Posts Tagged ‘government’
“A republic, if you can keep it.”*
Just over a decade ago, Nils Gilman wrote an essay, The Twin Insurgency,” in which he warned of an emerging confluence of strategies between the rising global plutocratic class, on the one hand, and transnational criminal organizations, on the other. For all our sins, as you’ll see in his piece, he nailed the fundamental disposition of the tech-libertarian broligarch class. And…
One other thing I think I correctly intuited a decade ago was that a key politico-spatial implication of the Twin Insurgency was that the space of the national was fragmenting into “kaleidoscopic microsovereignties,” an argument that my friend Quinn Slobodian has recently developed at monographic length in his marvelous book Crack-Up Capitalism.
Quinn’s thesis is that the ultimate goal of what I called the plutocratic insurgents (and their intellectual and high-end service-economy henchmen) is to end the constraints that democratic nation-states impose on the privileges of the rich. These are rich men (and it is almost entirely men) who believe that their wealth should be untouchable, and that the privileges that this wealth buys should be unlimited. With Elon Musk’s DOGE, the mask is off: they are hell-bent on destroying any institutions of social care or risk-sharing that might touch their money or their privileges.
I cannot recommend Crack-Up Capitalism enough. Methodologically, is an intellectual history of the most notorious radical libertarians — from well-known assholes** like Milton Friedman and Peter Thiel to a congeries of even more colorful crackpots and kakistocrats — and their quest to craft for the perfect space for unfettered capitalism by shattering the map of allegedly sovereign territories into a variety of “exceptional” legal spaces: free ports, tax havens, special economic zones, etc. It is also an historical travelogue, taking the reader (as its cover blurb says) “from Hong Kong in the 1970s to South Africa in the late days of apartheid, from the neo-Confederate South to the former frontier of the American West, from the medieval City of London to the gold vaults of right-wing billionaires, and finally into the world’s oceans and war zones, charting the relentless quest for a blank slate where market competition is unfettered by democracy.” Best of all, Crack-Up Capitalism is wonderfully written: erudite and droll in equal measure (as the punning title itself suggests).
** I use the term “assholes” in the technical sense elaborated by Aaron James, chair of the UC Irvine philosophy department, in his 2012 book Assholes: A Theory, namely someone who “allows himself to enjoy special advantages in social relations out of an entrenched sense of entitlement that immunizes him against the complaints of other people.” I was reading the book when I wrote “The Twin Insurgency” and, even though I didn’t cite it (the anxiety of influence?), I realize now looking back how much it informed my understanding of phenomenon of the plutocratic insurgency. Conversely, I suspect the empirical fact of the rising plutocratic insurgency may well have been part of what inspired James to write his own book.
– Nils’ thoughts in full: “Revisiting the Plutocratic Insurgency.”
So, what can we expect? Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way paint a pretty grim picture…
… Democracy survived Trump’s first term because he had no experience, plan, or team. He did not control the Republican Party when he took office in 2017, and most Republican leaders were still committed to democratic rules of the game. Trump governed with establishment Republicans and technocrats, and they largely constrained him. None of those things are true anymore. This time, Trump has made it clear that he intends to govern with loyalists. He now dominates the Republican Party, which, purged of its anti-Trump forces, now acquiesces to his authoritarian behavior.
U.S. democracy will likely break down during the second Trump administration, in the sense that it will cease to meet standard criteria for liberal democracy: full adult suffrage, free and fair elections, and broad protection of civil liberties.
The breakdown of democracy in the United States will not give rise to a classic dictatorship in which elections are a sham and the opposition is locked up, exiled, or killed. Even in a worst-case scenario, Trump will not be able to rewrite the Constitution or overturn the constitutional order. He will be constrained by independent judges, federalism, the country’s professionalized military, and high barriers to constitutional reform. There will be elections in 2028, and Republicans could lose them.
But authoritarianism does not require the destruction of the constitutional order. What lies ahead is not fascist or single-party dictatorship but competitive authoritarianism—a system in which parties compete in elections but the incumbent’s abuse of power tilts the playing field against the opposition. Most autocracies that have emerged since the end of the Cold War fall into this category, including Alberto Fujimori’s Peru, Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela, and contemporary El Salvador, Hungary, India, Tunisia, and Turkey. Under competitive authoritarianism, the formal architecture of democracy, including multiparty elections, remains intact. Opposition forces are legal and aboveground, and they contest seriously for power. Elections are often fiercely contested battles in which incumbents have to sweat it out. And once in a while, incumbents lose, as they did in Malaysia in 2018 and in Poland in 2023. But the system is not democratic, because incumbents rig the game by deploying the machinery of government to attack opponents and co-opt critics. Competition is real but unfair.
Competitive authoritarianism will transform political life in the United States. As Trump’s early flurry of dubiously constitutional executive orders made clear, the cost of public opposition will rise considerably: Democratic Party donors may be targeted by the IRS; businesses that fund civil rights groups may face heightened tax and legal scrutiny or find their ventures stymied by regulators. Critical media outlets will likely confront costly defamation suits or other legal actions as well as retaliatory policies against their parent companies. Americans will still be able to oppose the government, but opposition will be harder and riskier, leading many elites and citizens to decide that the fight is not worth it. A failure to resist, however, could pave the way for authoritarian entrenchment—with grave and enduring consequences for global democracy.
The second Trump administration may violate basic civil liberties in ways that unambiguously subvert democracy. The president, for example, could order the army to shoot protesters, as he reportedly wanted to do during his first term. He could also fulfill his campaign promise to launch the “largest deportation operation in American history,” targeting millions of people in an abuse-ridden process that would inevitably lead to the mistaken detention of thousands of U.S. citizens.
But much of the coming authoritarianism will take a less visible form: the politicization and weaponization of government bureaucracy. Modern states are powerful entities. The U.S. federal government employs over two million people and has an annual budget of nearly $7 trillion. Government officials serve as important arbiters of political, economic, and social life. They help determine who gets prosecuted for crimes, whose taxes are audited, when and how rules and regulations are enforced, which organizations receive tax-exempt status, which private agencies get contracts to accredit universities, and which companies obtain critical licenses, concessions, contracts, subsidies, tariff waivers, and bailouts. Even in countries such as the United States that have relatively small, laissez-faire governments, this authority creates a plethora of opportunities for leaders to reward allies and punish opponents. No democracy is entirely free of such politicization. But when governments weaponize the state by using its power to systematically disadvantage and weaken the opposition, they undermine liberal democracy. Politics becomes like a soccer match in which the referees, the groundskeepers, and the scorekeepers work for one team to sabotage its rival…
[The authors explore the ways in which the government bureaucracy could be politicized: the threat of targeted prosecution, the weaponization of the IRS, and the mobilization of other executive departments to further the adminsistration’s agenda– which can, among them, punish identified opponents, reward loyalists, and operate like a “protection racket” on everyone else. For alll of that, they see a limit to the damage…]
… The Trump administration may derail democracy, but it is unlikely to consolidate authoritarian rule. The United States possesses several potential sources of resilience. For one, American institutions are stronger than those in Hungary, Turkey, and other countries with competitive authoritarian regimes. An independent judiciary, federalism, bicameralism, and midterm elections—all absent in Hungary, for instance—will likely limit the scope of Trump’s authoritarianism.
Trump is also weaker politically than many successful elected autocrats. Authoritarian leaders do the most damage when they enjoy broad public support: Bukele, Chávez, Fujimori, and Russia’s Vladimir Putin all boasted approval ratings above 80 percent when they launched authoritarian power grabs. Such overwhelming public support helps leaders secure the legislative supermajorities or landslide plebiscite victories needed to impose reforms that entrench autocratic rule. It also helps deter challenges from intraparty rivals, judges, and even much of the opposition.
Less popular leaders, by contrast, face greater resistance from legislatures, courts, civil society, and even their own allies. Their power grabs are thus more likely to fail. Peruvian President Pedro Castillo and South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol each had approval ratings below 30 percent when they attempted to seize extraconstitutional power, and both failed. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s approval rating was well below 50 percent when he tried to orchestrate a coup to overturn his country’s 2022 presidential election. He, too, was defeated and forced out of office.
Trump’s approval rating never surpassed 50 percent during his first term, and a combination of incompetence, overreach, unpopular policies, and partisan polarization will likely limit his support during his second. An elected autocrat with a 45 percent approval rating is dangerous, but less dangerous than one with 80 percent support.
Civil society is another potential source of democratic resilience. One major reason that rich democracies are more stable is that capitalist development disperses human, financial, and organizational resources away from the state, generating countervailing power in society. Wealth cannot wholly inoculate the private sector from the pressures imposed by a weaponized state. But the larger and richer a private sector is, the harder it is to fully capture or bully into submission. In addition, wealthier citizens have more time, skills, and resources to join or create civic or opposition organizations, and because they depend less on the state for their livelihoods than poor citizens do, they are in a better position to protest or vote against the government. Compared with those in other competitive authoritarian regimes, opposition forces in the United States are well-organized, well-financed, and electorally viable, which makes them harder to co-opt, repress, and defeat at the polls. American opposition will therefore be harder to sideline than it was in countries such as El Salvador, Hungary, and Turkey.
Civil society is another potential source of democratic resilience. One major reason that rich democracies are more stable is that capitalist development disperses human, financial, and organizational resources away from the state, generating countervailing power in society. Wealth cannot wholly inoculate the private sector from the pressures imposed by a weaponized state. But the larger and richer a private sector is, the harder it is to fully capture or bully into submission. In addition, wealthier citizens have more time, skills, and resources to join or create civic or opposition organizations, and because they depend less on the state for their livelihoods than poor citizens do, they are in a better position to protest or vote against the government. Compared with those in other competitive authoritarian regimes, opposition forces in the United States are well-organized, well-financed, and electorally viable, which makes them harder to co-opt, repress, and defeat at the polls. American opposition will therefore be harder to sideline than it was in countries such as El Salvador, Hungary, and Turkey.
Weaponized states create a difficult collective action problem for establishment elites who, in theory, would prefer democracy to competitive authoritarianism. The politicians, CEOs, media owners, and university presidents who modify their behavior in the face of authoritarian threats are acting rationally, doing what they deem best for their organizations by protecting shareholders or avoiding debilitating lawsuits, tariffs, or taxes. But such acts of self-preservation have a collective cost. As individual actors retreat to the sidelines or censor themselves, societal opposition weakens. The media environment grows less critical. And pressure on the authoritarian government diminishes.
The depletion of societal opposition may be worse than it appears. We can observe when key players sideline themselves—when politicians retire, university presidents resign, or media outlets change their programming and personnel. But it is harder to see the opposition that might have materialized in a less threatening environment but never did—the young lawyers who decide not to run for office; the aspiring young writers who decide not to become journalists; the potential whistleblowers who decide not to speak out; the countless citizens who decide not to join a protest or volunteer for a campaign.
America is on the cusp of competitive authoritarianism. The Trump administration has already begun to weaponize state institutions and deploy them against opponents. The Constitution alone cannot save U.S. democracy. Even the best-designed constitutions have ambiguities and gaps that can be exploited for antidemocratic ends. After all, the same constitutional order that undergirds America’s contemporary liberal democracy permitted nearly a century of authoritarianism in the Jim Crow South, the mass internment of Japanese Americans, and McCarthyism. In 2025, the United States is governed nationally by a party with greater will and power to exploit constitutional and legal ambiguities for authoritarian ends than at any time in the past two centuries.
Trump will be vulnerable. The administration’s limited public support and inevitable mistakes will create opportunities for democratic forces—in Congress, in courtrooms, and at the ballot box.
But the opposition can win only if it stays in the game. Opposition under competitive authoritarianism can be grueling. Worn down by harassment and threats, many of Trump’s critics will be tempted to retreat to the sidelines. Such a retreat would be perilous. When fear, exhaustion, or resignation crowds out citizens’ commitment to democracy, emergent authoritarianism begins to take root…
See also: “There’s a Term for What Trump and Musk Are Doing- How regime change happens in America,” from Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic (gift article), “Trump As Sovereign Decisionist,” from Nathan Gardels and Noema, and this elaboration on Applebaum’s piece by Gilman, “What Comes after the Cleansing Fire of MAGA?“
Happily, there are some signs of the opposition for which Levitsky and Way call, among them: state’s Attorneys General, some major priviate law firms, even some red-state universities. Let us fervently hope that this is just the beginning. (Indeed, here, from the estimable Henry Farrell, a suggestion as of a step each of us can take: “Trump is weaponizing financial payments: here’s what you can do.”)
* Benjamin Franklin, in response to Elizabeth Willing Powel’s question: “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?“
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As we deliberate on democracy, we might recall that it was on this date in 1945 that the first anti-discrimination law in the United States, the Alaska Equal Rights Act of 1945, was signed and went into effect. The product of the Alaska Native fight against segregation and other forms of discrimination, it abolished Jim Crow laws in Alaska, then a territory (not yet a state). One wonders if such an Act will be legal in our future…
“Do not remove a fence until you know why it was put up in the first place”*…
The last U. S. election was fueled, in some large measure, by dissatisfaction with government bureaucracies. Indeed, public trust in government has been low– among Democrats and Republicans alike– for decades; there is a wide-spread constituency for reform.
The pending answer at the federal level is an Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy-led effort, DOGE, which their comments suggest will be an accelerationist application of “business principles” and slash-and-burn reduction.
But as Kevin Hawickhorst reminds us, there is another way, one that the U.S. has successfully pursued before– one that doesn’t throw the baby out with the bath water…
For the federal bureaucracy, the 1940s through the 1960s are a nostalgic time. The era saw one spectacular achievement after another: from winning World War II, to building the interstate highway system, to landing on the moon. At its high point, trust in the federal government reached almost 80% in the 1950’s, as opposed to only 20% today.
Trust in the federal government has plummeted alongside the federal government’s ability to accomplish anything – which is no coincidence. Although government competence has changed for many reasons, there is one forgotten reason: after the second World War, the government was competent because it taught its managers to be competent.
During World War II, the poor management in the federal government was keenly felt. Although federal management had never been especially good, it reached a boiling point when it began noticeably impeding the war effort. The Bureau of the Budget (now OMB) responded by creating a new management unit tasked with training federal managers.
They termed their newly-developed management approach work simplification, which held that implementation and policy went hand-in-hand, and therefore managers had to be trained to streamline procedure in order to achieve policy goals. Moreover, the Bureau of the Budget felt that this viewpoint could be systematically taught to federal managers of average competence, and developed a training program to do so.
During the war, the civilian agencies were incredibly short staffed due to the draft, so any procedural red tape or poor distribution of work created instant bottlenecks. Many of these bottlenecks directly impacted the war effort, as (for example) with slow approvals for important construction projects. The Bureau of the Budget therefore began an initiative to improve management around 1942.
They conducted user research with several agencies and eventually felt they had a management system that could scale, which they termed Work Simplification. They taught managers Work Simplification at training seminars, and also created guides and pamphlets to distribute across the government. I quote from one of their guides1 that sets out the problem, the audience, and their goal:
Thinking of this sort has been going on in the United States Bureau of the Budget for some time. It has culminated in the decision to make a concerted drive to capture the best available means for exposing and disposing of common management problems, set it forth in clear, simple language, and put it in the hands of those who can use it to best advantage. And who are they? They are the operating managers of government: middle management people and first line supervisors. […]
From the standpoint of the Bureau of the Budget, Work Simplification is a method of attacking the procedural problems of large organizations by equipping first line supervisors with the skill to analyze and improve procedures. It provides a way of tapping the great reservoir of unused practical knowledge represented by this group.
… Their management agenda developed a training program for the managers closest to the ground, rather than (as is common today) focusing on top leadership…
… Although Work Simplification was developed during World War II, it was still the common approach for training federal managers into the 1960s. These were the stodgy managers of the Eisenhower era who oversaw the building of the interstate highway system, or the administration of the GI bill.
This is not how the federal government approaches management today. It would be, obviously, unreasonable to claim that earlier success was entirely due to training managers differently. But it clearly contributed – their methods explicitly aimed to solve issues that today’s processes aggravate.
In particular, the Bureau of the Budget’s work almost remarkably anticipated current conversations on government efficiency. Reformers note that the bureaucracy piles up layers of procedure without ever rethinking them – process charting taught managers to reduce procedural burden. Reformers note that government IT piles up layers of software from different eras, with nobody understanding how it fits together – process charting taught managers the start-to-finish viewpoint. Reformers note that bureaucrats rarely consider what it’s like to actually apply for benefits – once again, a failure that process charting aimed to correct.
Process charting is clearly not a perfect solution to any of these issues. But it is proof that the government can train bureaucrats to tackle these issues head-on!
The overall lessons of Work Simplification are even more important. Work Simplification’s success did not last forever, but it did last for several decades. And it achieved its success because the Bureau of the Budget created free training for low-level managers, while nobody else particularly cared.
So would-be bureaucratic streamliners today – proponents of product management thinking, agile IT development, or what have you – might imitate Eisenhower’s bureaucrats. Above all, they should prove that their proposals are a rational method that can be systematically taught to low-level managers, in order to put their “great reservoir of unused practical knowledge” to use…
How the federal government taught its managers to cut red tape: “Eisenhower’s Bureaucrats,” from @KHawickhorst.
Via Jennifer Pahlka, whose own Recoding America (and her continuing work) are powerful contributions to this critically-important dialogue.
By way of context, a piece from Venkatesh Rao explicitly about “self-help” but very useful in this broader/more systemic context: “How to Fall Off of the Wagon.” (Per the diagram below, from that post, the approach suggested above is “clockwise”; the Musk/Ramaswamy m.o., “counterclockwise”… which will make clarifying sense after you’ve read the short essay. While I can’t attribute the significance that I draw from it [for the issue of reengineering the government bureaucracies that are not serving Americans as they should] to Rao, I’d note that the clockwise direction is green; the counterclockwise, red.)
* G. K. Chesterton, The Thing
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As we fix it instead of throwing it away, we might recall that it was on this date in 1957 that President Dwight D. Eisenhower gave his sixth State of the Union Address to the joint houses of Congress. Eisenhower focused on three themes: a vigilant regard for human liberty, a wise concern for human welfare, and a ceaseless effort for human progress. His speech addressed the threats posed by the Soviet Union (and communism more generally around the world); urged efficient, effective government (as the government’s duty to citizens); and raised the issue of civil rights, calling for the enactment of what later became the Civil Rights Act of 1957.
Senate Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson called Eisenhower’s speech “a comprehensive and thoughtful analysis of the problems which confront our people.”
“Only in our dreams are we free. The rest of the time we need wages.”*…
The Economist is repurposing one of its famous indices…
Since 1986 The Economist has produced the Big Mac index as a light-hearted gauge of whether currencies are at their “correct” level. The famous burger is a good test of currency valuations because of its global uniformity and ubiquity. The same properties make it a useful way of comparing international salaries: how many Big Macs, in principle, can a typical worker afford with their wages?
The more conventional way of comparing incomes is to convert wages in different countries into a common currency. But that is misleading because exchange rates are volatile. Moreover, one American dollar goes a lot farther in, say, the Philippines than it does in America itself. The Big Mac helps to solve this problem as a ready-made illustration of purchasing power: it represents a bundle of goods (or, rather, a bun of goods) that is identical everywhere, and so it serves as a yardstick of the real cost of things from country to country.
For the Big Mac wage analysis (the MacWage, for short), we started with full-time, pre-tax earnings in 2023 as reported by the OECD, a club of 38 mostly rich countries. We then made a simple adjustment, dividing wages by the price of a Big Mac—all in local currencies. That gave us the number of burgers that the average full-time worker can buy annually.
The results? Americans can perhaps be forgiven for having somewhat expansive waistlines. Although fast-food prices have rocketed since the pandemic, Americans still earn more greasy calories than any others in our analysis [chart below]. The average American worker takes home the equivalent of 14,000 Big Macs in wages for a year of full-time work. At 590 calories a pop, they could buy enough burgers to keep ten adults fed for a year. The Swiss and Danes come, respectively, second and third in MacWages. At the bottom are Mexican workers, who can afford to buy about 2,500 Big Macs with their average annual wages.
A standard objection to any measure of higher incomes in America is that its workers generally get less time off. To factor this in, we looked at average hours worked, based on data from the OECD and the Conference Board, a business-research group. This yields slightly different results (see chart 2). Americans still get more than enough Big Macs—pulling in the equivalent of about 7.4 per hour on the job—but they drop to third in the ranking. The burger champions are the Danes, who earn 8.1 per hour, followed by the Swiss. Looked at another way, the average Dane works for just seven minutes to make enough money to buy a Big Mac. In Mexico—still at the bottom of the rankings after this hourly adjustment—workers must toil for about 57 minutes.
The MacWage is, of course, far from perfect. Danes may celebrate their top performance, but our measure misses how income taxes (which can surpass 50% in Denmark) eat into their burger budgets. Much else of what goes into the cost of living, from housing to transportation, is also barely reflected in the price of burgers. In a developing country like Mexico, where housing is relatively cheap and American fast-food indulgences relatively expensive, a burger-based wage calculation understates how much stuff an average worker can actually afford. Still, as a quick method for comparing incomes around the world, the MacWage is easily digestible…
The purchasing power of average earners across the OECD: “An alternative use for The Economist’s Big Mac index” from @ECONdailycharts in @TheEconomist.
* Terry Pratchett
###
As we supersize that, we might recall that it was on this date in 1979 that the U.S. government agreed to a bailout of the Chrysler Corporation. The smallest of the “Big Three” automakers, but still the 10th largest company in America, Chrysler suffering from a combination a bad management decisions and increased competition from Japanese and German automakers. Facing a $500 million loss for the year (and probably bankruptcy), newly-installed CEO Lee Iacocca asked the government for a guarantee on a $1.5 Billion loan package. In return for detailed plans from Chrysler detailing both how the company would right its ship and how other constituents (employees, suppliers, lenders) would make concessions, the Carter Administration (which feared that a Chrysler failure could lead to a “depression”– and depression-level unemployment– in the auto industry) agreed. In return for its guarantee, the government received stock warrants in the company.
Chrysler did turn itself around: it proceeded to introduce the “K-Car” line, then mini-vans, then the earliest generation of SUVs. The company repaid the government-guaranteed debt ahead of schedule; the Treasury made about $500 million on its warrants.
But of course, nearly thirty years later, in 2008, Chrysler received billions in a new bailout from the U.S. government in the aftermath of the financial crisis that decimated automotive sales over the following few years. Chrysler filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in April 2009, before being acquired in total by Fiat in 2014.
“For every complex problem, there’s a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong”*…
Last year, in explaining the Biden Administration’s emerging new economic policy, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan talked of a “small yard, high fence” approach to its trade with China. The idea: to place strict restrictions on a small number of technologies with significant military potential while maintaining normal economic exchange in other areas.
The estimable Henry Farrell argues that this approach to technology and China is working poorly (though, he suggests, it will work much worse if Trump wins and takes office in January). Self-reinforcing political feedback loops and self-reinforcing expectations are leading to breakdown.
The fundamental problem of managing geopolitics through manipulating technological trajectories is not readily solvable given existing means, Farrell suggests. We live in a much more complex world than existing state institutions are capable of handling. Therefore, he argues, we need to remake the state…
… Making the right choices in a complex policy environment requires an approach that is a world away from the application of brute force at scale. Your maps of the environment are going to be all wrong when you go in, and brute force is likely to have unexpected consequences. It isn’t just that you are going to make mistakes (you are), but your map of the actual problem you are trying to solve is likely to be utterly out of whack. As you try to catch up with China on EV, you discover that you don’t understand the market right. As you try to impose controls on military use of semiconductors, you find out that you don’t have the information you need to really actually understand how the semiconductor market works.
The problem – as Jen Pahlka’s book Recoding America explains at length – is that addressing such complex problems does not fit well with the way that the U.S. government works. When you are trying to impose order a vast sprawling bureaucracy, which is its own mid-sized global economy, and when your people don’t trust government much, you rely on rigid contracting systems, which define the problem in advance down to its finest details, even if that definition is out of whack with reality. You don’t build connections between the bureaucracy and outside actors, unless they run through cumbersome and rigidly pre-defined channels because it takes months or years to get approval for such connections. And you certainly don’t try to remake policy in realtime as your understanding of the situation changes. Pahlka’s book is cunningly disguised as an account of US software outsourcing practices. If it mentions either ‘national security’ or ‘economic security’ once, I don’t remember it. But it is arguably (along with Dan Davies’ similarly motivated The Unaccountability Machine) the most important book on these topics of the last twenty years. [Your correspondent heartily agrees.]…
… what do you do – is this. You start to think… about how to build economic security institutions that are designed from the ground up to manage complexity. If you want to take ‘small yard, high fence’ seriously as a policy approach, you need to build the apparatus to discover what lies inside, what lies outside, and what the barriers ought be. That apparatus – and its prescriptions – need to change over time both to match a better understanding of the policy environment, and changes in the environment itself.
And we don’t have the apparatus to actually implement small yard, high fence properly. Nor do we have it for pretty well every other plausible economic security policy you might imagine, short of a brute force decoupling of the U.S. and Chinese economies. And if you did that, you would need enormous capacity to manage the horrifically complex aftermath, if that aftermath could even be managed at all.
Clearly, it is far easier to make these arguments in the general than the particular. Saying that you need reforms is straightforward, but figuring out what they ought to be, let alone how to implement them in current political circumstances, is an altogether more difficult challenge. But it is where the debate needs to be going – and there is a role for technology in it. We are in a situation that rhymes in weird ways with the situation discovered by Vannevar Bush after World War II – recognizing that the needs of government had changed, that vastly better information and feedback systems were required to meet those needs, and that even if we didn’t exactly know what those systems were, we needed to start figuring them out, and quickly. That world had its pathologies. This one does too. But to prevent them becoming worse, we need better ways to manage them, and to ensure that the solutions are better than the problems that they are supposed to mitigate.
This is – obviously – a radical set of claims. But it’s one that is entailed by the diagnosis of the problem that I’ve presented. If we need to manage complex challenges – of which the U.S. China relationship is only one – we need a state that is capable of managing complexities. We don’t have one. And that remains a first order problem, regardless of however hawkish or dovish you are…
We need a new kind of state for the new geopolitics: “‘Small Yard, High Fence’: these four words conceal a mess,” from @himself.bsky.social (and @pahlkadot.bsky.social). Eminently worth reading in full.
* H.L. Mencken
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As we ruminate on restructuring, we might recall that it was on this date in 1954 (7 years after the transistor was developed at Bell Labs) that Texas Instruments introduced the Regency TR-1, the first commercially-manufactured transistor radio. Its performance was mediocre, but its small size and portability drove sales of over 150,000 units.
Further to Farrell’s and Pahlka’s points, it’s instructive to ponder what became of the transistor radio as a product category (and of the competitors in it) over the next few decades– and the altogether-unanticipated plethora of small, convenient, hand-held product categories it spawned: calculators, mobile phones, tablets… and whatever comes next…
“A republic, if you can keep it”*…
Nathan Gardels on one of the deepest issues at play in the social and political sphere in the U.S and around the world…
It is a mark of just how deep the crisis of governance across Western democracies has become that conflict irresolvable through political competition is giving way to the reconsideration of founding constitutions and the institutions they invest with legitimacy.
At its heart, this crisis is about trust. As the political scientist Francis Fukuyama has argued, “Belief in the corruptibility of all institutions leads to the dead end of universal distrust. American democracy, all democracy, will not survive a lack of belief in the possibility of impartial institutions; instead partisan political combat will come to pervade every aspect of life.” And so it has.
The ongoing populist surge of recent years did not cause the crisis. It is a symptom of the decay of democratic institutions that, captured by the organized interests of an insider establishment, failed to address the dislocations of hyper-globalization, the disruptions of rapid technological change and the attendant creep of widening cultural cleavage. Too many were left behind and struggled while others prospered and played.
Adding danger to decay, the fevered partisans of populism are intent on throwing out the baby with the bathwater, assaulting the integrity of the very institutions which protect republics from themselves through checks and balances, or that are critical to the fair administration of complex societies. The rebellion against a moribund political class has become a revolt against governance itself and the infrastructure that goes with it.
Populists who fashion themselves as tribunes of the people have never met independent and impartial institutions they can happily abide. Believing they are the embodiment of majority will, any constraint on their power is portrayed as a contrivance by elites to keep the masses down. When cemented with cultural resentment against those at the top who look down on the unsophisticated rabble living in the sticks and outside the fashionable status sphere, anti-elitist sentiment has enough truth value to stick.
We’ve seen versions of this over recent years where the previous governments in Poland and Brazil, as well as the present government in Israel, have sought to politicize the top courts and limit their independence from the powers that be. Hungary under Viktor Orbán, an outright proponent of illiberal democracy, has done the same, seeking further to stifle independent media, think tanks and civil society organizations for good measure.
In Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum, the president-in-waiting elected by a landslide earlier this year, has pledged to continue pursuing President Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador’s plan for popular election of that nation’s Supreme Court, thus making its slant coincide with the interests of the ruling party. Sheinbaum, like her predecessor, is also bent on disempowering the independent electoral commission that oversees the polls and certifies voting outcomes.
With the U.S. Supreme Court already dominated by ultra-conservative judges, partisans of Donald Trump have turned their attention to slashing the powers of what it calls “the administrative state” — those agencies with the discretionary authority under legislative mandate to regulate private sector activities in realms from environmental impact to food and drug safety to publicly traded securities to the monopolistic conduct of large companies. Most of these agencies have been in place since the early 20th century as the Progressive Era’s response to the vast inequality, child labor, unsanitary industry, crony corruption and robber barons of the unregulated Gilded Age.
The aim of modern-day populists is to both diminish and politicize the regulatory technocracy to fit their agenda. The famous Project 2025 plan prepared by the Heritage Foundation in anticipation of another Trump presidency has gone so far as to propose the abolition of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — the key body monitoring climate change, which they don’t believe in. My colleague Nils Gilman aptly calls this endeavor “institutional vandalism.” [See here for a taste of Gilman’s sharp thinking on the more general issue at play.]
Though the Trump campaign has sought to distance itself from the details of Project 2025, which may scare sensible voters in the runup to the November election, few have any doubts that it provides the essential roadmap for action if Republicans come to power.
Following verdicts to overturn Roe vs. Wade on abortion, blunt the scope of regulatory agencies and codify presidential immunity, the realization of what a stacked Supreme Court means has prompted President Joe Biden to engage the battle over institutions head on.
As his last stand after bowing out of the presidential race, the president is embarking on a quixotic quest to undo the impact of recent rulings and seek a constitutional amendment to reform how the Supreme Court works. First, arguing that “no one is above the law,” he would repeal the presidential immunity recently granted and impose a “binding code of conduct” with strict ethics guidelines prohibiting political activity by justices and requiring transparent disclosure of gifts.
The core structural change of Biden’s proposal is to get rid of lifetime terms and limit them to 18 years, with staggered appointments every two years (when one of the terms expires) to avoid the enduring sway of justices chosen by one political regime and ideological persuasion. In short, a process which would perpetually unstack the highest court instead of invite and enable its stacking.
This is an uphill battle, for sure, since amending the constitution would entail a 2/3 vote of both houses of Congress and approval of ¾ of all state legislatures.
“Defend the institutions” is hardly a rallying cry that will stir the passions of the public in the same way as the instinctive appeal of demagogues who promise simple solutions to complex problems while blaming all misfortune on the world outside or perceived enemies within. But repairing and restoring the integrity of democracy’s infrastructure is the only path back to trust. That is a tall order in the short term.
Popular emotion is the Achilles heel of democracies. Institutions that temper emotion through the cool deliberation of disinterested reason are what make the system work to the benefit of all.
As Fukuyama rightly says, democracies can’t survive without at least a belief in the possibility of impartial platforms for the administration of justice and governance. That proposition will be tested as never before in the battle over institutions in the near years ahead…
A challenge to democracy’s infrastructure: “The Battle Over Institutions,” from @NoemaMag, with @FukuyamaFrancis and @nils_gilman.
* Benjamin Franklin’s response to Elizabeth Willing Powel‘s question in 1787: “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?”
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As we rally around the rudiments, we might recall that it was on this date in 1935 that President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act, part of his New Deal program that created a government pension system for the retired.
By 1930, the United States was, along with Switzerland, the only modern industrial country without any national social security system. Amid the Great Depression, the physician Francis Townsend galvanized support behind a proposal to issue direct payments to older people. Responding to that movement, Roosevelt organized a committee led by Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins to develop a major social welfare program proposal. Roosevelt presented the plan in early 1935 and signed the Social Security Act into law on August 14, 1935. The Supreme Court upheld the act in two major cases decided in 1937.
The law established the Social Security program. The old-age program is funded by payroll taxes, and over the ensuing decades, it contributed to a dramatic decline in poverty among older people, and spending on Social Security became a significant part of the federal budget. The Social Security Act also established an unemployment insurance program [only a few states had poorly-funded programs at the time] administered by the states and the Aid to Dependent Children program, which provided aid to families headed by single mothers. The law was later amended by acts such as the Social Security Amendments of 1965, which established two major healthcare programs: Medicare and Medicaid.
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