Category Archives: Trump

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For me, the three main strategies would be:

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

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

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


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

Gen Z and rebuilding the federal workforce

In The Nation, Sena Chang reports that young people who might have sought (or already had) federal jobs are looking elsewhere. That is bad for the government and for young adults, who will miss opportunities to develop skills and networks. Chang quotes University of Michigan Prof. Robin Jacob, who says, “I think it is quite likely that we will see a decline in youth participation and representation in the federal government and in government more generally over the next several years.”

That’s true, but I also want to look forward. Chang quotes me: “Levine believes that restoring the civil service may fall to the next generation. ‘At some point, the executive branch will have to be rebuilt with hundreds of thousands of new workers, many of whom will be young,’ he said. ‘Rebuilding the government is going to be the opportunity and the calling of Generation Z.’”

I know this is optimistic in the sense that it presumes a relatively good scenario–a successor to Trump who is a Democrat or a more conventional Republican and who wants to rebuild the civil service. That outcome is by no means guaranteed. But it is very possible. We must contemplate the relatively good scenarios as well as the worst ones.

Whatever he wants to accomplish, one thing that Trump achieves by talking about 2024 as the last time you’ll have to vote–or when he hints at running again in 2028–is to discourage opponents from planning for a recovery. If we apply frameworks of democratic decline or collapse, whether drawn from the 1930s or from recent examples around the world, we can convince ourselves that the end of democracy is inevitable. But Brownlee & Miao (2022) find that governments that have slid into authoritarianism fairly often move back to democracy. More generally, history is not inevitable; it depends on us.

A profound struggle over the nature of America is underway. That struggle is not over and is not lost. One ingredient of success is envisioning the consequences of victory. Gen Z has a particular role to play.


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

how to engage our universities in this crisis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

the state of nonviolent grassroots resistance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

16 colliding forces that create our moment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Solutions:

Better political leadership would help.

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

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

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

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

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