repairing the damage of federal actions

The Trump Administration often targets specific organizations and individuals for deliberate harm. For instance, Donald Trump said, “Harvard is treating our country with great disrespect, and all they’re doing is getting in deeper and deeper and deeper. They’ve got to behave themselves.” He said this while his administration was canceling up to $3 billion in contracts with Harvard, subjecting the university to at least eight different investigations, and blocking foreign students from attending–actions that could cost the university more billions.

If any private actor caused such damages, it would be subject to a tort claim and would face damages if it lost in court. If Congress passed a law targeting a specific entity, that legislation would violate the Bill of Attainder clause of the US Constitution and would be struck down.

However, the executive branch can violate a basic principle of the rule of law by acting against an individual or entity and face only the risk that its actions will be stopped. The government risks no penalty for persecuting a target, and there is no provision for the victim to win damages. This is because the Sovereign Immunity Doctrine generally shields the government and its officials from civil liability, and the Federal Tort Claims Act carves out very modest exceptions. (See this explanation by Glenn C. Altschuler and David Wippman.)

There is, however, a solution. Congress could pass a law enabling organizations and individuals who were persecuted in certain ways to seek damages in federal court. Victims’ rights could be made retroactive so that they could sue the government in the future for damages being caused now–or, indeed, for damages caused by Trump’s predecessors. If it’s really true that Obama took executive actions to bankrupt coal companies, then those companies might have a case, because such actions would bypass due process. I am skeptical that this claim is valid, but it could be assessed in court.

The goals would be: (1) to repair some of the damage incurred by the many victims of federal actions, and (2) to reinforce rule of law by creating a cost for the government when it targets organizations or individuals and harms them without due process.

I am fully aware that a Republican Congress would not pass this law, and if it did, Trump would veto it. But I think it is important to begin identifying specific priorities for the period of repair that must follow Trump. (See also “a generational call to rebuild” — on the opportunity to reconstruct the federal civil service.)

democracy’s crisis: a system map

The graphic that accompanies this post shows 16 explanations for democracy’s current crisis for which I think there is persuasive evidence. The arrows indicate significant causal relationships among these factors.

The details are entirely debatable. The main point of this model is to suggest a mode of diagnosis and prescription that is different from the root-cause analysis that often drives movements for political reform.

Imagine, for example, that the root cause of democracy’s dysfunction were economic inequality, driven by a competitive global market. In that case, a political party with a credible plan to combat inequality might represent a solution. The best strategy would be to support that party in elections.

Or imagine that the root cause were partisan polarization. In that case, it would be better to support moderates in the existing parties and promote reforms that would favor centrist candidates.

Or imagine that the cause were the arrogance of progressive elites; then a right-populist movement might be the solution.

I believe that all of these factors (and more) are causes of democracy’s crisis, meaning that there is no “root” cause. Because they are heterogeneous, it is unlikely that any ideological party or movement could address them all. And because they are interlinked, solutions must address many points.

Fortunately, democracy is not a tool meant for a single problem, as a hammer is designed to pound objects that resemble nails. Democracy means “coordinated efforts to solve problems that emerge as we navigate the natural and social world” (Knight & Johnson 2014, p. 20). Democracy requires pluralism and fallibilism about all ideologies and causal theories. Further, democracy is polycentric. We can find it not only in legislative chambers but also on news websites and in community meetings, interactions between agencies and citizens, and in the streets.

We should not hope for any entity, movement, or leader to remove the underlying cause of democracy’s distress so that it can function better. Instead, many people, organizations, and institutions must address the many causes of democracy’s dysfunction.

This would seem an impossibly tall order, except that many are already at work on the various troubles. A map like fig. 1 is meant to orient and motivate diverse actors and activities.

More detail on these factors is here: 16 colliding forces that create our moment. See also: What our nation needs is a broad-based, pro-democracy civic movement;

what is the basis of a political judgment?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


See also: don’t confuse bias and judgment; explaining a past election versus deciding what to do next; notes on Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution; Reading Arendt in Palo Alto; why ambitious ethical theories don’t serve applied ethics etc.

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

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:

  1. expand the capacity of Congress to legislate;
  2. restrict the discretion of the president and executive branch; and
  3. 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.


See also: beyond Chevron; 16 colliding forces that create our moment; on the Deep State, the administrative state, and the civil service; and on government versus governance, or the rule of law versus pragmatism (2012).

Gen Z and rebuilding the federal workforce

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.


See also: a generational call to rebuild; calling youth to government service; setbacks for authoritarianism? and the tide will turn.

how to engage our universities in this crisis

I write after the Trump Administration has abducted our beloved student Rumeyza Öztürk (please read the profile of her by her department) for contributing a well-reasoned op-ed to our campus discussion.

Many of us are familiar with a framework in which the university is a powerful institution with resources and discretion. For example, it decides whom to admit to the middle (or upper) class and what to teach them along the way. A university may be complicit with other institutions, investing in South Africa in the 1980s or fossil fuels today. It is an “it”–potentially a target of our pressure–not a “we” whose actions reflect us.

Naturally, then, the activist’s toolkit prominently includes tactics like insisting that the institution speak on the issues of the day, occupying the administration building, or demanding that the college divest from certain companies or industries.

Some of this script has become almost automatic, and I hear it right now. But the traditional framework and toolkit do not necessarily apply when the federal government is making college students and employees and the institutions themselves into targets and victims.

Christopher Rufo has disclosed his goal of putting “universities into contraction, into a recession, into declining budgets …. in a way that puts them in an existential terror.” Before we occupy administration buildings, we might want to think about whether Rufo would be glad to hear about that extra pressure. Indeed, the eerie quiet on many campuses probably reflects a realization that the usual toolkit won’t work.

A university is not the enemy. It is not alien to us. To a considerable extent, it is a victim, and resistance should be directed at those who bully it. We should also recognize genuine limitations that confront administrators and other official representatives of universities.

First, they must negotiate with–and litigate against–a hostile federal government. When you negotiate or litigate, you don’t disclose your strengths and weaknesses or your strategy.

Second, the administration can target colleges one by one and pick on any that are especially bold. As my friend Archon Fung says, “If you’re just considering Harvard University or Columbia University all by itself, maybe it is organizationally rational to try to get the best deal that you can … But that might be quite bad for higher education as a whole.” The most effective actors may not be individual institutions but coalitions (like the Mutual Academic Defense Compact proposed for Big Ten Academic Alliance) or independent actors like the ACLU.

Third, administrative positions are not tenured. Of course, resigning can be the right thing to do. But the problem is not that individuals may lose their jobs; it is rather that an institution can be held responsible for what each administrator says.

These are reasons to give each university’s administration a bit of grace. On the other hand, their business is our business. As members of a university community, we have the right and obligation to debate what it should do and to express our views about that question.

Although universities are not democracies, they must have public spheres. As Hannah Arendt writes, tyrants “all have in common the banishment of the citizens from the public realm and the insistence that they mind their private business while only the ruler should attend to public affairs” (The Human Condition, p. 221). According to Eric Calvin and Calvin Woodward, Trump recently “marveled” that universities are “bending and saying ‘Sir, thank you very much, we appreciate it.’” That “sir” is yet another indication that we are renouncing republican virtues of self-respect and honesty as we slide into tyranny. It is like the sudden doffing of hats to aristocrats that marked the end of the Florentine republic.

So what does it mean to make the the business of the university our business? For one thing, we must discuss how it should respond to existential threats.

I am just back from a quick visit to Columbia University, and I suspect that Maya Sulkin’s article entitled “Columbia President Says One Thing to Trump Admin—and Another in Private” gives a pretty good flavor of the way things have played out there. President Armstrong, who resigned on the day I visited, negotiated a deal with the Trump Administration and then reportedly tried to manage “the depth of the faculty’s frustration” with the arrangement by telling them that she would not fully comply with it. This is not exactly an accountable and public process.

Much is happening under the surface. In the Wall Street Journal, Douglas Belkin writes, “Columbia University is fighting two wars at once. One rages publicly against President Trump, whose administration in recent days ordered the arrest of a student protester and canceled federal funds to the Ivy League school over allegations of antisemitism. The second conflict simmers behind the scenes: a faculty civil war that pits medical doctors and engineers against political scientists and humanities scholars.”

This conflict began last year, when Columbia’s STEM professional school faculty were (in general) more likely to oppose the anti-Israel protests than liberal-arts faculty were. The conflict has intensified now that the Trump administration is holding Columbia’s STEM funds hostage in return for actions against the protesters and their faculty allies. Such intramural conflicts will intensify when any university must make deep cuts as a result of federal actions.

Looking beyond Columbia, Ian Bogost reports that he’s “spent the past month discussing the government’s campaign to weaken higher learning with current and former college presidents, provosts, deans, faculty, and staff. And in the course of these informal, sometimes panicked text exchanges, emails, and phone calls, I’ve come to understand that the damage to our educational system could be worse than the public comprehends—and that calamity could arrive sooner than people expect.” It would come, basically, in the form of drastic cuts in federal grants, overhead funds, and financial aid that would destroy the current business model.

As they say in community organizing, power corrupts, but so does powerlessness. It is a mark of powerlessness to be satisfied with expressing the opinion that a university should refuse the Trump administration’s demands. Are you sure that would be the right thing to do? Do you know the costs and risks? Do you have the information that you would need to decide? Should you have the information, or would secrecy better serve the university’s interests in negotiations? Meanwhile, what are you doing to weaken the government’s side in the conflict?

As Columbia’s crisis unfolded, I would have wanted to know: How likely would the university be to prevail in our actual federal courts if it refused to comply? Would a First Amendment (or statute-based) lawsuit win? Further, what else could the Trump Administration do if the university fought back in court? For instance, revoke all visas of foreign-citizen students and employees? Cancel the university’s nonprofit status so that it would have to pay corporate taxes? How likely would the university be to prevail in lawsuits against those actions?

Next, what would happen financially if the university lost its federal funding? Columbia has an endowment worth more than $14 billion, but most of that is permanently earmarked for specific purposes; it can’t be used to replace canceled federal contracts. How much is available for flexible purposes? Could the university borrow against the endowment, and on what terms?

What would it look like to fire the employees who had been covered by federal funds, versus retaining many of those people and cutting others? How would the internal politics of the university play out if the budget were dramatically cut? Would the STEM fields or the liberal arts prevail? Would the university cut early-stage faculty without tenure or could it compel senior faculty to retire? On the other hand, could the institution gain–for example, reputationally–if it went into full revolt?

I suspect these questions are quite hard. I am sympathetic to many current campus leaders–although not all, because some appear to be cowards. But their business is our business, and we need to shoulder it.

As we respond, we must acknowledge the full extent of the threat and contemplate radical responses, including restructuring our institutions to survive. But we must not yield to fatalism. Ian Bogost’s fine article might suggest–although he doesn’t say so explicitly–that the DOGE cuts (and more that will come) are permanent. On the contrary, Trump’s actions can be reversed. His successor would not even need congressional approval, because support for higher education is already required by federal law. And colleges have powerful constituencies distributed across the country.

In short, the battle is joined, but it is by no means lost. The antagonist is not in your campus administration’s building but in the White House. Individual universities may make good or bad choices; so can each of us. A robust debate is essential; consensus is impossible and probably undesirable. We must be citizens, not spectators; sober but not demoralized; realistic and also idealistic as we struggle to make our institutions better than they were before.


See also: the state of nonviolent grassroots resistance; civility as equality; time again for civic courage.

the state of nonviolent grassroots resistance

So far, Trump and Musk are at least as aggressive as I had expected and much smarter. Prominent institutions appear to be buckling–notably, law firms, universities, and Democratic senators. There is some angst about an apparent lack of popular resistance.

Indeed, we still need more grassroots opposition. However, Erica Chenoweth, Jeremy Pressman, and Soha Hammam show that “street protests today are far more numerous and frequent than skeptics might suggest”–and more frequent than in the same period in 2017.

Besides, the number and scale of street protests is only one indicator of an effective popular movement, and sometimes a misleading one. I believe that some recent movements have been overly enamored of public displays that miss their real targets. For instance, Occupy Wall Street may have occupied a park two blocks east of the eponymous street, but “Wall Street” is only a metaphor for the financial industry. Occupy put less pressure on banks and private equity than on municipal governments and college presidents. In a widely circulated 2022 article, Ryan Grimm documented how movements for racial and gender equity disproportionately targeted progressive nonprofits. And the most prominent protests against Israel last year chose US colleges (not the defense industry or Congress, let alone Netanyahu) as their primary targets.

I am not against all of these actions, but I doubt that they changed the behavior of the US government, major corporations, or Israel.

On the other hand, Kevin A. Young documents the many victories that grassroots groups did accomplish during the first Trump Administration, including successful opposition to new coal and gas projects, pressure on cities not to cooperate with ICE, and teachers’ strikes. These actions were less prominent than demonstrations against municipalities and colleges, but they effectively used “more disruptive forms of pressure.”

And such actions are happening again–most notably, at Tesla dealerships. Micah Sifry believes that “we’re seeing a qualitatively different opposition movement forming than the one that appeared in 2017, one grounded by working people and led from the center out rather than the left in.” An important component of this opposition–and one that is likely to grow–involves organizing by laid-off federal workers.

Sifry is calling the current movement “The Defiance” instead of “The Resistance” because “we need a new term to describe something new” and because “the opposition that is rising now is less about signaling cultural disapproval in polite society and then channeling voter fury into the mid-term elections and more about actually standing now in the way of the machinery that Trump, Musk, Miller and Vought have unleashed with DOGE and Project 2025.” It is being led by “federal workers who are disproportionately veterans, working-class, younger and people of color who are feeling the front-lash of the DOGE chainsaw.”

As Sherilyn Ifill wrote on Feb 9: “People are doing things. You will meet those people when you start doing things.”

See also: did the first resistance work?; the current state of resistance, and what to do about it (Jan. 22); the tide will turn (Nov 15.) features of effective boycotts; etc.

16 colliding forces that create our moment

Not one major phenomenon is driving US and global politics today. Several powerful and somewhat contradictory currents must be navigated together. I list the following trends in no particular order. The references in square brackets link to previous posts on the same themes.

Costs of neoliberalism: The global market economy harms people in wealthy countries [1]. It also has benefits, and the net impact is debatable. (For instance, US workers are reporting the highest mean levels of job satisfaction yet recorded.) But even if a minority of workers hold insecure, regimented, automated, underpaid, and demeaning jobs, their concerns are real. Meanwhile, AI looms as a potential destroyer of decent livelihoods.

Class inversion: In many countries, right-wing parties draw their main support from less-educated and less affluent constituencies, while the main center-left parties depend on voters of the highest socio-economic status. As a result, right-wing parties cannot compete by offering limited government, but instead promise versions of ethno-nationalism. And left parties provide mostly symbolic policies on social issues while blocking more ambitious economic reforms that would cost their own voters [2, 3, 29, etc.].

Right-wing populist authoritarianism: From the Philippines and India to Hungary and El Salvador and the United States, successful charismatic male politicians disparage outsiders or minority groups and repress dissent, purporting to speak–without inhibitions–on behalf of the authentic “people” of their respective countries. This formula wins elections [4].

Effective state repression: From ca. 1980-2000, authoritarian states–whether left, right, or technocratic–tended to falter when challenged by mass popular movements. One reason was that the authoritarians clung to old-fashioned methods, such as cancelling elections and imprisoning dissidents, which failed in the face of sophisticated nonviolent social movements that borrowed and extended the repertoire of the US Civil Rights Movement. But then authoritarian states innovated, developing more effective methods for control. Meanwhile, social movements mainly reprised the toolkit of the 1960s, with some modifications for digital media. The rate of success of nonviolent social movements fell [28].

Oligarchy: Small numbers of billionaires wield enormous power in the politics and media of many countries. This is a different problem from class struggle or economic inequality. In fact, some of the billionaire oligarchs are at odds with the highest income strata of their own societies. Often (as in the cases of Trump and Musk) they owe much of their fortunes to the public purse. They are literally corrupt [11].

Elite capture: The same institutions and towns or neighborhoods where political opinions are most progressive–and sometimes intolerantly so–are also designed to preserve the economic advantages of their own people. I write this post at Stanford University, which students describe as a “liberal bubble” and which operates at the very heart of global capitalism. Students who may be hyper-liberal also expect to work in tech or finance. They got here (and to institutions like my own) thanks to K12 schools and college admissions that relentlessly favored the most advantaged families; professors who held scarce, tenured jobs; contingent workers who cooked and cleaned for them; and even zoning rules that inflated the value of their families’ homes. From an outsider’s perspective, all of this looks rigged and hypocritical [5, 13, 14].

Regulatory capture: Progressive politicians prefer to require behavior by companies, nonprofits, and public institutions instead of providing services. The costs of regulation do not appear on governments’ balance sheets and can be played down. Unfortunately, regulations rarely produce the intended results because they are implemented by organizations that have interests of their own. From the perspective of an employee or a consumer, a government regulation whose original rationale was to protect the public good often looks like just another self-serving directive handed down by the company’s HR department [21].

Racial backlash: From the 1960s to the 2000s, national Democratic and Republican politicians talked about race in ways that were similar enough that voters who weren’t political specialists couldn’t tell the difference. Indeed, each party was inconsistent enough about racial issues that their real differences were ambiguous. I think the Democrats’ nomination of Barack Obama and then the party’s partial receptiveness to Black Lives Matter alerted voters to the fact that people of color, particularly Black Americans, held real influence in that party but not in the GOP. A significant number of white voters then shifted to the Republicans as a form of racial backlash [6, 7]

Affective polarization: Citizens in the USA and many similar countries are affectively polarized, increasingly using party labels to decide whether other citizens are friends or enemies. In the US, this trend is symmetrical for Democrats and Republicans. Many people also receive news and opinion that is ideologically tilted. We marinate in ideologically convenient clichés and avoid wrestling with tradeoffs and complexities. (This is true of sophisticated liberals as well as other people) [9, 10].

Loneliness: Americans have become much less likely to participate in self-governing voluntary associations. Yet such participation supports other forms of political engagement and correlates with tolerant and democratic values. The opposite of social capital is loneliness, which has reached epidemic proportions. Among the organizations that have shrunk are unions, which declined to their lowest level (one in ten workers) during Joe Biden’s friendly administration. Another category is religion. For many Americans today, being Christian is an identity label rather than a demanding, collective practice that teaches self-sacrifice and common action [12, 15].

COVID hangover: Several of the previously mentioned trends, notably loneliness and racial backlash, rose rapidly during and since the global pandemic. Although I sympathize with leaders who had to make decisions about matters like masks and vaccine mandates, I believe that these issues became polarized by party and social class; and liberal elites far overstated the case for restrictions. For example, as I noted during the pandemic, the scientific evidence for masks was weak, yet wearing a mask became politically correct. (Not to mention the genuine coverup of the Wuhan lab leak.) Since those who favored pandemic restrictions also tend to want more regulation in general, they helped to discredit government [16, 17].

Legislative incapacity: So far in this century, Congress has yet to pass any landmark legislation. Perhaps the strongest candidate for that label would be the massive spending bills that Joe Biden signed, but even those were mainly time-limited budgetary changes rather than new institutions. The federal government still addresses carbon emissions under the Clean Air Act of 1970 and social media under the Telecommunications Act of 1996. No Child Left Behind was a set of amendments (and a short-lived new title) for the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. Obamacare was likewise a set of tweaks on the Social Security Amendments of 1965. Congress appears incapable of passing major new laws, liberal or conservative [18, 19].

Executive aggrandizement: As the legislature has waned, the presidency and the executive branch have waxed. But the presidency is much more dangerous because it is the branch with guns, files, prison cells, and a charismatic leader. According to Juan Linz, constitutionally powerful presidents are almost guaranteed to become dictators unless a party-system creates effective checks, which has ceased to be the case in the United States [20].

The attention economy: The public sphere runs on advertising. Outrage draws attention and thereby drives profits. Not only do these incentives worsen affective partisanship and loneliness among citizens, but they reward politicians who can attract attention on cable news or social media instead of developing legislation [22, 23].

Climate change: The earth’s climate is warming in ways that are already harming, frightening, and dislocating people. Yet the public’s explicit support for addressing this problem is so weak that Democrats hid their own climate legislation under the misleading title of the “Inflation Reduction Act,” and even the Sierra Club’s president avoided climate in favor of abortion when he endorsed Kamala Harris. It is probably correct that Democrats would poll better if they were less identified with climate reform, but the issue needs more, not less, attention [24, 25].

Anxiety about American “exceptionalism”: For all MAGA’s rhetoric about the unique excellence of the United States, the same movement also paints a picture of decline and weakness in the face of overseas rivals. It is easy to psychoanalyze this combination of emotions as a neurosis. But I would not overlook that fact that the United States spent most of this century so far fighting two wars and essentially lost both. In other words, the neurosis results from trauma. The trauma could be described as self-inflicted, but it was inflicted by US political elites on everyone else [26, 27].

These 16 trends do not share one root cause. (Some would point to capitalism, but I do not find that analysis useful [28].) However, all of these trends relate to the same larger problem: the degradation of democracy. Each phenomenon reflects and/or worsens the declining power of regular people to discuss, learn, and control their environment in large numbers.

Solutions:

Better political leadership would help.

An authentic conservative movement could play a valuable role in countering populism, executive aggrandizement, regulatory capture, and some other items on this list. (Genuine conservatism is deeply antithetical to Trumpian populism).

I would favor significant changes to our constitution and can imagine that we will see serious efforts to curtail the presidency and the Supreme Court and to restructure elections after Trump’s term.

Voluntary groups with mostly middle-class members can address loneliness, anxiety, and perhaps even racial backlash if they were bigger and more influential.

But nothing is as important as building powerful parties, unions, and other organizations that are accountable to diverse working-class members. Such organizations can counter all the trends on my list above.

Right now, much attention is focused on the Democratic Party, because its favorability has reached an all-time low for either party, even while it represents the official opposition to a catastrophic president. I would welcome new Democratic leaders and policies, but deeper reform must be structural: shifting resources to active local party committees, especially in working-class districts, and making candidates accountable to them. Meanwhile, we also need associations that stand somewhat apart from any party.

the ham actor and the psychopath: Adorno on Trump and Musk

It is not my style to apply psychoanalytic categories to political phenomena. I generally want to take explicit political claims at face value, whether I find them appealing or awful. I see this as a way of treating other people as fellow citizens. Besides, I have little background in psychoanalysis and sometimes doubt whether it can make falsifiable claims about politics.

However, if you want a critical Freudian interpretation of people like Trump and Musk (or Putin, or Modi) and their supporters, I can recommend a classic text: Theodor Adorno’s “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda” (1951).

Adorno claims that many people in capitalist societies have “a strongly developed rational, self-preserving ego agency.” I think this means that people have been taught to form personal desires and to strive to get what they want. But they also experience “the continuous failure to satisfy their own ego demands.” In short, they are not as successful as they expect to be. “This conflict results in strong narcissistic impulses which can be absorbed and satisfied only through idealization as the partial transfer of the narcissistic libido to the object” (p. 126).

This object is a leader. “Only the psychological image of the leader is apt to reanimate the idea of the all-powerful and threatening primal father. This is the ultimate root of the otherwise enigmatic personalization of fascist propaganda, its incessant plugging of names and supposedly great men, instead of discussing objective causes” (124).

Three features enable a leader to draw support:

First, the leader presents himself as similar to his followers. “While appearing as a superman, the leader must at the same time work the miracle of appearing as an average person” (127). He even demonstrates “startling symptoms of inferiority,” such as a “resemblance to ham actors and asocial psychopaths.” (I thought about Trump and Musk, respectively, when I read that sentence.)

Adorno explains why people tolerate–or even prefer–their leader to have such flaws: it makes it easier to identify with him. “He resembles them psychologically, and is distinguished from them by a capacity to express without inhibitions what is latent in them, rather than by any intrinsic superiority” (132). “The leader image gratifies the follower’s twofold wish to submit to authority and to be the authority himself.” In short, the leader aims to be a “great little man” (127).

Second, people gain pleasure from loving a leader who demonstrates little or no love. “One of the most conspicuous features of the agitators’ speeches, namely the absence of a positive program and of anything they might ‘give,’ as well as the paradoxical prevalence of threat and denial, is thus being accounted for: the leader can be loved only if he himself does not love.” This combination is compelling because the followers identify with the leader and thereby feel liberated from having to give or care.

Or perhaps the leader vaguely expresses love for his followers (without being accountable to them), while denouncing more general love. Adorno quotes Freud’s “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego” (1922): “Even today, the members of a group stand in need of the illusion that they are equally and justly loved by their leader; but the leader himself need love no one else, he may be of a masterly nature, absolutely narcissistic, but self-confident and independent” (127)

Third, the leader enables the followers to identify with each other by expressing hatred for weak outsiders. The followers do not deeply believe the premises of the hatred but gain pleasure from participating together in ritualistic expressions of it. “Just as little as people believe in the depth of their hearts that the Jews are the devil, do they completely believe in the leader. They do not really identify themselves with him but act this identification, perform their own enthusiasm, and thus participate in their leader’s performance” (136-7).

There is more to Adorno’s account. For example, the mass’s desire is libidinal and erotic, but this truth must be concealed because it would be embarrassing. “It is one of the basic tenets of fascist leadership to keep primary libidinal energy on an unconscious level so as to divert its manifestations in a way suitable to political ends” (123).

Also, the decline of serious religious belief helps fascist leaders, because actual religions teach demanding ideas, including self-sacrificial love. But once religion becomes an identity label, religious ideas no longer stand in the way of politics.

the division between the believers and nonbelievers has been maintained and reified. However, it has become a structure in itself, independent of any ideational content, and is even more stubbornly defended since it lost its inner conviction. At the same time, the mitigating impact of the religious doctrine of love vanished. This is the essence of the “sheep and goat” device employed by all fascist demagogues. Since they do not recognize any spiritual criterion in regard to who is chosen and who is rejected, they substitute a pseudo-natural criterion such as the race, which seems to be inescapable and can therefore be applied even more mercilessly than was the concept of heresy during the Middle Ages (129).

Finally, Adorno denies that fascism has caused these outcomes or that a fascist leader is ultimately responsible for them. “Fascism as such is not a psychological issue” (135). Rather, for Adorno, a fascist demagogue is a tool by which capitalist interests control the masses.

(I am not committed to either the Freudianism or the Marxism of Adorno’s account, but it rings lots of bells today.)


Source: Theodor Adorno, “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda’”[1951] in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. A. Arato and E. Gebhardt (New York, 1982). See also: the troubling implications of factor analysis for democracy (with notes on Adorno); philosophy of boredom; what if the people don’t want to rule?;

the rise of oligarchy

The public money and public liberty, intended to have been deposited with three branches of magistracy, but found inadvertently to be in the hands of one only, will soon be discovered to be sources of wealth and dominion to those who hold them… They [the assembly] should look forward to a time, and that not a distant one, when a corruption in this, as in the country from which we derive our origin, will have seized the heads of government, and be spread by them through the body of the people; when they will purchase the voices of the people, and make them pay the price. Human nature is the same on every side of the Atlantic, and will be alike influenced by the same causes. The time to guard against corruption and tyranny, is before they shall have gotten hold of us. It is better to keep the wolf out of the fold, than to trust to drawing his teeth and talons after he shall have entered (Thomas Jefferson, 1785)

In current parlance, I think, an “oligarch” is someone with great personal wealth who influences politics, whether directly or via media. Oligarchs are not publicly traded corporations, and the threat they pose to democracy is different. The rise of oligarchs is also different from income inequality. It’s not about whether the top one percent or the top 10 percent of a country has disproportionate influence but whether a few individuals are “wolves in the fold”–literally making political decisions without accountability.

In fact, wealth inequality may have declined globally since 1980, but we now have about 2,500 billionaires who collectively own about $15 trillion, which is equivalent to the GDP of China (population 1.4 billion people). Some are uninvolved with politics, but a fair number either derive their wealth from government or buy political influence. I count at least 17 countries that have been directly led by billionaires in the last decade (not including the UK, since Rishi Sunak is only worth about $850 million). There are many other countries in which billionaires wield influence without holding office.

Above all, the President of the United States is a billionaire. His sidekick is more than a third of his way to being a trillionaire. The owner of The Washington Post is about a quarter of the way there.

This situation is not exactly unprecedented. John D. Rockefeller was worth about $1.4 billion in 1937. Measured in current dollars, his fortune rivaled Musk’s today. And the Rockefeller wealth transmuted into political power. Three descendants became governors; one was also a vice-president.

However, there are distinctively 21st-century ways in which private individuals sway national politics, here and overseas. Both Musk and Trump are celebrities with massive popular influence. They have millions of followers who treat their wealth as evidence of brilliance and superiority to government. They purchase impunity from almost all forms of accountability. And they enrich themselves at the expense of the government. As Jefferson writes, they “make interested uses of every right and power which they possess, or may assume.”

Google’s NGram tool suggests that the frequency of the word “oligarch” in printed books has risen 13-fold since the millennium (see above). This is just one sign that we are living in an age of oligarchy.

See also: why is oligarchy everywhere? and why is oligarchy everywhere? (part 2).