what is the basis of a political judgment?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

primer on free speech and academic freedom

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In US law and in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, free speech means rights of individuals and associations against their governments. If you have a right to a given form of speech, then your government may not block, ban, or punish that speech.

Free speech is very extensive in the USA. In 1969, in Brandenburg v. Ohio, the Supreme Court found that a KKK leader had the right to advocate publicly for “revengeance” against “black peoples” and “Jews.” This decision clearly protected hate speech and remains the law.

One important exception has involved non-US citizens. Periodically throughout US history, the federal government has barred people from entry or deported them on the basis of their speech. This is an unsettled area of constitutional law that is before courts right now.

Notwithstanding their constitutional free speech rights, Americans generally lack the right to speak as they wish at work. An employer can usually fire you for what you say, or even for speaking at all.

There are some exceptions. Many employees have a right to advocate unionization under the National Labor Rights Act, although that right is poorly enforced. Some public employees have free speech rights because their employer is also the government, but they are not protected when they are speaking in their governmental role. For instance, a state attorney does not have a constitutional right to dissent publicly about a case being handled by his office (Garcetti v. Ceballos, 2006).

Since the late 1800s, some have argued that students and faculty need freedom of speech to advance the mission of an educational institution. An early statement was by the University of Wisconsin in 1894: “Whatever may be the limitations which trammel inquiry elsewhere, we believe that the great state University of Wisconsin should ever encourage that continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found.”

This is academic freedom in the form of rights for individuals and groups of students and faculty in relation to their own educational institutions. Today, it is encoded in the form of policies adopted by specific schools and colleges, employment contracts, student disciplinary codes, prevalent norms and expectations, and some state laws that afford rights to students or faculty in state schools and colleges.

For the most part, academic freedom is not a constitutional right derived from the First Amendment. A college or a state system can choose not to offer it. When individuals sue for academic freedom, it is usually for breach of a contract that was voluntarily adopted by their employer.

It is tempting to envision academic freedom as just like freedom of speech, except that an educational institution is like the government: prevented from censoring or punishing individuals’ speech. But this model quickly falls apart, because educational institutions are fundamentally and intrinsically involved in choosing, evaluating, rewarding, and penalizing speech. For example, a department will select the prospective instructor who offers the best writing and oral presentation among all the applicants. That person is hired to teach courses in the approved curriculum. Professors award grades based on the quality and relevance of the students’ writing and speaking.

Thus the idea of neutrality or non-interference, which applies to governments, simply cannot govern schools or colleges.

Instead, academic freedom is a patchwork of provisions that vary by institution. Many universities have adopted explicit policies of not restricting faculty or student speech based on its point-of-view or position, usually within limits. (For example, the right to express opinions on political issues does not allow a faculty member to take extensive time in the classroom to discuss issues unrelated to the course content.) Colleges generally adopt procedures for faculty hiring, promotion, and tenure that are meant to enhance freedom along with quality. We talk about a “tenure case” because it has the feel of a legal process, with rights afforded to the applicant. Receiving tenure then prevents professors from being fired for the content of their speech.

Further, universities assign many decisions to groups of students or faculty instead of the central administration. For example, student groups often have broad rights to invite speakers of their choice. Departments are influential in choosing faculty and determining curricula. The whole body of faculty of a college votes on key curricular matters. These are examples of academic freedom as a kind of freedom of association for specific categories of people within the institution. The Supreme Court has also sometimes acknowledged a free speech right for each university to determine its own programming (Justice Powell in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, 1978).

The norm not to interfere with speech on the basis of viewpoint or content is quite strong in higher education (much less so in K12), yet the prevalent rules leave many gaps. In particular:

  1. Only students and “instructors” are typically protected. At my university, just under 30% of the employees are faculty, broadly defined. In general, if you cut the grass at a college, you have no more free speech than if you cut the grass at a condominium. And if you are a dean or vice-provost, a laboratory technician, a clinical physician, or a counselor, you may not be covered by academic freedom.
  2. Academic freedom is quite strong in a setting like a philosophy seminar, where the participants probably enrolled by choice, the professor had a lot of scope to choose the curriculum, and everyone can choose their own positions. But switch your example to a laboratory in the medical or engineering school. This is a highly capitalized enterprise with expensive equipment and many at-will employees. It probably exists thanks to government grants and private philanthropy. These two go together because private donations are what allow universities to hire the faculty, attract the graduate students, and build facilities that make them competitive for federal funds. Harvard wins $8 billion in federal grants annually because it has $53 billion in private money. In the lab sciences, key decision-makers include donors (often members of the board of trustees) and government officials. Now switch back to the philosophy class and bear in mind that overhead from STEM research may subsidize the professor’s salary. From this perspective, a university is not a community of citizens in a republic of letters who each decide what to say. It is an expensive, top-down enterprise whose research agenda is negotiated with outsiders.
  3. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act prevents discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, and national origin. For decades, it has been interpreted to mean that schools and colleges have a legal obligation to prevent speech by their own students and employees that causes discrimination. This principle is in tension with academic freedom as the right to choose and express one’s own view.

I do not regard this tension as simply unfortunate. In an educational institution, which is an employer, a gatekeeper to professions, and usually a landlord as well as a venue for “continual and fearless sifting,” both academic freedom and anti-discrimination are important. But I have long worried that penalizing speech and treating it as a disciplinary concern violates valid speech rights, hampers debate, and creates opportunities for bad actors to suppress valuable speech.* The Biden Administration investigated at least a dozen universities for potentially failing to protect Jewish students’ civil rights by stopping anti-Israel protests. I strongly disagreed with those actions, but far worse are the Trump Administration’s arbitrary and vindictive attacks on specific universities, which use Title VI as a weapon. (Interestingly, the latest letter from the Trump Administration to Harvard drops the pretext that the issue was ever antisemitism.)

  1. Alex Gourevitch makes an important point that the whole framework of preventing harm to students especially threatens the right to protest, because protests involve “public expressions of hostility toward political views and often the people who hold them.” I would add that protests are collective actions, during which individual participants can say a range of things. If a whole protest is shut down or punished because of what some people say, then all the other people’s right to protest has been curtailed.
  2. There is a live debate about whether educational institutions, as opposed to individual faculty and students, may or should speak. Proponents of the Kalven Report argue that speech by university leaders may chill individuals’ dissenting speech and purport to represent employees and students who cannot determine what the college says in their name. Critics of the Kalven Report argue that universities should be able to speak freely in the public sphere and doubt that these institutions could or should be neutral. I served on Tufts’ committee that considered these issues, and I am proud of our report, but I can’t describe it yet because it hasn’t been released. I would only say that this is a complex topic because institutions communicate in so many ways. Statements by university presidents are just one example.

*See also: freedom of speech for universities (2003), free speech and school discipline (2006), a theory of free speech on campus (2009), free speech at a university (2014), science, law, and microagressions (2017), podcast on free Speech, democracy, and campus discourse (2024), etc.

Philosophy Learning and Teaching Organization (PLATO) conference

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We are hosting the biannual PLATO conference this June 27-28 at Tufts University’s Tisch College of Civic Life. PLATO is mostly devoted to teaching philosophy in K12 schools.

Philosophy is not a priority in the USA, unlike in many European countries where it is taught (by that name) to large numbers of students in standardized or even mandatory courses. Nevertheless, the PLATO network is robust, attracting many educators (including some from overseas) who incorporate ethics and other aspects of philosophy in their courses and in extracurricular programs, such as ethics bowls.

From my point of view, philosophy is an aspect of civic education, which is my main professional cause.

The program is online and early registration is still open.

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

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The Trump Administration flouts the rule of law by denying its obligation to obey statutes and court rulings. On April 22, two TIME magazine reporters drew Trump’s attention to a portrait of John Adams that he had “put in” the White House. They quoted Adams to the effect that a republic is a government of laws, not men. Trump had never heard of this quote and said, “I wouldn’t agree with it 100%. We are a government where men are involved in the process of law, and ideally, you’re going to have honest men like me.”

This is the present crisis. However, rule of law means more than obeying explicit laws, and it had been weakening for many decades. Here I will present Trump’s current administration as the most recent stage in a disintegrative process that began in the 1960s.

Law should take the form of rules that are general, durable, transparent, coherent, chosen in legitimate processes, consistently applied, and anchored to principles. The principles that motivate laws may be good or bad, which is why rule of law is insufficient for justice. (We also need good laws). However, rule of law permits people to plan, it provides important forms of fairness, it frustrates outright corruption, and it makes government accountable. When rule of law prevails, but the actual laws are unsatisfactory, we can work to change them. When there is no rule of law, we have little recourse.

Generality, durability, transparency, legitimacy of process, coherence, consistent application, and principle are relative terms. It is impossible, for example, for laws to be perfectly general. They should not be so durable that they persist when circumstances change. Instead of exemplifying any single principle, laws may balance conflicting principles along with practical constraints.

Nevertheless, rule of law is a guiding ideal for republican government. More importantly, a good political system creates incentives for the players to promote rule of law. In contrast, a corrupt system rewards biased enforcement, ad hoc exceptions, back-room deals, short-term arrangements, impunity, and other violations of rule of law.

You can tell that 21st century America neglects rule of law from our dependence on executive orders instead of laws, regulatory rulings instead of statutes, and budget deals instead of legislation. As I’ve noted before, the federal government still addresses carbon emissions under the Clean Air Act of 1970 and social media under the Telecommunications Act of 1996. This is because Congress has been incapable of passing major statutes, liberal or conservative.

Trump lacks any compunction about governing by decree (often on the social media platform that he owns) and has signed fewer statutes than any modern predecessor in his first 100 days. His attitude is unprecedented, yet he represents the third of three stages of decline.

Theodore Lowi’s great book The End of Liberalism: The Second Republic of the United States (first edition, 1969) already described the first two stages.

The first stage was exemplified by some of John F. Kennedy’s speeches. JFK was neither original nor very influential, but he expressed the prevailing midcentury modernist view of US politics. Kennedy declared that Americans had reached consensus on the grand questions. Both national parties were ostensibly committed to Keynesian economics, Social Security, desegregation, and the Cold War. However, said Kennedy, issues had become complex, and therefore governance should be delegated to non-ideological agencies with lots of expert staff who could manage all the particular issues that would arise.

As the New Frontier turned into the Great Society, the executive branch vastly expanded, but Congress stopped passing landmark statutes, and power shifted to appropriations committees and budget negotiators, rulemakers in the executive branch, Senate confirmation hearings that determined who could serve as regulators and judges, and courts, not only in the judiciary but also within the executive branch. Donohue & McCabe (2021) write, “as of March 2017, more than 1,900 administrative law judges (ALJs) were serving in at least 27 adjudicatory bodies, with their specific roles and responsibilities reflecting those of the agencies and departments in which they were located.”

Meanwhile, the 1960s had exploded the Kennedy-era consensus about basic issues. Social movements of left and right mobilized, competing to change society through the expanded federal government. From the 1960s through the Biden Administration, urgent debates roiled civil society, but the mechanisms of government remained negotiation and regulation rather than lawmaking.

For Lowi, the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA) of 1970 exemplified this shift. Congress did write and pass OSHA, but “it did not attempt by law to identify a single specific evil that the regulatory agency was to seek to minimize or eliminate.” Instead, Congress vaguely endorsed the idea that, “so far as is possible every working man and woman in the nation [shall have] safe and healthful working conditions.” Congress gave the Department of Labor the power to issue actual regulations, subject to constant revision and negotiation, some of it before the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission, which is a tribunal in the executive branch. This is not rule of law.

One result is that social movements have usually broken like waves on the shoals of the administrative state, leaving lots of small and inconsistent regulatory actions to reflect their ideals. The women’s movement, the gay liberation movement, and the Movement for Black Lives made discernible impressions on executive branch policies without enacting major laws. A side-effect is that social movements now benefit more from expertise inside the Beltway than from grassroots mobilization.

The third stage is Trump’s. Until he won office, a system that had neglected rule of law was nevertheless, in my opinion, usually used for benign purposes, at least for domestic policies outside of some aspects of criminal law. But this system was waiting to be hijacked by someone without principles. This is what we observe right now.

As Trump’s popularity plummets, the odds of a post-Trump reconstructive period are rising. We should not be thinking about how to restore the processes of 2022 (or 1990) but how to revive rule of law, properly understood.

For me, the three main strategies would be:

  1. expand the capacity of Congress to legislate;
  2. restrict the discretion of the president and executive branch; and
  3. codify the procedures of the administrative agencies and the rights of the civil service so that these become appropriate and coherent.

These strategies must be accomplished together, because, for example, to restrict administrative agencies without enabling Congress to legislate will just hamper government.

More specifically, I would favor: substantially more funding and staffing for congressional offices and committees; state-level electoral reforms, such as ranked-choice voting, which may encourage members of Congress to legislate instead of grandstanding; court rulings or (if necessary) a constitutional amendment clarifying the president’s obligation to execute statutes and making that obligation enforceable; substantial reforms of administrative law and the civil service; a general shift to taxing-and-spending instead of regulation to accomplish progressive goals; and legal repercussions for the Trump appointees who are currently violating laws.

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

reaching the opt-outs

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In today’s New York Times, Rob Flaherty, who was Kamala Harris’ deputy campaign manager, argues that Democrats lose “opt-out voters,” people who distrust all politicians and all traditional media and who obtain their politically relevant information from other sources, such as online influencers or real-life contacts who follow the influencers. These “opt-outs” may start out looking for tips on health or nutrition or relationships or gaming (not politics), but they find their way to right-wing propaganda.

I can support some of these generalizations with data from the 2020 American National Election Study. (I don’t think 2024 data are available yet). For example:

  • 61.5% of strong Republicans and 5.5% of strong Democrats expressed no trust in the media.
  • 26% of strong Republcans and 8% of strong Democrats fully agreed that “Much of what people hear in schools and media are lies by those in power.”
  • 6% of strong Republicans and 30% of strong Democrats trusted experts much more than ordinary people for public policy.
  • Of those who said they did not follow the 2020 campaign using any source listed on the survey, 57% said they intended to vote for Trump; 27% for Biden.

It would be possible to overstate this problem. If most Americans only got information from unreliable influencers, then Trump’s approval rating would not have declined across most of the population in 100 days, before his tariffs and cuts had directly affected many people. If influencers had persuaded everyone to hate civil servants and researchers, then DOGE’s personnel cuts would not be as unpopular as they are. Evidently, many non-Democrats are seeing hard news. Nevertheless, Flaherty’s diagnosis is important.

His recommendation is to build an alternative media environment that carries people from “culture” (their interests in regular things like health or relationships) to liberal political ideas.

I doubt this approach is realistic, and it creates more of conflict or even contradiction for the institutionalist center-left than it does for the MAGA right (or, indeed, for the radical left). Basically, it asks liberals who believe in institutions to use anti-institutionalist means, which looks hypocritical and may prove impossible.

Here is an alternative: People have reasons to trust big, impersonal systems only when the human representatives of those systems relate to them well. For example, I trust the mainstream scientific views of vaccines and climate change not because I understand all the science, but because human beings who represent science as an institution–my own k12 and college teachers, doctors and nurses, and now my academic colleagues–have generally earned my trust. They relate to me with respect, as a fellow citizen.

Actually, not even scientists understand the science, because the necessary knowledge exceeds any person’s capacity (and much of it is built into instruments and software and datasets that each user must simply trust). But some of us have confidence in the whole process because we have benefitted from most of the moments when it has touched us directly.

The sociologist Anthony Giddens calls this process “re-embedding”: contacts between abstract systems and ordinary people via professionals who represent the systems. To be honest, I have never read a significant amount of Giddens, but I take his vocabulary from a relevant article by Mills and St Clair (2025).

The employees who are points of contact between abstract systems and regular people include teachers and professors (and educational administrators), doctors and nurses, lawyers and police officers, local elected officials, and reporters.

Americans have widely differing experiences with these professionals and varying grounds for trust. If you are at risk of being stopped and harassed by the police on account of your race, you do not have a reason to trust the criminal justice system. If your doctor dismisses your concerns, or you can’t even afford to see one, then you have less reason to trust the health sciences. If you can’t get into college, can’t afford the tuition, or experience contempt for your home culture in a college classroom, then our trust in academia is bound to fall. If your kids’ k12 school is failing–or if it seems driven by standardized curricula and tests and there’s no way for parents to engage–then you have reasons to be skeptical of schools.

For center-left institutionalists, I don’t think there’s any shortcut. In an environment where it pays to attract outrage by attacking abstract systems, we must make these systems as accountable, caring, and interactive as possible so that people will have reasons to trust them more.

The goal is for people’s “influencers” to be their own kids’ teachers, their doctors, and the reporters for their local newspaper (among others). This requires not just encouraging them to trust people who often have more education, power, and income than they do, but also making these professionals more consistently trustworthy.

Source: Mills, M. Anthony, and Price St. Clair. “The Strange New Politics of Science.” Issues in Science and Technology 41, no. 3 (Spring 2025): 40–48. https://doi.org/10.58875/NDTQ1755. See also to restore trust in schools and media, engage people in civic life; my own trust in institutions; it’s no accident that people distrust institutions (2017); and many other posts.