The conversation about limited government has morphed from looking at ways to reduce bureaucracy to an effort to eliminate large pieces of the government all together. Russell Muirhead is Robert Clements Professor of Democracy and Politics at Dartmouth College, and he joins host Krys Boyd to discuss why non-elected workers in “the administrative state” find themselves in the crosshairs from both the right and the left, how Donald Trump’s term might affect them, and what elimination of their functions might mean for the nation. His book, written with Nancy L. Rosenblum, is “Ungoverning: The Attack on the Administrative State and the Politics of Chaos.”
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Transcript
Krys Boyd [00:00:00] We can argue and we do, about how big government ought to be in this country and what amount we ought to spend on keeping it going. But we all agree that we do need government agencies to take care of things the private sector can’t or won’t. Right? Turns out not so much. From Kera in Dallas, this is Think. I’m Krys Boyd. My guest is raising alarm bells about a stunning antipathy toward non-elected government in all forms, coupled with an effort to eliminate many functions carried out by the so-called administrative state. Russell Muirhead is Robert Clements, Professor of Democracy and Politics at Dartmouth College. His new book, written with Nancy L Rosenblum, is called “Ungoverning: The Attack on the Administrative State and the Politics of Chaos. Russell, welcome to Think.
Russell Muirhead [00:00:44] Thank you. I’m delighted to be here.
Krys Boyd [00:00:46] Before we define ungoverning, maybe start by defining this thing known as the administrative state. What does that term encompass?
Russell Muirhead [00:00:54] My gosh, what a great question. Because, you know, I teach politics and I feel like, you know, as I should I should have known this my whole career, but I didn’t really even myself focus on it until I saw it start to start to become under attack. And I asked myself the same question. And I came to see that there’s this. The biggest part of government is the administrative part of government. It’s it’s the 15 departments that make up the president’s cabinet, starting with the famous ones like the Department of Treasury, Department of Defense or Department of State. But all the way down to, you know, Department of Commerce, not only those, but independent regulatory agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Environmental Protection Agency. And these are the things that do the work of government. You know, I actually serve in the New Hampshire legislature. We can pass bills. And after we pass them, if the governor signs them, they become laws. But laws are just pieces of paper. They don’t do anything. They don’t they don’t, you know, lay any rubber on the road. You need another part of government to take those laws and make them real and use them to build bridges, to clean waterways, to insure that the workplaces are safe. And that part of government that takes the laws and makes them real is the administrative part of government. And and it’s it’s where most people who work for the government are actually employed.
Krys Boyd [00:02:24] It’s so interesting because you’re right, we do understandably get very hung up on the political portions of government. But that is in many ways the tip of the iceberg.
Russell Muirhead [00:02:33] Yeah, And it’s the part you know, what’s nice about the political part is you can kind of get it all in one room. You know, take the State of the Union address, which is coming up. Most everyone in the House of Representatives, most everyone in the Senate, most, you know, even a number of Supreme Court justices, the president, the president’s cabinet will all be there in the Capitol. And if you’re sitting in the gallery, you could you could take them in. And one glance, and that’s our government, you know, it’s about is about 5 or 600 people. But actually, of course, there’s there’s another 2 million people who are who are doing the work who are in, you know, embassies around the world, who are in military bases around the world, who are in FBI offices all over the country. And and those you know, that’s the part of government that’s its biggest. As you say, the iceberg metaphor is good. It’s the part you don’t really see.
Krys Boyd [00:03:24] Ungoverning takes aim at the administrative state specifically, is the idea that appointed government professionals and civil servants who just get jobs by being hired ought to have less power to actually do the work of government.
Russell Muirhead [00:03:38] You know, it could be we could argue about exactly how much power regulatory agencies ought to have, say, in interpreting laws passed by Congress and translating those laws into rules that get applied to companies, to individuals, even to state and local governments. And, you know, we could argue about how much oversight the courts ought to have. Those are kind of the fine lines of determining administrative power. But but I think what’s really happening now isn’t just an argument over exactly how much authority, you know, regulators ought to have a little more, a little less, a little more discretion and less what’s happening, as is an argument, not even an argument, just a frontal attack on the very existence of government. And so, yeah, I mean, and it’s motivated by this idea of a deep state conspiracy. And the deep state conspiracy doesn’t say, hey, these regulators, you know, who decide how many, you know, sort of wheelchair accessible parking spaces there need to be outside the Home Depot. You know, those regulators have too much power. That’s not you know, that could be true. Maybe they do have to was was you know, what’s happening is this kind of frontal attack, this is they shouldn’t exist at all. They actually represent a conspiracy. They are conspiring to defeat the American people and they need to be destroyed. And and so it’s not a fine grained, refined, you know, sort of correction of the writ of authority given to administrators. It’s not nuanced at all. It’s something that says, hey, the Internal Revenue Service shouldn’t exist. The thing that allows our government to collect revenue, something every government has to do, just shouldn’t exist. And, you know, a government that can’t collect revenue is a government that can’t govern. So so that’s what I’m talking about. And that’s why Nancy and I went to this kind of, you know, maybe made up the word ungoverning. We’re like, this is something we haven’t really seen. If you look in the annals of political history, it’s hard to find an example of someone, you know, party a person who who comes into power and says, hey, let’s destroy the government that I now command. That’s that’s something really different.
Krys Boyd [00:05:54] Traditional conservatives have been quite skeptical about big government for a long time, Russell. How is ungoverning different from wanting to limit the size and reach of government?
Russell Muirhead [00:06:05] Nancy and I spent a lot of time thinking about that, discussing it with each other and researching it, because we really wanted to make sure that we weren’t just like two liberal professors, you know, saying, hey, what conservatives want smaller government, a larger room for markets, you know, is totally like illegitimate. In fact, we don’t believe that at all. We appreciate the the rivalry of conservatives and progressives and, you know, the constructive tension that can set in motion by bipartisanship and by argument. And we I think individually, each of us have many examples where we personally kind of agree with the idea that maybe government should get smaller. You know, the regulation take an old example, the regulation of airlines in the 1970s, which regulated, you know, the the food that they would serve it and their lunch service that that was that was actually producing prices that were really high. Air travel that was a luxury that was unaffordable to the middle class. And airline deregulation might make sense. We agree with that, looking back. And lots of other examples, too. So deregulation, which is kind of taking an area that the government used to regulate and saying, let’s let’s get the government out of this and turn it over to, you know, create a larger space for markets. That might be a very prudent policy. And it is a policy. It’s a form of governing to say something should be deregulated. It’s it’s totally plausible, and we can argue about it in any given case. Destroying government isn’t the same as redrawing the boundaries of what government regulates.
Krys Boyd [00:07:41] To the extent that there seems to be some appetite for and governing among many Americans at the present moment. What is the reason? Are people just fed up with what strikes them as poor performance from government agencies? Or is there something else at work here?
Russell Muirhead [00:07:55] You’re right. It’s ungoverning isn’t this this thing that’s been kind of brought in through the back door? You know, it’s not it’s not like a secret plan. It’s just it’s not top down. It’s you’re right. It’s a response to widespread and really, really profound frustration with government and with the group that we might call governing elites. And, of course, you know, let’s just let’s just acknowledge that it’s bureaucracies always frustrating. And bureaucracy is going to be frustrating because almost because of its of its fairness, you know, bureaucracy is following rules. Standard operating procedures. And what I want when I go into City Hall is I want, you know, the person on the other side of the desk to respond to me. To my situation. I say, hey, I shouldn’t have gotten that parking ticket. I was just running in to tell my dentist I wasn’t going to be able to get to my next appointment. I mean, come on. Do I really? And they say, well, you’re you know, we follow the rules. You were parked. We shouldn’t be. You’re getting the ticket. And I feel frustrated that the government can’t acknowledge my situation. So frustration with red tape, with standard operating procedures, with with the impersonality of bureaucracy, that’s just normal. That’s going to be built in. But I think what what we have seen in recent American politics is something much, much more grave, a real draining of trust in our decision makers. And and the reason for that, I think, is because of two colossal failures that we’ve seen. You know, those political elites who take charge rule in our name commit in the last 20 years, one, the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. And, you know, we were told when when we invaded Iraq in March 2023, that might take, you know, six weeks, but not six months. That’s what the secretary of defense said. And, you know, 20 years later, we’re bogged down in Iraq, Afghanistan. You know, when we left, we accomplished I hate to say absolutely nothing. And, you know, patriotic Americans supported decision makers in the Department of Defense and the White House who who argued that this was that, first of all, this was a doable task and a necessary task. And, you know, I don’t know if we’re misled or whether our elites just misled themselves. But trillions and trillions of dollars and many, many thousands of lives, many, many entries later, nothing was accomplished. So that’s a huge failure. And Donald Trump, you know, in the South Carolina debate, I think the spring of 2016 said that the Iraq invasion was a humanitarian catastrophe. Carly Fiorina know, looked at it and said, you can’t say that we’re Republicans. I just said I just said that. So he was one of the he was the first Republican to acknowledge this failure. And and it was a bipartisan failure. Another, of course, was the financial meltdown of 2008, followed by the the morally offensive bailing out of the very, very individuals and companies that were responsible for the meltdown, such as Goldman Sachs. And and, you know, in the wake of that, to see, you know, Hillary Clinton go give a couple lunchtime talks and look, I don’t want to beat up on Hillary Clinton. I think public spirited, intelligent, wonderful person. But to see her go give talks, lunchtime talks to Goldman Sachs and come away with, you know, 2 or $3000 checks, it makes I think a lot of people think, hey, the system is rigged and it makes them lose faith in and I say elites in those people who run for president, who run for Senate, who run our government. So those are two colossal failures. And. And by 2015, you know, the 2016 by the 2016 election, it was, you know, not a lot of trust for those who said, hey, you know, leave it up to us. We’ll take care of you.
Krys Boyd [00:12:00] Okay. So how does ungoverning represent a substitution of personal will for governing? If there’s so much distrust in institutions, why do we put our trust in a leader that wants to blow it all up?
Russell Muirhead [00:12:15] Again, you’re putting your finger right on it. When we distrust institutions, when we distrust an entire political class, when we when we lose confidence in the whole system. And this is, I think, a loss of confidence that I see on the left, on the right and in the center. When that happens, it’s almost natural to say we need one great person, one person to ride in on a white horse and fix it. And here he is, this person who isn’t tainted by those historic failures. Donald Trump. Say what you will about him. A man who has who has created enormous success for himself in real estate and entertainment, 14 seasons. I mean, somebody gave me a network television show. It’d be off the air in a week. I wouldn’t be able to hold my audience. And he held it for 14 seasons. So I’m like, okay, this is somebody who’s good at something. And and he’s and he’s not been part of the political class. And he comes in and says, Only I can fix it. And I understand. I understand how frustrated you are. And and he voices he gives convincing voice to that frustration. And another person who does and who did that and who’s been doing it for the past ten years is Bernie Sanders. And so people like Bernie Sanders, people like Donald Trump. I mean, Bernie isn’t fundamentally a demagogue who believes that only he can fix it. I think Trump really believes only I can fix it. And so he says, give me personal power. Don’t trust the bureaucracy. Don’t trust the agencies, don’t trust the political class. Trust me. And people are and people, you know, in this in this moment of intense, I think, disappointment, feelings of betrayal, really, not just disappointment with their government. A lot of people are like, okay, we trust you.
Krys Boyd [00:14:03] Russell, why would any president want to preside over a government that can hardly do anything for its own people?
Russell Muirhead [00:14:10] You know, I think I think it’s the kind of paradox of personal rule. I think people who are tuned to power who, in a sense love power, you know, they’re attracted to politics, normal people. I you know, normal people, I have to say, they don’t love power. They just don’t want to be oppressed by those with power. They want to be left alone. But but there’s a small group of people, category people who really turned on by power. They want it for themselves and they believe in themselves. And, you know, and if they are extraordinarily talented and extraordinarily lucky, they get a lot of feedback, too. And, you know, maybe a little bit diluted. They can create a world for themselves in which they’re good at everything and they always succeed. And so they don’t realize that by concentrating personal power, they actually become less powerful. So so let me give you an example. Ronald Reagan is the person who breathed life into conservatism for the first time since since 1932, really, 1936, the great, great victory, the second reelection, the first reelection of Franklin Roosevelt. Conservatism been pretty dead since then. In 1980, Ronald Reagan’s elected and breathed life back into it. And and he collects around him principled conservatives and he appoints them to the agencies. He sends them out into the federal government. He appoints them to roles. And and and and they knew that if they served his principles, the principles of small government, for instance, of low taxation, of restraining and maybe turning back the regulatory state that if they serve those principles, he they wouldn’t get fired. They might mess up, they might make a mistake here or there. They might fall on their faces now and then. But the president would support them. And and so by devolving power, by turning it over to other people, Reagan became more powerful if he had insisted on keeping it all for himself, if he had loved power that much, if he had loved it as much as I think Donald Trump loves it, he would paradoxically have been less powerful. I mean, let me give you another example. Suppose I, I start a lawn mowing business and and I’m, you know, whatever so successful that I can’t keep up with the lawns and I’ve got to hire other people to run the equipment. I, you know, if I want to succeed, I’ve got to devolve power to those people I hire. I can’t sharpen every blade. I can’t inspect every lawn. I can’t drive every piece of equipment. I’ve got to let other people do it. Other people make decisions. I’ve got to higher quality people, pay them fairly and trust them to do a good job. If I do that, I can scale up and serve a lot more customers than I can all by myself. So. So this is the sort of principle of administration giving other people power, devolving power to qualified people, giving them, you know, a few key goalpost to aim for holding them accountable at key moments, but letting them make the small decisions. That’s how you get you get more powerful by being less powerful and you get less powerful by keeping all. Power to yourself.
Krys Boyd [00:17:16] So ungoverning advocates, if you want to call it that, I mean, that’s your term, we should say they’re not calling themselves ungoverning advocates, but obviously they have problems with the so-called deep state. And I have to confess, a quite apart from any political orientation, I know a fair amount of people who work in government jobs. And if their intention is to destroy the country and undermine the rule of the people and the elected officials that represent them, they have done a really good job of hiding this. Like who exactly is thought to be pulling the strings in this toxic deep state?
Russell Muirhead [00:17:52] That I know. So it’s somehow the deep state. I mean, it’s this thing about conspiratorial. I didn’t want to call them theories, but let’s just say conspiracy theories today is that they’re not really theories. They don’t give an account. They don’t give an answer to the question you just asked, who’s pulling the strings? How does a conspiracy operate? They’re just free floating accusations. They’re just free floating assertions. It’s like, you know, Pizzagate, Hillary Clinton’s running a child sex trafficking ring out of a pizzeria in Washington, D.C. You know, there’s there’s no evidence. There’s no, you know, narrative. There’s nothing that’s being explained. The Deep State conspiracy is is similarly nebulous. It’s just an assertion. But take you know, Kash Patel, he’s the gentleman who’s been nominated to to lead the Federal Bureau of Investigation. You know, Kash Patel says that the FBI, the bureau, he’s about to well, if he’s confirmed that he will lead. He says that the FBI has been directed by deep state conspiracists who are centered in the Washington, DC office of the FBI, and that the only solution is to close down the Washington office, the Washington headquarters of the FBI. And he’s promised to close it down and convert it into a museum of the Deep State. You know, they may not call themselves ungoverning advocates, but this they might as well. I mean, this guy is saying my aim is to destroy the institution that I’ve been nominated to lead because it’s so corrupt, it can’t be reformed. And I think that last thing is the thing to kind of just to just linger on the alternative, too. And governing is not a defense of the status quo. It’s not a defense of the political elites. That said, yes, let’s, you know, gallop into Iraq and Afghanistan. Let’s deregulate financial markets. The alternative to ungoverning is reform and what this country needs. Well, I don’t want to just share my opinions, but it’s quite possible that what this country really needs is serious reform. And the real crime of ungoverning is that it displaces reformist energy. You know, to reform something. You have to know what you’re doing and you have to you have to be very, you know, very careful about it. You want to I think the FBI should be reformed, but reform isn’t destruction. And if we opt for a course of destruction, we’ll give up on the chance for reform.
Krys Boyd [00:20:22] Of course, reform takes a lot of time and planning and trial and error. You note in the book that one appeal of ungovernable as an alternative is that, again, eventually it can happen overnight, right? Kash Patel, if he were to get his way and close down that Washington FBI office, that that’s something that theoretically could be executed immediately.
Russell Muirhead [00:20:43] That is so right that there’s there’s an incredible appeal to immediacy, you know, to right now. And I think what we’re seeing from from a lot of the movement that’s really excited about about Trump’s, you know, election and the Trump presidency is a desire for change right now. And and and that’s not politics. I mean, to make something happen and make it last in the world takes time. And and so that desire for immediacy is is something that you know, can be satisfied, I guess to the theater of destruction. But but in the long run it won’t create any lasting satisfaction. We won’t look at the government after a moment of destruction and say, you know, yes, now we really believe in it.
Krys Boyd [00:21:37] Well, let’s say that un governing advocates get what they want. They somehow dismantle the administrative state and many of its functions. Do they have plans for what comes next? Like, do they replace the kind of government agencies they disapprove of with something that could ostensibly work better? Or do they just give up on many of the functions that government currently fills?
Russell Muirhead [00:22:00] If they sort of so-called succeed, if they do what they say they’re going to do. If Kash Patel closes down, the Washington, D.C., FBI office, turns it into a museum of the Deep State. Well, it sounds so preposterous that it’s almost like I shouldn’t take it literally. I shouldn’t be, says. But but, you know, either people are liars or you should take what they say seriously. So when he says this, I take it, you know, as a serious proposal, as absurd as it might sound. If he succeeds at doing this, what we’ll have is, on one hand, a government that can’t investigate crimes, that can’t enforce laws neutrally, and that opens up and that will introduce a lot more insecurity, a lot more chaos. Those who want to break rules and break laws will be more likely to get away with it. But also introduces the possibility that the elected leadership can then use the husk of the old FBI to do its political work to obstruct, harass, prosecute, intimidate, dispossess, imprison its political opponents. And this is the kind of thing that if we look at traditional politics from time immemorial until fairly recently, this is why people wanted political power. They wanted power so they could harm their enemies and help their friends and and that harming using power to harm your enemies and help your friends is the opposite of the rule of law. That that’s the that’s the rule of persons, not the rule of law. So so what we’re going to get if if the agents of ungoverning succeed in their quest to destroy institutions like the FBI, the Justice Department, to make them to make them responsive to the personal will of the one great leader, what we’re going to get on one hand, on one hand is chaos. On the other hand is we’re going to get a an erosion of rule of law, an abstraction, rule of law. Such an abstraction. It almost it just you can hear the frustration. I can hear the frustration in my own voice when I say it. But but what rule of law means is, is a government of laws, not men, a government that’s fair with respect to every single human being and doesn’t enact the will of one party, the one side of one person.
Krys Boyd [00:24:25] So if this starts with suspicion of and attacks on the expertise that exists within government departments, do you think the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Chevron case laid the groundwork for that?
Russell Muirhead [00:24:38] So in all honesty, I can’t really tell yet. I don’t think so necessarily. I think that, you know what the. But it might I mean, here’s here’s what I think. I think there are about three justices on the Supreme Court who want to destroy the administrative state. They think it’s unconstitutional. They have kind of an eighth graders understanding of the Constitution. You know, there’s Article one, the legislature, Congress, the Senate, the House, there’s Article two, the presidency, Article three, the courts. And because they can’t figure out exactly where every agency fits in, like the Securities Exchange Commission or the FBI or the EPA, they want to get rid of those. And, you know, never mind if if we needed an EPA in order to make sure that our rivers didn’t catch on fire, you know, because of rampant pollution, the consequences be damned. We’re going to get rid of these agencies. About three, three justices, I think, just want to get rid of the administrative state. And there are another three who I think want to redraw the lines of authority that, you know, are invested in the administrative state in a sort of precise way. And that’s and those three and three came together to reverse the Chevron decision, which basically the consequence of that means that agencies, they don’t get much discretion in interpreting vague laws passed by Congress and translating those vague laws into concrete rules. When they do that translation, if somebody objects. Courts can oversee and review their decisions, even if their decisions are kind of reasonable or extreme, extraordinarily reasonable on their face. So courts have more power and agencies have have less power. That itself doesn’t destroy the role of expertise. It doesn’t systematically, you know, destroy the administrative state. It just makes makes it easier for people to sue agencies and and gives courts somewhat more power. How it actually plays out, I don’t yet know. But but I do think that underlying that very kind of the precision and the specificity of of this decision with respect to the Chevron, with Chevron deference, is this more general desire to just obliterate administrative agencies? And I think that there is a faction on the Supreme Court that wants to do that and use this decision and will use future decisions to try to get everything at once. As of yet, I don’t think it’s gotten everything at once.
Krys Boyd [00:27:00] Russell, if an ungoverning leader wants loyalty over expertise is going to prioritize loyalty. I mean, the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive, right? Isn’t it possible to find people who are loyal to the leader at the very top who know what they’re doing in running a government agency?
Russell Muirhead [00:27:19] I really appreciate that that that observation. I think you’re exactly right. That and look, if you were the president, you would want people who are you know, when you made an appointments, you know, you’d want people who are both expert and loyal. I agree. And that’s exactly right. John Bolton, a Trump’s appoint appointee in his first administration to be ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton, recently wrote a piece differentiating loyalty from fealty. You know, loyalty is is commitment to principles and goals. You could be a loyal can serve you could be loyal to Reagan because of your principled conservatism. But that doesn’t mean that you’re that you’re loyal to Reagan as a person, that you’ll do his personal bidding. So we all, you know, public officials take an oath where we commit to uphold the law and the Constitution. And so so if your superior were to issue an unlawful order, an order that would command you to do something at variance, what’s required with the Constitution to betray your oath, to support and uphold. And you’d be duty bound to disobey that order. And and, you know, and that’s that’s loyalty to principle loyalty to the Constitution, loyalty to your commander insofar as they, too, are serving the Constitution. But it’s not personal. It’s not it’s not loyalty to, you know, the person of the king. And and I think what Trump wants isn’t loyalty. I think he wants fealty, personal submission, and he engages in what I would call submission rituals, forcing those people he’s appointed to show their submission to him. The way they’re doing that right now is by compelling those who are appointed to the new Trump administration to proclaim that the 2020 election was stolen. If somebody says the outcome of the 2020 election was free and fair and Biden was elected, rightfully, they cannot get an appointment in this administration because by saying that they’re showing that they’re not loyal to Trump as a person. And and so he’s you know, he’s forcing people that he’s appointed to bow down and and engage in a kind of almost humiliation ritual. Would be it would be a better way to put it, a humiliation ritual where they show that they’re submissive to him personally. And and he does this by, you know, humiliating his own appointments. And, you know, we could see this, for instance, back in his first administration when his coronavirus response coordinator was talking about different, different, different things that, you know, the government was recommending. He stepped in and said, you know, and and we also this is the moment when he famously stepped in and said, well, we should be considering, you know, injecting people with bleach and other possibilities, irradiation. And and he said, you know, I may not be a doctor, but he said putting to his head, I’ve got a good you know what. And and this was this was, you know, here’s humiliating the medical expert whom he had appointed, who was it was loyal to his administration and I think loyal to the to the job. He was humiliating her for the purpose of forcing her to be submissive, to enact her submissiveness to him on national television.
Krys Boyd [00:30:41] Russell, how does ungoverning work with regard to carrying out foreign policy?
Russell Muirhead [00:30:47] Yeah, that’s I mean, it’s another great question. It’s it’s so interesting that, you know, over the past really since the end of World War two, the United States has has followed an amazingly consistent and predictable foreign policy from administration to administration. This is particularly notable, of course, during the Cold War, you didn’t see radical shifts, any kind of shift really in foreign policy going from, you know, Eisenhower to Kennedy or from Lyndon Johnson to Richard Nixon. And and so our allies could rely on us and and could predict, you know, that we would be reliable well into the future. That’s why we have allies like the ones we do. It’s an incredible thing for a country to have an ally. The modal number of allies that countries have had in the history of politics is zero. It’s as if, you know, in politics there are no friends, there are just interests. And yet the United States does have friends, extraordinary friends like the U.K., like Japan, like Germany. We in fact, we have, you know, you could probably say 70 great allies. And so I do think that if we stop, you know, what governing means when it when it comes to foreign policy, is it means that we no longer have a policy, say, a policy of supporting NATO. What we have is a person in charge, a person who needs to be pleased and catered to and flattered. And and so what we see, you know, are foreign rulers, the the, you know, from Italy, from Canada coming tomorrow Lago on bended knee to present themselves to the great man Trump. They’re kissing up to Trump because they know that’s what they have to do to to get out decisions that might benefit them or at least don’t harm their countries. The thing about pleasing someone’s will is you can never be sure how to do it. The reason for that is that the person the human will is is capricious. It’s unknown, it’s uncertain, it’s unpredictable. And and so who knows whether what, you know, somebody wants this morning is what they’re going to want at lunchtime or dinner or tomorrow. And and so if Trump’s will is is what decides Americans and the United States of America’s foreign policy, then we don’t have a policy. We just have a person. And and under those conditions, our allies are going to be much less certain that they can count on us, much less certain of what we’re going to do. And and and under those conditions, our allies are going to start looking out much more ruthlessly for themselves. And maybe they’ll still be allies, but they won’t really be friends. So so, you know, to personalize foreign policy is to destroy foreign policy. And I think to to permanently weaken the United States of America and to also imperil our national security interests.
Krys Boyd [00:33:55] We’ve talked a lot so far about ungoverning in the once and future Trump administrations. But what about calls to defund the police? Is that also a form of ungoverning?
Russell Muirhead [00:34:05] I actually think it was a part of ungoverning. I think it’s very parallel and it’s a great example because my you know, I have I have a number of friends who who had some sympathy for the idea. And and I think I can, you know, I, I can get it that deep, deep frustration with police forces and the kind of intransigence of not just racism, but racial violence coming from many police officers and police forces around the country and and and a kind of loss of hope that any sort of reform could be effective. And in the midst of that despair, a and a, you know, an attraction to the promise of destruction, let’s just defund it. Let’s let’s burn it down. It can’t get worse than what it is. You know, be better to have no police force at all and to and to reallocate the money to social services than to have the kinds of police forces that we have right now. So the whole logic of defund was, I think, a logic of and governing. And and it’s one of the examples where you might see that kind of logic on the left rather than than the right. But but it’s you know, again, it’s more of a populist logic than a left or right logic. I mean, and governing isn’t right wing ungoverning doesn’t help conservatives realize conservative goals. And ungoverning is not going to help Trump, you know, secure the border in the way he wants to. It’s not going to help him implement a different immigration policy. It’s not going to help him revive the manufacturing base of the United States economy. It ultimately isn’t very effective. It satisfies the kind of, you know, popular. If frustration isn’t even powerful, if their despair with the possibility that government might serve the common interest. Whether that part of the government is the police force or the agencies of the federal government.
Krys Boyd [00:35:58] You note in the book that populist authoritarianism is at home in the United States because it arises out of democracy. How is it different from liberal democracy, even if a populist authoritarian is duly elected?
Russell Muirhead [00:36:11] Yeah, the promise of democracy that, you know, just the basic promise paradox is that here the people rule. You know, that’s what democracy means. And and so that seems to suggest that, you know, what the people want should be translated into the authoritarian authorities law. Right now, as we were saying before, in an immediate way, democracy wants that translation right now. Liberal democracy doesn’t actually say, well, the job of a constitution is simply to empower popular wants. It says that individuals have rights that need to be respected and and and that majorities can be unjust and majorities can be unwise and and majorities can even be unlawful. And the task of a democratic constitution, therefore, is not merely to empower the majority, but to empower it and to empower the best of the people. And that means empowering them in a way that’s consistent with respect for individual rights and the permanent and aggregate interests of the country. And that means observing the rule of law. I mean, slowing things down. It means subjecting popular wants and movements even to rational reflection. And that’s why we have, for instance, two legislatures in 49 states and the national government instead of one, a House and a Senate. Why, If the job of the Constitution is just to empower the popular will, why would you have two legislatures? Well, two legislatures slow things down. Of course, you pass something in the house and numerous body where everybody’s being elected every two years that, you know, ought to reflect popular moods. Very. Exactly. Well, then it goes to the Senate where only a third of the body is up for reelection every two years, and they have that long six year terms. And and it ought to, in principle, subject something that’s passed in the House to a lot more rational reflection, slows things down, allows everybody to see what’s happening, to rethink it and to act not on their first impulse, but on their second thought. You know, in everyday life, we’ll say on second thought, you know, say to a second thought, let’s not go to the this restaurant. Let’s go out to the movie. And, you know, we act on our second thoughts. We act much, much more prudently than we act on our first impulses. And so the job I mean, liberal democracy, fancy term, I don’t know. It’s kind of it doesn’t I don’t know what it means and say, but this is what I understand it to mean. It allows the government to empower the reflected judgment, reflective judgments of the people, not popular impulses.
Krys Boyd [00:38:52] We do still have the Constitution in place. Is it insufficient to prevent and governing?
Russell Muirhead [00:38:58] I love it. I love it. We do still have it in place. And, you know. And the way I think we need to understand our Constitution is not as a kind of mechanical contrivance. It’s not like the wiring in your house that goes down to the circuit board. And, you know, the question is, will it work? Will our circuit breakers trip and prevent, you know, the circuits from being overloaded? And it doesn’t work in a mechanical way. The Constitution only works if citizens and public officials listen to the spirit of the Constitution, take it into their hearts and minds, and act accordingly. They have to interpret this idea, this aspiration to empowering not just the ordinary immediate impulses of a majority, but to empowering the the reflective judgments of a group that’s even larger than the majority. They have to take that ideal into their hearts and minds and act from it. And and so one way, you know, that could happen is by the Senate taking on its in its advise and consent constitutional responsibility seriously as opposed to merely rubber stamping the the nominees of the president. And what I’m worried about right now is that, you know, so many senators are going to say that that, you know, gosh, I’m worried about about Elon Musk funding a primary opponent if I don’t act as a rubber stamp. And they’re more worried about losing a primary election than they are about betraying the spirit of the Constitution and and abdicating their advise and consent responsibility. So so, I mean, will the Constitution work only if those people who are elected to office and citizens watching them take in the spirit of the Constitution and and enliven it and actualize it in their own thought and their own speech and in their own deeds.
Krys Boyd [00:41:02] What is the relationship, if any, between ungoverning and a climate of political violence?
Russell Muirhead [00:41:08] I worry that ungoverning will have the effect of legitimating political violence. Rogue violence that that it will, first of all, cause large numbers of citizens to lose confidence in the rule of law and in in the reliability of their government and of agencies like the Justice Department, the IRS, the SEC, the Securities Exchange Commission, doing their investigations and impartial ways and and that they will therefore see these agencies as fundamentally partizan and unworthy of of respect or compliance. And once people when citizens in large numbers think that their government is unworthy of their respect and unworthy of complying with its its rules and its laws, then the hold of law and the hold of law enforcement loosens enormously. And and people, I think, will will seek a greater license to take the law into their own hands and and to and to impose their own will through through violence as they may, you know, as they’re able to. So I don’t think that’s an immediate effect. I don’t think that comes the next day. But I do think, you know, that’s the long run consequence of destroying the capacity of the government to govern.
Krys Boyd [00:42:45] For those who think ungoverning sounds like too great a risk to take, Russell. What are some ways they might push back on the weakening or the destruction of the administrative state?
Russell Muirhead [00:42:56] I think that in lots of ways, large and small, we need to breathe life into the cause of reform. I think what this country needs is a new reformist edge. And and I think we need to push each other and push our officials to take their frustration and despair and away from that from the allure of destruction. It’s destroying stuff can be a lot of fun if you’ve ever just kicked over a sandcastle or something, you know, or, you know, tower blocks, it can be fun and satisfying. But to, to to just, you know, to to really prompt our public officials, our candidates and ourselves away from the allure of destruction toward that much more, I think difficult but ultimately effective cause of building reform movements and reform causes. I mean, I think there’s just so much cynicism when I when I talk to my own students, so much cynicism about the formal institutions of politics, they don’t really believe that we can get money out of politics. You know, we can’t get money out of politics. It is, I think, a very corrupt scene right now. And and I think it can’t be fixed. It can be reformed. It’s going to take more than just a few laws. It’s going to take a movement. And so I think, you know, we’ve got to believe in the possibility of reform and in specific reformist causes. Now, we may disagree about exactly what reforms need to be prioritized or how they ought to be carried out. We may you know, conservatives and liberals and centrists may have different ideas about what needs to be reformed. Those arguments are the normal fuel of politics. They’re what make politics interesting and lively and consequential. I don’t expect a complete agreement, but I do think that from the left, right and center, what we need is a far more vigorous, far more intense and far more serious kind of reformist energy than than what we’ve seen over the last five or so years.
Krys Boyd [00:44:54] Russell Muirhead is Robert Clements, Professor of Democracy and Politics at Dartmouth College. His new book, written with Nancy L. Rosenblum, is called “Ungoverning: the Attack on the Administrative State and the Politics of Chaos.” Russell, thanks for the conversation.
Russell Muirhead [00:45:09] Thank you for these fun and incisive questions. What a pleasure.
Krys Boyd [00:45:14] Think is distributed by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. You can find us on Facebook and Instagram and anywhere you get your podcasts if you search for KERA Think. Our website is think.kera.org. While you’re there, sign up for our free weekly newsletter. Again, I’m Krys Boyd. Thanks for listening. Have a great day.
