular work, I have been trying to support social movements against authoritarianism. Lately, I have been offering trainings–most recently at the excellent Dayton (OH) Democracy Summit — on how to resist authoritarianism from the bottom up. Here is a video of my standard talk.

Thus, I am applying the comparativists’ framework plus social movement scholarship. However, I am not completely committed to this combination. It is plausible that scholars of American government are right, and the usual patterns of US politics will reassert themselves. I am using a precautionary principle: taking preventive action in case of a disastrous outcome.

Predicting the next three years is difficult because we don’t know two crucial variables.

One variable is the performance of the economy in the next months. So far, it is holding up pretty well considering all the stress. The main indicators are not really very different from last year. Voters are unhappy but not facing an economic meltdown.

The economy could improve, boosting Donald Trump. (The Supreme Court may help by striking down the tariffs). The economy could keep puttering along. Or it could tip into a significant recession. If that happens, scholars of American political behavior would predict a realignment in favor of Democrats, and comparativists might expect Trump to attempt drastic action to save himself.

The other unknown variable is the behavior of Trump and his inner circle. They have crossed many bright lines: choosing political opponents for investigations, pardoning rioters, deploying troops in selected cities, and shuttering whole departments that are authorized and funded by statute. But they could do a lot more, such as invoking the Insurrection Act, deploying ICE against peaceful protesters, or suspending elections.

Comparativists tell us that subtler methods of authoritarian control work better in the 21st century. Using drastic methods would indicate weakness. Nevertheless, heightened drama could end with victory or defeat for Trump. The regime might succeed in suppressing opposition, or it might provoke a much larger popular response that succeeds. A common pattern is: protest –> state violence –> protests that mourn and celebrate the victims –> state violence against the mourners –> larger protests –> victory for the grassroots movement.

Finally, Trump has some personal characteristics that make him hard to classify. One is that he seems to care almost entirely about his own welfare. All other modern American presidents have wanted to enact legislation. That is the main way to change society durably. A president can only sign a bill after both houses of Congress have passed it. Therefore, all modern presidents have cared deeply who prevails in Congress.

But Trump does not seem to care about legislation. He signed nothing significant during his first term except budgetary changes. The Republicans loaded a lot of provisions into the “Big Beautiful Bill” that Trump signed on July 4, but even most of those were budgetary.

Meanwhile, Trump has radically–but perhaps not durably–changed government through unilateral executive action. Looking forward, he may not care very much whether Democrats win in 2026. He can ignore subpoenas, avoid removal by holding at least 34 votes in the Senate, and continue to govern unilaterally from the White House.

On one hand, this means that he is less likely to take drastic steps to prevent an electoral defeat in 2026. I think he has always expected to face a Democratic Congress in 2027 and 2028. He won’t pass any laws, and he may have difficulty appointing judges, but that won’t matter much to him. On the other hand, it means that no one in Congress–including congressional Republicans–will have much leverage over him. We may not see the usual pattern of the president’s party trying to constrain him to save themselves.

I think that Trump and many around him are incurring legal liability. Increasingly, as his term ends, we may see them primarily concerned about avoiding prosecution in 2029 and thereafter. Similar concerns could begin to influence private organizations that could be charged with bribery for assisting Trump. This phenomenon is common around the world–hence very familiar to comparativists. It raises questions about whether Trump will try to suppress elections just to avoid legal repercussions (although he could use preemptive pardons instead), and whether it will be necessary to negotiate an amnesty of some kind.

See also Trump: personalist leader or representative of a right-wing movement?; Trump, Modi, Erdogan; why political science dismissed Trump and political theory predicted him, revisited. Sources: Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (Crown 2018); Smith, Rogers M., and Desmond King. America’s new racial battle lines: Protect versus repair. University of Chicago Press, 2024 Chenoweth, Erica, and Maria J. Stephan. Why civil resistance works: The strategic logic of nonviolent conflict. Columbia University Press, 2011.

Trump, Modi, Erdogan

Posted on October 13, 2025 by Peter

I am flying back to the USA after a meeting in Istanbul with activists and NGO leaders from six or more countries. (By the way, I don’t think that all of them could have met in the USA because of our government’s visa policies and treatment of visitors.)

One of the many benefits of the meeting was to challenge a framework that I have been using which treats leaders like Donald Trump, Narendra Modi, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan as examples of the same phenomenon. These men are both similar and different, and it’s important to keep the differences in mind.

All three (it seems to me) are national narcissists, meaning that they believe their own country is the best yet disrespected (Cislak & Cichocka 2023). All espouse a form of populism: the idea that they enjoy the united support of the true nation, whereas opponents and critics are enemies of the people. All identify a favored ethnic and/or religious majority as the authentic country and its rightful rulers.

All favor aggressive state economic interventions while favoring allied businesses and industries (and making money from these alliances). All prefer splashy infrastructure projects to providing consistently decent public services. To be generous, we could say that they each “see like a state” (Scott 1998). And they all use a similar toolkit. They don’t cancel elections or openly suspend (most) constitutional rights but rather prosecute opponents and use economic pressure against the producers of speech: publishers and universities (Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018).

As for the differences:

Modi represents a century-old effort to establish Hindu supremacy in India. Islamophobia is central to this project (Bhatia 2024). It already inspires regular violence, and it has the potential to spark vast destruction. Modi’s party and government are disciplined. Their agenda is not only social control or personal profit but also redefining a nation in a way that would exclude 200 million of its citizens.

Erdogan, I think, began by opening Turkish politics and civil society to groups and perspectives that deserved representation, including but not limited to observant Muslims. He made appropriate reforms. He is the kind of leader who should have retired a decade ago, in which case he could now travel the international circuit as an elder statesman with some genuine contributions to his name. Alas, he crossed many bright lines by jailing opponents and crushing opposition, perhaps in part because he sincerely believes that he is indispensable. But his managerial record is now quite poor.

Trump represents political views that he did not invent. He espouses familiar forms of xenophobia, chauvinism, and aggrieved nationalism. But I interpret Trump as more transactional than his counterparts in Turkey and India. For many voters, he offers a deal: better economic outcomes in return for legal impunity, the ability to settle scores, praise and monuments, and lots of sheer cash.

Since Trump’s relationships are always self-interested, they are also relatively fragile. I think an economic downturn would break his implicit contract with voters, lowering his approval by 10 points, and that would make him an increasingly problematic ally for Republican politicians. I can see him being discarded (not necessarily impeached, but rendered a lame duck) in a way that I cannot quite see for the regimes represented by Modi or Erdogan.

Sources: Cislak, A., & Cichocka, A. (2023). National narcissism in politics and public understanding of science. Nature Reviews Psychology, 2(12), 740-750; James C . Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (Yale, 1998) Stevnb Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (Crown 2018), and Rahul Bhatia,, The New India (Abacus, 2025)

the rule of law and the Trump Administration versus higher education

Posted on October 3, 2025 by Peter

On Wednesday, according to The New York Times, the Trump Administration sent letters to nine universities offering them financial benefits and relief from investigations if they agree (among other things) to “freeze tuition for five years,” provide “free tuition to students studying math, biology, or other ‘hard sciences’ if endowments exceed $2 million per undergraduate,” “cap the enrollment of international students,” “commit to strict definitions of gender,” and “change their governance structures to prohibit anything that would ‘punish, belittle and even spark violence against conservative ideas.'”

I have not seen the letter itself, but it refers to a “compact” document that the universities are asked to sign, and that is here. It includes, among other things, a provision that “all university employees, in their capacity as university representatives, will abstain from actions or speech relating to societal and political events except in cases in which external events have a direct impact upon the university.” (Does that mean I may not publish an article about Ukraine and identify myself as a Tufts professor?) Erwin Chemerinsky says, “It would be hard to come up with a more explicit attempt to restrict freedom of speech.”

Failure to sign evidently means risking federal support, or at least facing investigations and litigation. “This Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education represents the priorities of the U.S. government in its engagements with universities …. Institutions of higher education are free to develop models and values other than those below, if the institution elects to forego federal benefits.”

Trump won the election, and elections have consequences. The Administration may write regulations governing higher education. So why doesn’t the Department of Education publish this “compact” as a regulation applying to all universities? One rule would then apply to all, and it would be transparent and predictable.

A rule would also be subject to judicial review, and colleges and higher ed. associations would have incentives to sue, arguing that the regulations exceed the statutory authorization of the Department of Education, violate the First Amendment, or both. Some or all of the regulations might survive judicial review. In any case, everyone would know the results and would have to comply with the courts’ rulings. Because the rules would apply to the entire sector of higher education in all 50 states, there might be considerable backlash from voters.

All of this–publicity, consistency, predictability, judicial review, and review by voters–constitutes the rule of law. These letters violate it.

Some institutions may willingly take the deal, and others may decide to settle even if they believe that it undermines their rights because it is cheaper to negotiate than to fight back. Already, the chair of the University of Texas Board of Regents has said that UT is “honored” to have been “named as one of only nine institutions in the U.S. selected by the Trump administration for potential funding advantages.”

The result will be a de facto policy, applied one institution at a time, with no judicial review. Colleges may accept deals that trade away their Constitutional rights. Possibly, students and faculty will have standing to sue their own institutions (as Jimmy Kimmel could have sued ABC), but it will be hard for third parties to challenge these “voluntary” agreements. And institutions that the Administration decides not to target will be left alone, thus reducing any backlash.

It is very important that students, faculty, and alumni of these communities advocate for their institutions not to sign the compact: University of Arizona, Brown, Dartmouth, MIT, the University of Pennsylvania, USC, the University of Texas, Vanderbilt University, and UVa.

AAUP v Rubio

Posted on October 1, 2025 by Peter

On March 25, Tufts student Rümeysa Öztürk was abducted by masked ICE agents because she had co-authored a clearly legal op-ed in our campus newspaper, not directly about Israel but about how the university had responded to our student government. According to Andre Watson, the Assistant Director of the National Security Division of ICE, this op-ed could “undermine U.S. foreign policy by creating a hostile environment for Jewish students and indicating support for a designated terrorist organization.”

After an unconscionably long period of detainment in inhumane circumstances, Rümeysa was ordered released. Subsequently, the American Association of University Professors and the Middle Eastern Studies Association sued Donald Trump and members of his administration, seeking an injunction against the policy that had ensnared Rümeysa and other defendants.

Yesterday, federal District Court judge William G. Young, an appointee of Ronald Reagan, issued a 161-page decision in favor of the plaintiffs that is a blistering denunciation of the Administration. It makes quite a read.

It starts with the image that I reproduce above. (I have never seen a judicial decision with a front-page illustration.)

The judge’s main finding comes early:

Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and the Secretary of State Marco Rubio, together with the subordinate officials and agents of each of them, deliberately and with purposeful aforethought, did so concert their actions and those of their two departments intentionally to chill the rights to freedom of speech and peacefully to assemble of the non-citizen plaintiff members of the plaintiff associations (pp. 4-5).

Judge Young does not mince words in the many pages that follow. For example, “the facts prove that the President himself approves truly scandalous and unconstitutional suppression of free speech on the part of two of his senior cabinet secretaries” (p. 96).

After considering the arguments in favor of masking ICE agents, the court “rejects this testimony as disingenuous, squalid and dishonorable” (p. 98).

The judge explains:

It was never the Secretaries’ immediate intention to deport all pro- Palestinian non-citizens[.] for that obvious First Amendment violation … could have raised a major outcry. Rather, the intent of the Secretaries was more invidious — to target a few for speaking out and then use the full rigor of the Immigration and Nationality Act (in ways it had never been used before) to have them publicly deported with the goal of tamping down pro-Palestinian student protests and terrorizing similarly situated non-citizen (and other) pro-Palestinians into silence because their views were unwelcome.

The Secretaries have succeeded, apparently well beyond their immediate intentions” (p. 95).

I have been saying that we in academia should enhance ideological pluralism because it’s the right thing to do. It makes our thinking and teaching more rigorous. However, the Trump’s Administration’s attacks on higher education have nothing to do with that goal, except that intellectual diversity is occasionally and inconsistently used as a pretext. The Administration is trying to crush pluralism by applying a set of tools popular among modern authoritarians of the left, center, and right. The Administration’s policies make it considerably more difficult to promote reasonable dialogue across ideological differences on campuses. But more importantly, the government is “terrorizing” vulnerable people into silence.

Near the end of the decision, Judge Young quotes the president who appointed him, Ronald Reagan: “Freedom is a fragile thing and it’s never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by way of inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a people.” The judge concludes:

As I’ve read and re-read the record in this case, listened widely, and reflected extensively, I’ve come to believe that President Trump truly understands and appreciates the full import of President Reagan’s inspiring message –- yet I fear he has drawn from it a darker, more cynical message. I fear President Trump believes the American people are so divided that today they will not stand up, fight for, and defend our most precious constitutional values so long as they are lulled into thinking their own personal interests are not affected.

Is he correct?

national narcissism

Posted on September 24, 2025 by Peter

At the United Nations yesterday, our president told the assembled leaders, “Your countries are going to hell.” The Trump Administration extolls the unique excellence of the United States. An early executive order (14190, Jan 29, 2025) called on schools “to instill a patriotic admiration for our incredible Nation.” But the same movement also paints a picture of decline in the face of overseas rivals and traitors within.

Aleksandra Cislak and Aleksandra Cichocka (2023) provide a review of research on “national narcissism.” This phrase does not mean a secure affection for one’s nation or a commitment to enhancing it. Rather, it is a belief that the nation with which one identifies is “exceptional and deserving of privileged treatment but underappreciated by others.” It “reflects a demand for recognition, privileges and special treatment … and predicts aggression and hostility when these are not provided to the nation.”

At the individual level, indicators of national narcissism are correlated with higher support for “populist” politicians (using that adjective in a pejorative sense) and lower support for democracy (Cislak & Cichocka 2023).

In the 2016 election, national narcissism predicted voting for and approving of Donald Trump even when many other variables were controlled (Federico & Golec de Zavala 2018).

I submit that Donald Trump himself would score high on the group narcissism scale, answering questions like these positively:

“I wish other countries would more quickly recognize the authority of my country”
“My country deserves special treatment”
“I will never be satisfied until my country gets all it deserves”
“Other countries are envious of my country”

And 19 more (Golec de Zavala et al. 2025)

I do not know how many other Americans share these views. Some people certainly voted for Trump without being national narcissists. I also do not know whether national narcissism has risen in the United States. It is not a new phenomenon. However, I would guess that it has risen lately in response to anxieties about the US role in the world.

After all, the United States spent most of this century so far fighting two wars and essentially lost both. Typically, foreign policy issues do not register in national surveys as reasons for voters’ preferences. My suggestion is subtler and more difficult to document. Two long and costly military disasters discredited elites, worsened polarization as communities bore disparate burdens, and provoked deep self-doubt and resentment in a country that had seen itself as enormously powerful. At any rate, it is difficult to imagine that twin defeats at this scale would not affect the mood of an electorate; and one outcome could be national narcissism.

Sources: Cislak, A., & Cichocka, A. (2023). National narcissism in politics and public understanding of science. Nature Reviews Psychology, 2(12), 740-750; Christopher M Federico, Agnieszka Golec de Zavala, Collective Narcissism and the 2016 US Presidential Vote, Public Opinion Quarterly, Volume 82, Issue 1, Spring 2018, Pages 110–121; de Zavala, Agnieszka Golec, et al. “Collective Narcissism and its Social Consequences.” Journal of personality and social psychology 97.6 (2009): 1074-96. ProQuest. Web. 24 Sept. 2025.

a checklist for democracy activists

Posted on September 5, 2025 by Peter

Many Americans are working to defend democracy, but we need even more. People with diverse agendas and various diagnoses of our current problems must take action right now. There are several legitimate theories of our crisis. We need people to address whatever aspects resonate most with them, coming from their diverse backgrounds and viewpoints.

I think these (below) are our most important tasks. And I believe that if many people do them, our disagreements about diagnoses and strategies will not matter very much, because a stronger civil society will preserve democracy:

One-to-one interviews: Fanning out in a community and asking people what they care about, looking for individuals who have various kinds of leadership potential and networks, and bringing them together in meetings. Use a guide like this one.

Local news: Collecting information that would otherwise go unreported because of the collapse of local journalism, and sharing it. Local news is highly relevant to national events, because everything from budget cuts to ICE raids plays out in locations.

Caring for affected people: Raising money, serving food, driving people where they need to go, taking care of their children and pets, helping them find work.

Advocacy in local institutions: We need concerned citizens to meet with their school superintendent to ask how undocumented children are being protected, their local college president to ask about free speech, and their local TV station to ask about biased news coverage. Some of this advocacy can be friendly and low-key. Sometimes, local leaders just need our quiet support. But some issues may have to escalate to public conflict.

Registering and turning out voters: It is fine to do this in a partisan way: party activism is an important aspect of democracy. It is also possible to register and motivate voters in a genuinely nonpartisan way to expand the electorate and protect everyone’s right to vote as they wish.

Recruiting and supporting candidates: This is important at all levels, from school boards to 2028 presidential candidates.

Nonviolent resistance: Civil disobedience is a spectrum, from easy and safe actions to very courageous ones. The method of banging on pots in big cities has spread globally in the last decade and has now reached Washington, DC. It is an example of a relatively safe action. Standing in the way of armed government agents is much more dangerous. Effective nonviolent movements offer and celebrate a wide range of actions.

I did not list protests on this table. They can be valuable, but I want to suggest that they are more means than ends. For example, a march can be a powerful way of publicizing that there is a resistance and collecting the contact-information of people who might do the other tasks. I often think that the most important people at a rally are not the speakers on the podium but the folks at the back of the crowd with clipboards.

These are not tasks for individuals to do alone. None of us can accomplish much by ourselves; we can’t even think wisely unless we discuss what to do with others. Therefore, the tasks listed above require organizations, and there is an equally important agenda for building and sustaining groups:

Recruitment: Individuals must be invited into organizations and made to feel welcome, notwithstanding their previous experience and views, and encouraged to commit to the group. (This is where protests belong on the checklist.)

Logistics: A group can’t get anything done unless someone finds a space, buys the pizzas, arranges childcare, and does all the other scutwork. Some of this requires skill and experience; all of it requires effort. By the way, the people who contribute in this way must be recognized and thanked.

Decision-making: Groups must make decisions efficiently, yet without ignoring dissenters who have genuine disagreements. Effective groups treat meeting time as a scarce resource and use it economically. They know what they are doing at any given moment during a meeting. (Are we venting? Brainstorming? Advising someone? Choosing between two courses of action?) I recommend distinguishing between contested values and merely practical questions and reserving discussion time for the value-conflicts that need resolution. I would delegate practical issues to volunteers to decide. It is also crucial to record all decisions so that it’s clear what the group has committed to do.

Leadership-development: Groups need leaders. Even the most non-hierarchical groups actually have leaders, although those people may not have titles or official powers. Leaders should be recognized and thanked. They should have opportunities to grow. They should also be held accountable and, if necessary, removed.

Raising and holding money: The typical anti-Trump resistance group raises money, but not for itself. Members pass the hat (metaphorically), and their funds go to political candidates or name-brand national nonprofits. This is unsustainable. In the first month of the first Trump Administration, 350,000 people donated to the ACLU, disproportionately funding one organization that had one strategy. Then the money tapered off. Groups need their own bank accounts and budgets, reserving some funds for their own continuous fundraising.

Hiring: We need more people whose jobs involve organizing for democracy, and we need pathways for those who want to do this work. Organizers can be young, part-time, and (frankly) underpaid, but they need salaries.

Scaling up: Once there are three resistance groups in a given county, there should be an umbrella group for the county. This should not just be forum where like-minded people share news; it should make decisions. That implies a leadership structure at the county level–and then upward from there.

Coalition work: There should be many flavors of organizations, and they should coordinate. I completely respect the big emerging networks, such as Indivisible and #50501, but they need company, and not everyone will want to join any given network. Groups have various identities and agendas. To work in coalition is not only to express mutual support or to agree on general principles. (In fact, it’s fine if different groups disagree on principles.) A coalition can coordinate concrete actions at key moments. That requires empowering selected representatives from the various member organizations to meet and make decisions.

See also: “democracy’s crisis: a system map (a longer and revised version of which is forthcoming in Studies in Law, Politics, and Society); the current state of resistance, and what to do about it; tools people need to preserve and strengthen democracy; and a flowchart for collective decision-making in democratic small groups.

holding two ideas at once: the attack on universities is authoritarian, and viewpoint diversity is important

Posted on August 26, 2025 by Peter

Two points are valid, in my opinion, and we should address both:

First, the Trump Administration is using almost every available tool, including unconstitutional methods, to harm universities and to interfere in their internal affairs. At my university, they literally abducted a beloved graduate student because she had written a completely appropriate op-ed in our student newspaper, thus suppressing speech on our campus.

The Administration receives support from people who think that higher education has been intolerantly leftist (or biased against Israel). Trump and his close associates may believe those complaints. However, their campaign against higher education is top-down and self-interested and closely resembles that of other “personalist” authoritarian regimes around the world today, which range across the ideological spectrum:

“Under the [right-wing] authoritarian leadership of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, the government has started a culture war to dismantle the independence of academic institutions.”
“As Modi’s [Hindu nationalist] BJP tightens its grip, India’s universities become political battlegrounds where academic independence is sacrificed to ideological loyalty.”
In Venezuela, “The main public universities, in particular, have paid a heavy price as a consequence of their defense of democratic values and academic freedom, as they have been defunded by the government” (which is left-wing).
“Much of the structure of Turkish higher education” is being dismantled “through purges, restrictions, and assertions of central control, a process begun earlier this year and accelerating now with alarming speed.”

Both here and in other countries, attacks on universities are coordinated with attacks on broadcast media, foundations, law firms, civil servants, judges, and, often, the legislative branch.

In its battles with US higher education, the Administration has some grassroots support. In July, Gallup found that 41% of people had little or no confidence in higher education, and of those, 32% said it was “’too liberal,’ trying to ‘indoctrinate’ or ‘brainwash’ students, or not allowing students to think for themselves as reasons for their opinions.” That group represents 13% of the whole sample: enough to generate a flood of social media, but a minority of the population. The Administration’s agenda is mostly self-interested rather than populist.

Thus I disagree with people like Greg Lukianoff, the president of FIRE (now the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression), who believe that American universities courted trouble by being intolerant of conservatives. He says, “If they’d listened to us 15 years ago, none of this would be happening.”

I welcome FIRE’s current work against the Trump Administration, but I believe that Trump would have gone after higher education in exactly the same way if universities had attracted more prominent conservative faculty and speakers or had avoided issuing statements about current events. Right-wing media would still have found plenty of anecdotes about liberal bias, and 13% of Americans would still have denounced higher education from the right. The administration needed a pretext–not a fair assessment–to squash higher education as an autonomous sector.

Second, I believe that one of our most important tasks–as humans, and specifically as people who study or work in universities–is to inquire into what is right. This process (call it “normative analysis”) is comparative or dialectical; it’s about juxtaposing alternative values and competing arguments and reasoning about which is better. Furthermore, John Stuart Mill was correct; you can’t just read and discuss alternative arguments to feel their force. You must talk to peers who sincerely hold them.

I think that swaths of US higher education are too ideologically homogeneous to support this kind of reasoning well. In the liberal arts and some of the professions, the dominant ideology is left (although not Marxist, because real Marxism is marginal). In business schools, economics departments, and business-oriented engineering programs, I think the bias is center-right and biased toward technology.

I do not object to the characterization that the whole of higher education is too homogeneously center-left. For instance, at my university, less than one percent of faculty political donations went to Republican candidates or organizations in 2018. At the same time, the name “Marx” is mentioned in just four Tufts course descriptions this semester, half of which are in Art History; none in the social sciences. In short, the ideological range is constrained on both sides, not to mention that academic culture tends to be secular, meritocratic, cosmopolitan, civilian, Anglophone. and technocratic.

Excessive homogeneity can lead to clichés, “motivated reasoning” (selecting evidence to favor a preferred conclusion) and weak argumentation. It can fail to prepare people to engage the broader society.

Meanwhile, few faculty are trained and empowered to address questions of value in academically rigorous ways.

Normative analysis is the focus of a subfield in political science, political theory, which had about 75 job openings in the USA in 2022-3 (5.75% of all political science jobs). That year, there were also about 450 job openings in the USA for philosophers involved with value-theory (broadly defined). Put together, those searches constituted about one open job dedicated to teaching normative inquiry for every ten institutions of higher education in the United States.

Normative analysis is (and should be) conducted in other disciplines as well. Yet it is generally countercultural across higher education and in contemporary society.

Some right-wingers denounce discussions of “divisive concepts.” I have personally observed left-wingers who are genuinely intolerant of conservative (or classical liberal, or religious) arguments. And many administrators, professors and students are positivists. They believe that facts and values are strictly distinct; that values are matters of opinion; and that scholarship should be about facts. It is particularly difficult to have a serious discussion about values in a community where people share key political values and yet deny that values are relevant, claiming that research and teaching are only about facts.

In sum: we should expand philosophical or ideological heterogeneity on college campuses, which means extending our ideological range to the right but also in other directions. We should do so because it is good for us, not because the Trump Administration claims to want this outcome. Trump’s people simply want to squelch autonomous civil society. A powerful civil society is confidently pluralistic and willing to debate normative questions from many angles. Getting there requires internal work, even as we battle our national government for freedom.

learning from the Great Salt March: on civil disobedience and breaking through to mass opinion

Posted on August 15, 2025 by Peter

Erica Chenoweth, Soha Hammam, Jeremy Pressman, and Christopher Wiley Shay estimate that the No Kings protests this June were among the largest in American history, and the number of protests is growing faster than in 2017 (see the graph above).

Protesting has several purposes, including advertising a movement and recruiting people to take other actions. But protests can also influence people to change their views or behavior. For example, they can convert people who disagree or motivate people who are passive (Bayard Rustin 1965).

Inevitably, the vast majority of any protest’s audience does not observe it directly. People see it through media of various kinds. That was even true during the French Revolution (Jones 2021), and more so in an era of mass communications. It is critical whether and how media organizations (and nowadays, social media users) describe protests (Wasow, 2020).

For those protesting against Trump, two current challenges are: 1) neglect and 2) backlash. Some prominent voices in the media seem not to notice that protests are happening, which may reduce their impact. And many powerful media outlets misrepresent protesters. For example, right-wing media obsessively presented Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests as violent, when data show that they were not, and this contributed to a very tangible backlash. BLM demanded reductions in police budgets, but the presence of BLM protests was associated with increases in police budgets (Ebbinghaus, Bailey & Rubel 2024).

The power of media can be discouraging, especially given the splintered and ideologically polarized media landscape and the prevalence of media outlets that are outright hostile to resistance.

However, protest events can break through if they are skillfully designed (and perhaps a bit lucky).

Consider the apex moment of Gandhi’s career as a protest leader, the Great Salt March of 1930.

Before he launched the March, the Indian independence movement was struggling, and Gandhi was struggling against rivals who included religious sectarians, Marxists, and violent revolutionaries. The media that mattered to him (Indian and foreign) was polarized by ideology, language, and ethnicity and was widely hostile to him.

Gandhi chose to march to the sea to harvest salt because that action would dramatize the evils of imperialism, provoke police action, acknowledge the needs of poor Indians for whom salt was expensive, and turn salt itself into a powerful symbol.

When Gandhi set off on foot with a rather small group, press reports were dismissive and patronizing. The Statesman newspaper of Calcutta called the march “a childishly futile business,” and the Times of India defended the government’s salt monopoly as good for the poor. In the USA, TIME Magazine mocked Gandhi’s “spindly frame” and called his wife Kasturba, “a shriveled, little middle-aged Hindu.” (I quote these and the following snippets from Guha 2018.)

But the scale of the march and the brutality of the police response at the shore broke through. TIME switched to describing Gandhi as a statesman and even as “St. Gandhi,” whose “movement for independence” uses “Christian acts as a weapon against men with Christian beliefs.” Perhaps not all the world’s coverage was favorable, but most of the media switched from viewing Gandhi as a bit of a joke to taking him very seriously indeed. He was back at the head of the Independence movement, which now had momentum.

I am not saying that we need a new Gandhi. Centralized leadership is overrated (even in the Indian independence movement). The way to achieve a breakthrough today is to try many tactics in a decentralized way until one or more of them work. But all of us can learn from the Great Salt March, particularly:

Innovation: We always need new forms of civil disobedience. Harvesting salt illegally on a public beach was an innovation in 1930. Protesting at Tesla showrooms was an innovation in 2025. What’s next? (Right now, I am wondering about a march of many religious congregations from the National Cathedral toward Lafayette Square.)
Grassroots support: Gandhi would have lost humiliatingly except that thousands of people joined him on his march. The cost of salt resonated with poor Indians (as did his leadership, of course). The question is not which issue is most important, but what gets many people involved.
A focus on the audience. It is always hard for social movements to think rigorously about how outsiders will receive their messages, because they disagree with the outsiders! Activists are not obliged to change their goals to cater to public opinion, but they must consider perceptions. What will “Normies” think about our protest? That may sometimes be an annoying question, yet victory depends on answering it well.

See also: the state of nonviolent grassroots resistance; features of effective boycotts; how to engage our universities in this crisis etc. Sources: Bayard Rustin, “From Protest to Politics: The Future of the Civil Rights Movement” Commentary (February, 1965); Colin Jones, The Fall of Robespierre: 24 Hours in Revolutionary Paris (Oxford University Press, 2021); Omar Wasow, “Agenda seeding: How 1960s black protests moved elites, public opinion and voting,” American Political Science Review 114.3 (2020): 638-659; Mathis Ebbinghaus, Nathan Bailey & Jacob Rubel, “The Effect of the 2020 Black Lives Matter Protests on Police Budgets: How ‘Defund the Police’ Sparked Political Backlash, “ Social Problems, 2024, spae004, https://doi.org/10.1093/socpro/spae004; Ramachandra Guha, Gandhi: The years that changed the world, 1914-1948 (Vintage, 2018).

Trump: personalist leader or representative of a right-wing movement?

Posted on August 6, 2025 by Peter

Here are two frameworks for analyzing Trump and MAGA. Although elements of both could be true, they are not fully compatible. More importantly, they suggest quite different responses.

MAGA is an ethnonationalist right-wing movement with considerable popular support (although less than a solid majority), a base of local organizations, and deep roots in American history (Smith 1999). Donald Trump is the current national leader of this movement, but it will outlast him. The movement uses many conventional methods, such as winning elections and passing legislation through the legislature. It also plays hardball and violates rules and norms, but that is not a definitive trait. In fact, the center-left has also used similar behavior at times. Ethnonationalist right-wing movements are common around the world today. Some are led by charismatic figures, but that is not especially true of AfD in Germany, for instance. Their common characteristic is their ideology.
Trump is a personalist or patrimonialist leader. Today’s personalists around the world include right-wing, left-wing, and technocratic leaders, and many are ideologically flexible. In essence, they are charismatic leaders whose followers owe their power to the leader and who trample rival power centers in the civil service, other branches and levels of government, the media, and civil society (Frantz et al.). In personalist parties, the grassroots is almost entirely passive; power is centralized. Insofar as today’s personalists share a philosophy, it is populist-authoritarianism, or perhaps Bonapartism–identifying the authentic people with a single “strong” leader.

If you apply the ideological framework, then your response to Trump will vary depending on your ideology. If you’re on the left, you’ll want to build a more popular and effective progressive alternative. You may welcome defectors from the right, but you will be suspicious of them if they remain conservative. If you’re conservative but not MAGA, you may see some value in some of Trump’s positions and suspect that liberal elites are biased against him. If your main concern is polarization, then you may recommend cross-partisan dialogue and favor a centrist response.

On the other hand, if you apply the personalist framework, then you may be attracted to the solution that seems to work in other countries–a broad-based coalition in defense of constitutional limits and against the charismatic leader. This coalition should have a modest economic and social agenda and focus instead on challenging the authoritarian leader.

I suppose my own view is that Trump is a personalist authoritarian who taps into a robust right-wing ethnonationalist movement, just as other personalists use locally popular ideologies (Hindtuva, Chavismo) in their respective countries. This means that I would endorse strategies that challenge Trump as a personalist as well as ideological opposition from the left and center-left. However, I am not sure the same people and organizations can do both at the same time.

See also: democracy’s crisis: a system map (a revised version to appear in Studies in Law, Politics and Society); what is the basis of a political judgment?. Citations: Smith, Rogers M. Civic ideals: Conflicting visions of citizenship in US history. Yale University Press, 1997; Frantz, E., Kendall-Taylor, A., Wright, “Why Trump’s control of the Republican Party is bad for democracy,” The Conversation, Jan 30, 2024.

what a Democrat could do with Trump’s power

Posted on July 24, 2025 by Peter

In the Atlantic, Paul Rosenzweig asks what a Democratic president could do with the unilateral executive powers that the Supreme Court seems willing to grant Trump–assuming that the “Court acts in good faith—that its views on presidential power are without partisan favor, and that it doesn’t arbitrarily invent carve-outs to rein in a Democratic president.”

As Rosenzweig notes, a Democrat would want to rebuild or build things, whereas Trump’s new powers mostly involve canceling or blocking things. Therefore, a Democrat would have a harder job than Trump has. Rosenzweig also notes that it will be a challenge to fill vacant positions that are authorized by statute. “Firing experts is much easier than hiring them. And given the uncertainties that Trump has created, our best and brightest might not willingly take positions in the federal government. Who wants a job that might last only four years?”

I would add that any president must refrain from crossing certain ethical lines, regardless of what the courts may rule. For example, selecting individuals to be prosecuted violates the rule of law; the government should only investigate alleged crimes, not choose people as targets for legal action. No politician should decide ex ante to prosecute Elon Musk or Steven Miller or any other individual.

But I think Rosenzweig somewhat underestimates the opportunities for the next administration. Here are four:

Rebuilding the civil service

Hiring federal workers will be a challenge, but a worthy one. Yes, the Trump cuts have unjustly ended careers and caused massive damage. At the same time, the federal civil service has long suffered from a severe problem of generational replacement, hiring far too few young people. This is one reason that some federal agencies and offices have been sclerotic and ineffective. To attract young and talented people into federal service will require leadership. We should expect that from our next president. The result could be a better executive branch.

(Yes, federal jobs are less secure, now that the president seems to have the right to lay off civil servants; but government positions are at least as secure as jobs in the private sector.)

Restoring accountability

Although the rule of law does not permit selecting individuals for prosecution, it requires accountability. The difference lies in process. The next administration could create commissions, offices, and/or tribunals that investigate corruption and illegality without fear or favor. Individuals and organizations that allege that they were abused by the Biden Administration or its predecessors could come forward, not just those with complaints against Trump and his people. The White House would have no say in the decisions.

It would be worth considering a Truth and Reconciliation model.
In addition to investigating crimes, the administration could investigate federal employees and contractors and terminate those who crossed ethical lines–with due process. Companies that gave things of value to Trump would also be at risk of bribery charges.
It would be worth trying to waive sovereign immunity so that aggrieved parties could sue the government for damages. There is no question that the Trump Administration has intentionally caused costly harms. (And possibly previous administration did so as well.) I am not sure whether courts would allow plaintiffs to sue without Congressional approval. But it would be worth testing a strategy of unilaterally waiving the sovereign immunity defense.

Judicious cuts

There are pieces of the federal government that a responsible center-left or progressive administration should cut by fiat, using the powers that Trump has accumulated. For example, I would consider zeroing out Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) within ICE. The benefits would far exceed any disadvantages.

Leverage

A responsible president of any party should not fire people or cut spending just to achieve political objectives. For example, a responsible president should not threaten to fire all the federal workers in a district unless its representative votes with the administration. That would harm innocent workers and clients.

However, leverage can be used more judiciously. Terminating all positions in Enforcement and Removal Operations would be a net benefit for the public; it could also be a bargaining chip in negotiations about immigration reform. A president could even threaten to relocate federal jobs of certain types out of specific districts. For example, there are nearly 1,000 Small Business Development Centers (SBDCs), 50 federal Rural Development State Offices, and more than 360 IRS Taxpayer Assistance Centers (TACs). Maybe a Member of Congress would like those to leave his district? Or would the Member prefer to vote “aye” on the president’s bill?

I am not sure I want this kind of president. There is a risk that playing hardball with the new presidential powers would further degrade constitutional norms. But perhaps such leverage would be ethical if the proposed legislation were valuable and the collateral damage were strictly limited.

Going beyond specific bills, I would consider proposing a grand bargain. We need a much stronger and more capable Congress, a more resilient civil service, and a more rule-bound presidency. Since the courts are responsible for unleashing the president, laws won’t suffice to change the balance; we probably need constitutional amendments. I could see a progressive or center-left president saying: “Pass these amendments and limit my discretion. Meanwhile, I will use my unilateral powers to the full.”

A raft of ambitious policies would be a success. A restored constitutional balance would be a success. And it might be possible to get one followed by the other.

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