Category Archives: Public Policy and Governance

There’s A Lesson Here

A recent Vox article focused on a question–perhaps the question–that consumes most sentient Americans these days, especially the seven million of us who turned out for the No Kings protest: can America recover, or have we lost representative government forever?

As the article began,

The president of the United States is deploying masked troops to the streets of blue cities, working to put friendly billionaires in charge of the media environment, and attempting to jail his personal enemies.

Can any democracy come back from this?

There is relevant research on that question, and the article cited two papers published earlier this year that seemingly came to opposite conclusions. In both, researchers examined what are called “democratic U-turns.” Those are situations in which  a country that begins as a democracy subsequently moves toward authoritarianism, but recovers in relatively short order. The first research team’s conclusions were optimistic. “They identified 102 U-turn cases since 1900 and found that, in 90 percent of them, the result was “restored or even improved levels of democracy.”

The second team, however, focused on 21 of the most recent cases and concluded that “nearly 90 percent” of alleged U-turns were “short-lived mirages.”

After contacting both teams of researchers, the author concluded that the seemingly opposed findings weren’t actually inconsistent —and that the implications for the United States are both hopeful and disturbing.

Both research teams used a “democracy score” that takes into account how free the press is, whether elections are free and fair, and other accepted markers of democratic societies. A U-turn is defined as the country’s democracy score rebounding after a recent decline — and the data suggests that such U-turns are very common, that over half of all countries that have experienced a slide toward autocracy have also experienced a U-turn. And the research found that those U-turns have typically been very successful.

Good news, right? But as we know from differences in poll results, results will vary depending upon who you ask and how you frame the question.

The second group of researchers focused their analysis on twenty-one cases of democratic U-turns that occurred post-1994.  The authors then looked to see how many of those countries maintained their higher, post U-turn democracy scores. Their analysis extended to the years following those that the first team analyzed–looking to see whether the gains of a country’s U-turn were sustained. The findings on that score give us little cause for optimism; “out of the 21 cases, 19 countries experienced another decline in their democracy score within five years of the seemingly successful U-turn.”

Both teams of researchers emphasized that their findings were not in tension. For one thing, modern autocratization differs from the historical pattern. “Before the 1990s, democracies tended to be toppled by coups or revolutions — unmistakable uses of force that ended the current regime and replaced it with naked authoritarian rule.”

Nowadays, thanks in large part to democracy’s increasingly dominant ideological position around the world, the threat tends to come in a more subtle and hidden form — what scholars call “democratic backsliding.” In these cases, a legitimately elected government changes the laws and rules of the political system to give itself increasingly unfair advantages in future elections. The ultimate aim is often to create a “competitive authoritarian” regime, where elections are not formally rigged but take place under such unfair conditions that they can’t truly be considered democratic. That’s what Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party did in Hungary, and what PiS tried to do in Poland.

And–rather obviously–what Trump is trying to do in the U.S.

As the article notes, because elected authoritarians were elected, they often represent a real constituency–one that is often large enough to make it impossible for their opponents to defeat them permanently and democratically illegitimate for those opponents to outlaw them entirely. Just because you have a democracy doesn’t mean you have a stable democracy. As the article concludes:

Even if America experiences a U-turn upon Trump’s departure, the country may not be out of the woods. The forces that made Trump possible in the first place will still remain, open to exploitation by any political leader with the requisite savvy and shamelessness.

“There is a reason why Trump came to power, and there is a reason why he won those elections… If you don’t solve the underlying reasons, then of course democracy will still be at risk.”

I am increasingly convinced that the U.S. will oust Trump and his band of wildly incompetent White Christian Nationalists–that we will experience a U-turn. I am far less sanguine about our ability to address those “underlying reasons.”

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Forget Dog Whistles

In the ten-plus months of this horrific excuse for a federal administration, the racism that powers the MAGA movement has become impossible to ignore or minimize. Trump and his sycophants aren’t even trying to mask their hatreds–they have withdrawn funding from universities and other organizations that engage in even the most modest efforts to level the playing field for minorities; waged war against (their version of) DEI; fired competent Black officials and replaced them with manifestly unqualified White ones; sent masked goons into Blue cities to kidnap Brown people…the list goes on.

Now, several media outlets report that the FBI has officially abandoned what has for years been its top domestic terrorism concern: White nationalism. The agency has cut its ties with two major civil rights watchdogs, yielding to pressure from MAGA influencers and Donald Trump’s FBI Director Kash Patel.

The FBI has abruptly ended long-standing partnerships with the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), organizations that for years have provided the agency with significant assistance in tracking hate groups. Not only has the FBI ended its relationship with those organizations, figures in the administration have libeled them. Kash Patel called the SPLC a “partisan smear machine,” and Elon Musk labeled it an “evil” source of “hate propaganda.”

The animus aimed at SPLC was evidently prompted by that organization’s Hate Map, which identifies White Nationalist, anti-government, and other extremist groups, and which includes Turning Point USA as one of  those anti-democratic, hard-right groups.

The FBI also ended its partnership with the ADL, which for years has trained agents to recognize antisemitism and hate crimes. (Patel mocked former FBI Director James Comey for praising the ADL, sneering: “That era is OVER.”) As one media source reported (link unavailable),

In 2017, then–FBI Director Christopher Wray told Congress the agency had about 1,000 open domestic terrorism investigations, many linked to white nationalism. A 2021 GAO report backed that up: domestic terrorism cases surged 357% since 2013, with white supremacists responsible for the majority of deadly attacks.

But under Trump and Patel, the FBI is turning its back on civil rights, and walking away from groups that helped prevent homegrown hate.

It isn’t just the FBI. And it goes further than an administration that is “turning its back on civil rights.” This is an administration that absolutely revels in parading its bigotries. Actually, we shouldn’t be surprised by the degree to which its hatreds are being openly expressed–as the Brookings Institution, among others, has documented, racism has always been Trump’s not-so-secret sauce. In 2019, the Institution reported (emphases mine),

Donald Trump’s support in the 2016 campaign was clearly driven by racism, sexism, and xenophobia. While some observers have explained Trump’s success as a result of economic anxiety, the data demonstrate that anti-immigrant sentiment, racism, and sexism are much more strongly related to support for Trump. Trump’s much-discussed vote advantage with non-college-educated whites is misleading; when accounting for racism and sexism, the education gap among whites in the 2016 election returns to the typical levels of previous elections since 2000. Trump did not do especially well with non-college-educated whites, compared to other Republicans. He did especially well with white people who express sexist views about women and who deny racism exists.

Even more alarmingly, there is a clear correlation between Trump campaign events and incidents of prejudiced violence. FBI data show that since Trump’s election there has been an anomalous spike in hate crimes concentrated in counties where Trump won by larger margins. It was the second-largest uptick in hate crimes in the 25 years for which data are available, second only to the spike after September 11, 2001. Though hate crimes are typically most frequent in the summer, in 2016 they peaked in the fourth quarter (October-December). This new, higher rate of hate crimes continued throughout 2017.

What is so depressing is the “in your face” evidence that Americans haven’t come very far since the Civil War, that a significant percentage of White Americans continue to hate and fear people who are different. White Christian Nationalism is, in a number of ways, a continuation of the worst of the Confederacy, and it is still as fundamentally unAmerican as it was then.

Trump and MAGA are tearing down more than the East Wing of the White House. That destruction is symbolic of the arrogance with which they are trying to destroy the very fabric of a nation trying to live up to the principle that all people are created equal. 

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That Constitutional Ethic

Thursday, I traveled to Hancock County, to speak at what their community foundation calls a “Collaboration Station.” My assignment was to address–or perhaps commiserate with– local elected and appointed officials who are serving at a time of intense political polarization and hostility–to offer them guidance suggested by relevant academic research.

We covered a lot of ground that isn’t necessary to include in this post, but I think the concluding portion of my presentation is relevant to the discussions that occur here–as well as consistent with the overarching message of the recent No Kings rally–so here’s that portion of my talk.

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Back in 2011, I co-authored a textbook for use in classes on public administration. That textbook was titled American Public Service: Constitutional and Ethical Foundations, and in it, my co-author and I described what we dubbed “The Constitutional Ethic.” We argued that public officials cannot make intelligent policy decisions unless they have a basic understanding of America’s constitutional framework, because government legitimacy and the rule of law require that a government’s operations be consistent with its country’s legal framework.

It was the thesis of our textbook that the U.S. Constitution dictates a very particular approach to public service—that the legal philosophy animating the Constitution and Bill of Rights establishes certain ethical norms. That philosophy starts with the Founders’ belief in limited government. I want to emphasize that—political rhetoric to the contrary–limited government is not the same thing as small government; in our system, government’s authority is supposed to be limited to areas that in our system are deemed properly governmental.

As we wrote in the introduction to that textbook, a public servant’s ability to do a job well depends upon how well that official understands what the relevant rules are, why we have these particular rules rather than others, and why we choose to solve some problems collectively through government action while leaving other problems to individuals and voluntary associations.

Public officials certainly don’t need to be constitutional scholars, but it is necessary that they understand the general principles and values on which this nation built its governing structures, because—as I said before and as I want to emphasize– ethical public service requires performance consistent with those foundational principles and values.

Let me be clear about what that means. Fidelity to our constituent documents requires a basic understanding of the constitutional framework. Public servants in the United States are responsible for discharging their various duties in a manner that is consistent with that framework, consistent with what I sometimes call “the American Idea,” the philosophy that animates our governing and legal structures. That requirement is obviously more or less relevant depending upon your job description—less to a surveyor or engineer, more to law enforcement personnel. But it applies to some extent to all public officials.

I am certainly not the only person to suggest that citizens’ current inability to engage in productive civic conversation is largely an outgrowth of declining trust in our social and political institutions—primarily, although certainly not exclusively, our government. Restoring that trust is critically important if we are going to make our representative democracy work—but in order to trust government, both citizens and political functionaries need to understand what government is and is not supposed to do. We all need to understand how government actors are supposed to behave—in other words, we need to understand what behaviors our particular Constitutional system requires, and what behaviors are inconsistent with that system. (A sound civic education would impart that knowledge; unfortunately, the current emphasis on job skills and STEM has largely displaced citizenship instruction.)

As most of you in this room understand, the choices originally made by this nation’s Founders shaped a very distinctive American culture. Those constitutional choices have shaped our beliefs about personal liberty, and our conceptions of human rights. They’ve framed the way we allocate social duties among governmental, nonprofit and private actors. I think it’s fair to say that those initial Constitutional choices created a distinctively American worldview.

Most Americans fail to understand how incredibly radical the choices made for the then-new United States were for the times. For example, in the new country our Founders established, unlike the situation in countries elsewhere, citizenship wasn’t based upon geography, ethnicity or conquest; instead, it was based on an Idea, a theory of social organization, what Enlightenment philosopher John Locke called a “social contract” and journalist Todd Gitlin has called a “covenant.” Perhaps the most revolutionary element of the American Idea was that our Constitution based citizenship on behavior rather than identity. An individual’s status and rights depended upon how that individual behaved rather than on who he or she was.

Right now, as you all know, there are elements in American society and government trying to ignore or even reverse that fundamental precept. We’ve had stunning Supreme Court decisions that allow government actors to ignore the 4th Amendment’s requirement of probable cause and to detain people based only upon their skin color or language, and we have numerous political figures who insist that White Christians are the only “real Americans” –and that others are not.

Public officials who are focused on providing basic services usually aren’t tempted to distinguish between members of the public on the basis of their identity—local officials pave streets that everyone drives on, pick up garbage from all the homes in a district, fight fires wherever they erupt and so forth. But many of you do hold positions that allow or even require the privileging of some citizens over others, and making those distinctions on the basis of identity—as some political actors at both the state and national level are encouraging you to do—would  violate both the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection clause and a foundational American ideal. Disadvantaging or firing people based upon opinions they’ve expressed, as some political actors are advocating, would be a violation of the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech. Obeying such mandates or similar ones, would violate the Constitutional ethic.

My co-author and I had both practiced constitutional law, and at the time we wrote the textbook, we both held professorships in schools of public affairs. We wrote the book, it was adopted by several schools of public management, and we both went on to pursue other projects. To be honest, I hadn’t revisited that textbook for several years, and when I was preparing for this workshop, I pulled it out again– and I will admit I was startled to read some of the supposedly “far-fetched” examples we’d used that were intended to illustrate the relationship between public administration and the Constitution. We explained, for example, that the Constitution and other authorities in our legal system don’t permit American officials to use U.S. troops to address domestic criminal activity; that the Constitution doesn’t permit censorship as a solution for disfavored political opinions; that the Equal Protection Clause wouldn’t permit the reduction of welfare rolls by refusing to feed Black or Hispanic children, and that substantive due process guarantees prevent government from forcing women either to abort or give birth.

Fourteen years later, some of those examples are no longer so far-fetched.

As we acknowledged in that textbook, the American Idea is not monolithic, and it is constantly contested and evolving, but—as we also insisted– it has real content. It rests on considered normative judgments about the proper conduct of public affairs, and it prescribes an ethic that should dictate the behavior of those engaged in public administration and management—even when it is uncomfortable or even dangerous to do so.

So here’s the bottom line: When push comes to shove—when keeping your heads down is no longer an option— the Constitutional ethic must guide you.

These days, that may not be comforting.

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Trashing The First Amendment

Ten months into the Trump administration, the outlines of America’s cold civil war have become too stark to miss. MAGA is determined to remake the United States into a nation where White Christian Nationalists are legally privileged and in control. And they’re making progress.

The evidence is overwhelming. Masked ICE agents focus on people of color. Trump reportedly wants to “revamp” immigration rules in order to make it easier for Whites and harder for others to enter the country. From day one, the administration has pursued an all-out war on “DEI”–insisting that any effort to level the playing field for previously marginalized folks is really anti-White discrimination. Aided and abetted by a thoroughly corrupted Supreme Court majority, the hits have kept coming: universities prevented from continuing programs even slightly resembling affirmative action, the continued gutting of the Voting Rights Act…

And as we’ve recently seen, the racism motivating MAGA isn’t diminishing; it infuses the GOP’s young activists.

I have previously written about the faux-Christianity that motivates much of this. I particularly recommend Tim Alberta’s book, “The Kingdom, The Power and the Glory.” Alberta is a genuine Christian Evangelical, and his critique is informed by his own deep religiosity. More recently, David French–another committed Evangelical– has described what is happening in thousands of churches as a religious “revolution”–not to be confused with a true revival. In his telling, America is close to a religious revolution, and the difference between that revolution and a true religious revival is immensely important for both church and state.

Decades of scholarship, very much including scholarship by religious organizations, have attributed America’s religiosity–far greater than in other Western Democratic countries–to the fact that the First Amendment requires the separation of church and state. That understanding fails to persuade the MAGA folks who’ve turned religion into a political identity.

The Christian Nationalists who dominate Red state governments reject the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause. They intend to indoctrinate the nation’s schoolchildren, and they aren’t satisfied with mandates to post the Ten Commandments in classrooms. In Texas, they’ve introduced a “revised” and bible-infused English curriculum.

A new state-sponsored English curriculum infused with lessons about the Bible and Christianity could reach tens of thousands of Texas schoolchildren this year.

More than 300 of the state’s roughly 1,200 districts signed up to use the English language arts lessons, according to data obtained by The New York Times through a public records request. Many are rural, and relatively small.

The curriculum was created as several states, including Oklahoma and Louisiana, fought to bring prayer or religious texts like the Ten Commandments into public school classrooms, blurring the line between church and state.

According to the analysis done by the New York Times, the Texas curriculum features content on Christianity, the bible and the life of Jesus. Lessons include the Biblical story of his birth in a Bethlehem manger, New Testament accounts of the angel who described him as the Messiah, and even stories about the miracles he was purported to perform.

Fifth graders examine a psalm in a poetry unit. First-grade students discuss the parable of the prodigal son alongside stories like “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.” Kindergarten children learn in depth about the Book of Genesis in a lesson on art exploration that notes that “many artists have found inspiration for creating art from the words in creation stories in religious books.”

The Times analysis found that Christianity was heavily favored in the lessons. In the materials used in the second grade, for example, “Christianity, the Bible and Jesus are referenced about 110 times. By contrast, Islam, Muslims, the Quran and the Prophet Muhammad are mentioned roughly 31 times in lessons spanning from kindergarten to fifth grade.”

The Times article has much more detail, and it is worth clicking through and reading. The curricular changes were summed up in a quote by David R. Brockman, a Christian theologian and religious studies scholar at Rice University. After he reviewed all of the Texas materials, Brockman concluded that the lessons amounted to Bible study in a public school curriculum, and he worried that the state’s adaptation of its curriculum would send an implicit message to children “that Christianity is the only important religion.”

Well, duh! Of course that’s the message, and it’s intended. In MAGA’s America–a country distant from the one occupied by the rest of us–the only real Americans are lily-White and “Christian.” The rest of us–including genuine Christians–are intruders.

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What Can Be Repaired? What Can’t?

Just a quick note before today’s post: my husband and I attended the No Kings protest in Indianapolis, and were blown away by the size, composition and positivity of the crowd. (I think my 93-year-old hubby may have been the oldest attendee, but there were lots of older folks–as well as younger and middle-aged ones.) The thousands of attendees were upbeat, entirely peaceful, and the numerous signs they carried weren’t just clever–they were patriotic in the best sense of the word.

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When I try to find cause for optimism, I tell myself that–while the incredible destruction being wreaked by Trump and his merry band of morons, misfits and clowns is horrific–a lot of government systems had become calcified and overly bureaucratic, and that once this despicable crew has left, we can (to use Joe Biden’s term) “build back better.”

Unfortunately, reality then kicks in.

A while back, Thomas Edsall addressed that reality in a New York Times op-ed. The title was “What Can’t Trump Wreck?” and the column distinguished between the kind of damage that can be redressed relatively quickly and the damage that can’t.

Edsall began by reminding readers that Trump’s inhumane cuts to USAID are predicted to result in more than 14.05 million all-age deaths by 2030– a number that includes the death of 4.54 million children younger than age 5 years. Rather obviously,  lives lost remain lost.

We can count the dead. We can assess–at least approximately– the damage done by ICE’s thuggish behaviors– the human costs of its indiscriminate kidnapping, the social costs of its undermining of the rule of law, and the economic losses to farmers deprived of workers to pick their crops.

What we can’t quantify are the immense consequences that flow from a lack of institutional memory and expertise. Edsall quoted Sam Issacharoff, a law professor at N.Y.U., who wrote:

Government stretches the time frame for decision making. Long-term investments, collective needs like roads and defense, these are all matters that require long-term investment and expertise. Experience creates what the Swedish political scientist Bo Rothstein calls “knowledge realism,” the know-how created by experience and repeat efforts.

The dismissal of career experts, the dismantling of long-horizon science projects are examples of what cannot be recreated. What happens if tensions resurface between North and South Korea or between India and Pakistan? Who guides policy if the State and Defense Departments lose their experts? This is something where the next administration cannot simply reopen the spigot and recreate. Expertise is long to create and fast to destroy.

Ordinary citizens are likely to bear the brunt of the administration’s assaults on medical science and research, its destructive incursions into agencies like the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the withholding of  billions of federal dollars that had been awarded to medical researchers.

 “Federal funding for biomedical research is central to health care innovation,” David Cutler and Edward Glaeser, economists at Harvard, wrote in “Cutting the N.I.H. — The $8 Trillion Health Care Catastrophe,” published in May in The Journal of the American Medical Association. “More than 99 percent of all new drugs approved from 2010 through 2019 had some antecedent research funded by the N.I.H.”

Another study documented the administration’s withholding of financing and undermining of government oversight in multiple areas, including long-term care, scientific research and vaccination policy. The administration’s budget proposals and “Big Beautiful Bill” include severe reductions in health care access, including the outright termination of services for immigrants and gender minorities. Its mass layoffs of scientific and regulatory specialists will be difficult to reverse.

William Galston, a prominent social scientist, weighed in, writing that there has been “irreparable damage” on both the home front and in foreign relations. He cited the “destruction of America’s reputation as the best place in the world for the most promising scientists and innovators of various kinds to conduct research. The evisceration of funding for basic research will be hard to reverse without restoring some bipartisan agreement about the importance of knowledge and expertise. I’m not holding my breath.”

Galston argued that irreparable harm has been done to America’s relations with the rest of the world. Trump hasn’t simply upended the longstanding system of multilateral trade relations that this country created, but he has destroyed the “trust the United States built up over decades as the guarantor of European security, of support for democracy and human rights and provider of global public goods such as freedom of the seas.”

Edsall’s op-ed enumerates a number of areas where rebuilding will be difficult, if it can be done at all, very much including Trump’s assaults on the civil service–from the firing of thousands of workers (many of whom had irreplaceable expertise)  and turning thousands more into “at will” employees, to efforts to politicise the federal workforce in continued defiance of the Hatch Act.

A Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution called the Trump administration “the political-societal equivalent of a neutron bomb, and predicted that, even if Democrats take over, it will take far more than the next four years to rebuild it.

He isn’t wrong.

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