Program transcript:
Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. My guest today appears to be something of a political soothsayer. Nancy Rosenblum is a Professor of Ethics in Government and Politics at Harvard University, and the coauthor with Russell Muirhead of a book called, “Ungoverning: The Attack on the Administrative State and the Politics of Chaos”. Professor Rosenblum, welcome to the program and congratulations on this obviously timely new book.
Nancy Rosenblum: Thank you, Grant. I'm happy to be here.
GR: Well, we're glad you made the time. So let's just start with some basic term definitions. What exactly is ‘ungoverning’ and where does its recent form get its start in our political history?
NR: Well, I think that is, it really is unique to Trump's first term. That is, there are many ways of governing democracy well and many ways of failing to govern democracy well, uncompromising this and, you know, people who are clients not representing their people and so on, we can all think of failings of government. But ‘ungoverning’ is literally the attempt to destroy the capacity for governing. It's vandalizing the machinery of government, and it's unprecedented. And it's so unfamiliar, that we gave it this name and it's literal. ‘Ungoverning’ is not evocative, it's a term designed to say that you can have elected representatives who are out to destroy the capacity to govern.
GR: I love that phrase, vandalizing the machinery, I’ll have to remember that. You know, I kind of thought, you surprised me there, because I kind of thought you were going to say Ronald Reagan, because some people have looked at that administration and said, you know, although Reagan wasn't as aggressive as he might have sounded as a candidate there, I know there are people in the civil service that still will talk about that time as one of the, sounds a little bit like ‘ungoverning’ the way you've defined it.
NR: Yes, we do talk about the prehistory of assaults on the depth and width of what government does. I mean, conservatism has always tried to constrain the business of government. And Reagan, you know, didn't develop that famous sentence that said, you know, somebody knocks on your door and says, I'm from the government, I’m here to help. And so he and other Republican presidents along the way have tried to go backwards, right? To undo certain kinds of regulations, to undo certain kinds of policies and ways of doing things. But they still remained essentially conservative, right? They were not Trumpist-like attempts to destroy the administrative state and to stay so vividly and to have a populist army behind them to do it. Don't forget, you know, Trump, is not a normal Democratic candidate, he is the representative of a radical social movement that he helped to create and that supports what he does. So in all of those ways, previous Republicans and conservatives, no matter how much they wanted to take apart this or that from Roosevelt's administration, didn't begin to make the kind of dent that we're seeing today.
GR: Well, President Trump has been compared to a lot of other leaders around the world, particularly some of them in Europe. So one of the questions I wanted to ask you is, is this a distinctly United States phenomenon or do you see ‘ungoverning’ elsewhere where you could identify it?
NR: Yes and no. And that's a hard question to do in just a few sentences. But I'll say this, there are in other places successful populist presidents or heads of state, right, that rode populist anger into a position of some sort of autocracy where they basically started to take away the elements of democracy, right, and some are still trying and some have succeeded very well. None of them have wanted to destroy the state. Because all of them had some sort of understanding that apparently Trump and his people do not, that you have to be able to govern if you want to be a successful autocrat. You have to be giving your people enough things, right, that there's stability in the society that you're not overthrown. And also because you want to rule, right? You can't rule by fiat in the modern state. So Trump is unusual in his declaration and his carrying out of the declaration to deconstruct the administrative state and to want to have personal rule without the apparatus of a government.
GR: Okay, I'm getting the distinction you're making there. And so, is the main, this may seem like a dumb question but I'm going to put it out there, is the main problem for this then the politics of chaos? How would you identify what the deepest problems are with someone who wants to do this?
NR: Well, I think one problem is that you have the politics of chaos. And let me say upfront why that's so difficult for people, which is that we all have in our lives run by security of expectations. And when all of our security of expectation about our economic well-being, about our health, about the security of our nation from other strong nations, about our work, about whether somebody is going to take away our citizenship, when all of these expectations are violated, or we fear that they're being violated, what happens is you lose your sense of political agency, and that's the end of democracy, when people lose their sense of agency. But I think the first part of what you said, you asked, is it chaos or is it, what was the second choice?
GR: I was throwing it up for you. I mean, you know, is there something else there?
NR: Yes, there is. And I think that what is responsible for this insecurity of expectation and what is clearly chaos is the desire for personal rule. Disrespect for the requirements of any office, whether it's Congress or the administrative state, the secretary of state or the presidency, is a desire for personal rule. That's really a very unusual thing and certainly unusual in the United States, where presidents, no matter how radical they might have been, or a conservative they might have been, understood that they occupied an office and that this office had a certain constitutional status, right? And that they had to (a) very great extent, operate within the limits of this thing called an office. And Trump has no interest in the office and no respect for it. As everybody said, what he wants is personal command, personal rule. And the interesting story here is how he managed to get it and why it's getting worse.
GR: Yeah, we'll come back to that. You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm speaking with Harvard University government and politics professor Nancy Rosenblum, and we're discussing her new book titled, “Ungoverning: The Attack on the Administrative State and the Politics of Chaos”. You've kind of already answered this, so I guess I'll frame it maybe as a potential general pushback on what you're saying. I'm wondering, is this phenomenon really, ungoverning in a general sense, or would it be better thought of as, for lack of a better term, selective ungoverning, meaning the undermining of certain government functions that are previously supported and maybe bolstering some others like, you know, immigration enforcement? So it's a really, it's more about what government is doing or not doing, and not just government doing things generally.
NR: Well, by our definition and understanding and I think it's sort of generally accepted now, it's ungoverning. It's not that this president who wants to personally rule doesn't do things, he does things right? He raises tariffs, he goes to meetings with world powers, he drops bombs on people, he tries a major effort to militarize deportation and immigration, he does do things. We say that is not governing because it's not through any of the apparatus or within any of the rules or constraints that make a government. What we have is a ruler. What we have in discussion of, the ancients would say, what we have is a tyrant. And the evidence of what I'm saying is if we look at what he has done to the people and the institutions that do the business of governing and always have, that is the Department of Defense or the attorney general of the United States or the Social Security office or any area of policy is dedicated, is made by Congress in a general way, and then enacted by the agencies of our government. And all of that depends upon that apparatus of the Congress making a law and the independent, and the agencies deciding how you actually implement this law with open hearings and so on. All of this has been eliminated.
GR: Now, obviously, Donald Trump is going to be the big culprit in your story and has been in our conversation so far. Are there other culprits here who are culpable and how we've got to this spot?
NR: Well, you know, that's a difficult question to answer. You could say the people who voted for him. It's unclear, especially now in his second term, how many of his, except for very core MAGA followers, imagined that he would be doing what he's doing now, by taking away Medicaid or deporting their neighbors without finding, you know, without any rule of law and without determining that they're criminal, which had been his promise and so on. So we don't know whether, what kind of support he has for what and the polling is very variable. And so do you blame voters when their representatives act in ways that they did not expect them to act? So that's one question. But clearly, there has been leaving the electorate aside, an enormous amount of support for Trump from various quarters. The most important being a long and developed history of wanting to undo the Roosevelt administrative state on the part of conservatives. The Heritage Foundation and the person who now runs the Office of Management and Budget that put out this Project 2025 and so on. And these people wanted to deconstruct the administrative state. They wanted to do it, some of them from money, right? Because if you can raise the money by eliminating programs, you can give them tax breaks. Some of it because they wanted different kinds of technology and so on involved. Some of them because they wanted Christian nationalism. But you had various very powerful social and economic forces out there that thought they stood to gain from the Trump administration. And some of them are now nervous that they're not going to gain and some of them clearly feel that they are. But I say this to say that this this idea of deconstructing the administrative state, shrinking government, giving the president what's called the power of a unitary executive has been advanced for probably 20 some odd years by important factions of conservatism, but shouldn't be called conservatism, but what was called conservatism in this country.
GR: Yeah, I remember during George W. Bush's administration, we heard a lot about the unitary state. You didn't mention members of Congress, and that surprised me in sort of identifying who might be culpable in this. I mean, they're not standing up for the institution.
NR: I could name two other major sources and they were elected by Trumpist populists. They have at this very slim majority, they are completely obeisant. They go along even if they disagree and we know that because they'll say so. Because they're afraid, because they're afraid for their positions, that if they deviate from Trump, he will have the power with voters to get them dis-elected, unelected. So clearly, the Republican Party, as it stands now, which is no longer a conservative party, it is a party in thrall to Trump, is part of this. Now, what's interesting, if I can just say one more word about the Congress, is that he has really emasculated Congress. Many of the measures that he's taken have been refusing, impounding, refusing to spend money that Congress authorized, destroying whole departments like the Department of Education, the Congress made, right? Making appointments, all kinds of interim appointments so that he doesn't have to go through the business of congressional approval. Congressional approval for people no one in the world would have approved, like Hegseth as Secretary of Defense or Robert K. Junior as Secretary of Health and Welfare. I mean, so Congress is culpable, the republican Congress is culpable. And then the Supreme Court did something in 2020 that has been very important. They gave Trump and presumably other presidents immunity for prosecution from any act that they did, any official act that they did as president. And Trump now has this immunity. He can do anything he wants as President. And I can show you some instances of how he's done this, but maybe you want to move to something else.
GR: Well, we'll come back to some of those things in the second half of the program. You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm talking with Nancy Rosenblum. She's a Harvard University government and politics professor and the coauthor of a new book titled, “Ungoverning: The Attack on the Administrative State and the Politics of Chaos”. I wanted to come back to what we were talking about before the break there in terms of who you see as most to blame in this regard. And I guess the way I want to frame this question is, are Democrats blame free? Do they have any culpability in where we are today?
NR: Well, they certainly didn't win the election to that extent. That's the requirement for getting Trump in power. I don't think that there are any Democrats who approve of or want what's going on now. So can you say that that a party that was crippled by the fact that their president had to, you know, leave office under the gun very shortly before election, that probably made a terrible miscalculation in the candidate that they ended up with, that was actually delivered to them. But when we say blame, we usually mean something about intentional or moral blame. I don't think the Democrats intentionally lost or have any moral culpability for what we may think of as extremely destructive, anti-democratic, anti-liberal actions on the part of this regime. What the Democrats do now is going to be, you know, hard to watch, and I would doubt whether it will be very successful for quite a while.
GR: Well, yeah, I wanted to ask you about that, because it struck me as I was thinking about the arguments in your book, if they take on what you're talking about directly, they're almost going to have to put themselves forward as, or at least be vulnerable to the characterization I'm about to make, as the party of government, the party of the state. And I don't know whether that's a label they want to put on themselves at the moment, given the current political climate. I mean, how do they get out of that box? They tried being the party of democracy in 2024, and that didn't seem to resonate with enough people. So if they become the party of government and the party of the state, I don't know if that's going to do it much better.
NR: Well, I think that's right. So I think the problem for the Democrats will be how to identify those areas in which people want government and that they want government, not the way it's always been before Trump, they want government that's reformed and more responsive and doesn't try to do too much and does a lot of deregulation that, you know, they would have to do to identify what kind of governing, who wants, where. And that's why I think that this next, the elections coming up, this one in the next and so on are going to have to be mainly talking to people in the states. And that the presidential candidate, you know, has got to depend on their success to win. But I would not be surprised if the Democrats are brought back to office, because, you're right, they're identified with a government that people rejected for different reasons. Some because they were too liberal, some because they weren't really terribly conservative or Christian. I mean, there are all kinds of reasons. And even if Trump, they're abused of their infatuation with Trump, it's not clear that they will vote for the Democrats. So this is, I'm not an election person, but I think this is a hard row and I won't be surprised if the Democrats don't. Of course, it will also depend on what happens to Trump if indeed he has an election and there are many political scientists who think that he may very well obstruct another election. If he dies in the meantime, he's an elderly man, will the Republican, will Vance be able to compete with an attractive Democratic candidate? There's no way to answer your question, but it will be a rough road. And your initial skepticism is well put.
GR: If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and my guest is the Harvard professor, Nancy Rosenblum. So, you know, you track the origins of this in Trump's first term, we're seven months into a second term that has just seen a whole flurry of different kinds of activity and you've been describing different aspects of it. Is this just something that's been turned up two or three notches, or are we seeing something in recent months that's different and new? What's changed?
NR: Well, I think his capacity to really deconstruct the administrative state and evolve things has changed dramatically for political reasons and then for others. So some of these things I've mentioned, I think there have been three developments that make this a whole different landscape than it was four years ago and one has to do with the appointments he's made. And, you know, we always say that what he wants is loyalty, what he wants is loyalty, people who are submissive. Well, yes, he wants that, but he wants something much more. He has picked people for his administration who incarnate ungoverning, that is, who hate the institutions that they've been assigned to lead. RFK Jr., as I say, is the best example of that. You really want someone there who is an anti-vaccine person or anti-science to put federal money away from the sciences and health? Or an attorney general who's hostile to the Constitution? Or somebody in charge of national security and intelligence, who doesn't want intelligence, who looks at things ideologically? So Trump is announcing by his appointments and the Congress, by going along with his appointments, that he is out to destroy these things. He appointed someone to head the Department of Education, whose philosophy was get rid of the Department of Education, I mean, so that's one thing. The appointments that we've watched have told us an important story, that this is about wreckage, not about governing. I think there's a second and probably a third real change. And that there's been a real change in the law since he was first there. I mean, I mentioned before that the Supreme Court granted presidential immunity of a kind of blanket kind if a president is fulfilling his official duties as president. And many, many people from these associations like Heritage and so on, have spent the last four years looking at the law and figuring out how he could get around things. I'm going to give you one example, all right, the president is in charge of foreign policy. That’s where the imperial presidency has always lodged its authority. So Trump has translated a lot of things that are domestic into foreign policy things, right? That's clearest with his deportation business, he's no longer just saying that he's getting rid of criminals and immigrants and then going at the border. He's saying that this is a foreign invasion. When he goes after demonstrators in Los Angeles, he says this is an alien, the Alien and Sedition Act applies. So one of the clever things he's done and so far done successfully is to say, well, they say I can do anything I want as president and this is what presidents do. So I think the legal doctrines combined with the courts have allowed him to sweep things away. And he has said, he says and I have in article to power, that means I can do anything I want as president. He thinks that and he's proceeding on that path. They've also, by the way, developed legal strategies for bringing these cases to court, even where they think they don't have good advocacy, you know, position, constitutional or legislative positions, but they have figured out, and we know that Trump himself is an expert at this, figured out how to how to appeal and appeal and appeal and these cases go on forever. And by the time the case and the Department of Education gets resolved, finally, there will be no Department of Education. And when you’re deconstructing, you can't go backwards. But what's done is done. And I think that's the saddest thing of all.
GR: Well, one of the things that also struck me that might fit your characterization there regarding foreign policy is tariffs, too, and the way that they're done. We only have about a minute and a half left. I wanted to make sure I got this last question in because it relates to something you said right at the end there. After these things are unraveled, you know, it's harder to, it's hard to build Humpty Dumpty back together again. Setting aside the partisan politics, if we could, just how does the administrative state recover? I mean, what needs to happen? It would take I guess, a president and a Congress that are really engaged in building things if all you're saying is correct. So how do you see that happening? Is that is that a generational effort?
NR: Well, I think you're right, I think that you're right. You know, I've talked to a lot of people who have been either fired from administrative agencies of one kind or another or are still working there, but working under fear. And it's unclear how you would reconstitute the tens of thousands of people who have left and are going to leave government, people who know how things work, how to make things work, right? How to obey the law in making things work. And you're losing these people in a massive way. If he has his way, it's going to be hundreds of thousands of federal workers. And some of them are relatives or relatives of mine. And it's so, how do you get them back? Is a younger generation actually want to go in government? I mean, I think but even if they do, even if you can reconstitute a population, you know, a population of federal workers who are knowledgeable and who understand the processes it's going to be hard to repair.
GR: Well, we'll have to leave it on that depressing note. That was Nancy Rosenbloom. And again, her new book is titled, “Ungoverning: The Attack on the Administrative State and the Politics of Chaos”. She wrote it with her coauthor and colleague, Russell Muirhead. Professor Rosenblum, thanks again for making time to talk with me. Very interesting topic, thank you.
NR: Thanks for asking such great questions.
GR: I appreciate that. You're listening to Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.
