Nonprofits face a series of interlocking crises in the second Trump administration. Most obviously, there are broadsides from the White House: indiscriminate funding cuts for human services providers, targeted pressure campaigns and cuts to research funding for higher education, threats to investigate and prosecute left-leaning philanthropies.

But this challenge is layered on top of a deeper crisis of trust.

“The hidden crisis facing nonprofits is declining public confidence in the sector,” writes longtime nonprofit executive Greg Berman in his new book, The Nonprofit Crisis. “If nonprofits don’t reverse the trend line soon, they may be hit with a stark lesson: once trust has been lost, it is exceedingly difficult to regain.”

In this forum, we ask a range of thinkers to weigh in: What kind of internal stewardship can see the sector through this volatile period? What kind of structural changes might be necessary? How can nonprofits respond to hostile funding disruptions and illiberal threats and simultaneously engage in self-examination?

The trust collapse and the nonprofit sector

Survey data on nonprofit trust is limited, as you might expect for a sector that ranges from athletic rec leagues to giant health systems. The Edelman Trust Barometer found that as of 2025, faith in nonprofits hovered only in neutral territory, several notches below business, after hitting a nadir of “distrusted” in 2022.1

Edelman research conducted for the trade group Independent Sector shows a brighter topline, with about 57 percent of Americans expressing “high trust” in nonprofits every year from 2021 to 2025. Gallup’s trust polling does not ask about “nonprofits” in general, but three pillars of the sector – higher education, the medical system, and organized religion – all register trust levels under 40 percent.

Of course, it is not surprising that faith in nonprofits should be wavering in an environment where virtually all institutions have experienced a 50-year collapse in trust. In their 2022 survey of the cross-institutional trust decline, Henry Brady and Thomas Kent wrote: “One-third [of the decline in trust] might come from nonpartisan factors such as increasing [societal] inequality and diversity, leading to anomie that undermines trust in nearly all institutions among all groups.” That kind of macro trend is certainly beyond any organization’s control.

But the authors note: “One-third might come from partisan factors related to the emergence of cultural, social, and identity issues in American politics that have implicated nonpolitical institutions.” Here, the aperture for controlling one’s own destiny widens; organizations can make at least some choices about how they position themselves around such issues.

And finally, the authors speculate, “one third of the overall decline in trust might be due to specific events and experiences with institutions” — issues like poor performance, perceived violations of ethics, and the like. The media environment of the 21st century has probably raised the bar by exposing flaws more ruthlessly and rapidly than ever before, but nonprofits surely can do their utmost to meet the new expectations.

Steady hands in a shifting world

The nonprofit sector did itself no favors with its response to the first Trump administration, Berman argues in a passage excerpted from his book:

Many, if not all, of the organizations that embraced resistance the last time around ended up doing real long-term damage to the nonprofit sector by allowing themselves to be seen as explicitly political actors. Indeed, if a full-fledged battle for public support were to break out between Donald Trump and American nonprofits and foundations, Trump would be the likely winner.

Notably, many organizations face this fraught moment with inexperienced leadership. But if they are looking for inspiration, Eboo Patel offers an unlikely model: Alice Waters, the legendary chef whose Berkeley, Calif., restaurant Chez Panisse helped to transform America’s food culture through the farm-to-table movement:

Because Chez Panisse was excellent, it inspired the right people to also want to be excellent. And the secret to Chez Panisse’s excellence was total alignment around mission. Every role was executed in the service of fresh, delicious food in a comfortable environment.

At the same time, organizations already reeling under funding cuts may need to brace themselves for the possibility that there will be no return to the status quo ante. Nonprofits were vulnerable to the second-term assault from a hostile administration because in the last 60 years, conservatives and liberals teamed up to create “a public-private hybrid system of service provision,” explains Daniel Stid of the American Enterprise Institute.

The hybrid system’s demise is not something we can attribute only to the administrative tornado that is the second Trump administration. Tracing the system’s historical evolution indicates that its sudden toppling resulted from mounting contradictions that, like so many termites, ate away at its foundations and legitimacy for decades. In light of these accumulated problems, we should not try to salvage the old hybrid system. But we can reimagine it — and now have little choice but to do so.

Finally, John MacIntosh of the nonprofit-banking provider Seachange argues that nonprofits should neither flatter themselves by assuming they are of much interest to our mercurial president, nor sell themselves short by wondering if their day-to-day work matters when liberal democracy itself is being attacked:

Our mere existence as a largely autonomous bastion of noneconomic, diversified, politically unrewarding, civic endeavor demonstrates the limits of political power.

The structure of America’s nonprofit sector may be up for renegotiation. The focus and performance of many organizations surely needs sharpening. That is work Americans can surely embrace as they yearn for a vital public space between politics and the market.

David Dagan is director of editorial and academic affairs at the Niskanen Center.

Share

The nonprofit sector is a messy residual. The set of programs that nonprofits might provide is restricted to the leftovers that government and business have passed over as politically unrewarding or financially intractable. Out of these scraps, the services that nonprofits actually do provide are those that, despite being leftovers, are sufficiently enticing for funders and leaders to voluntarily contribute the resources necessary to address them. In a sector with upwards of a million organizations there will always be outliers that get more than scraps: credit unions and hospitals that have nonprofit status by dint of historical accident or political expediency; captive entities set up by the wealthy to minimize taxes or transparency; trade associations, etc. However, most of the sector lives off leftovers — which is a fine thing, as philanthropic resources are scarce and should be used to provide things that government and business won’t.

Since it goes last, the nonprofit sector is inherently dynamic: Politics, technology, costs, and attitudes change what business and government will or won’t provide directly and what funders will or won’t fund. A financially intractable program can become tractable (for example, hospice or telehealth), forcing nonprofits to compete or exit as for-profits enter the space. A tractable program can become intractable (for example, higher education), forcing some for-profits to convert into nonprofits while others wither away. Funders may lose interest in an area or the costs may go up, (for example, the opera), leaving nonprofits to restructure or exit.

Government and business are attracted by initiatives that have wide appeal (for votes) or target the affluent (for spending power), and that are not critical of the status quo. As a result, the leftovers usually have narrow appeal, serve low-income people, represent quasi-public goods that are difficult to charge for, or advocate against the status quo. These types of programs are antithetical to an administration focused on money and political acclaim.

As a result, the Trump administration has targeted many programs delivered by the sector – humanitarian assistance, public media, arts and culture, DEI-related higher education, etc. – supported by federal funding. However, with a few exceptions — Harvard, Planned Parenthood, etc. — the nonprofits delivering the disfavored programs have not been directly attacked. And despite the anxieties those assaults have prompted, by and large the nonprofit sector is well-structured to weather any widespread attack.

Big business – and the lawyers, bankers and consultants who serve it – has proven extremely vulnerable to pressure from the Trump administration. It is highly concentrated, with a small number of easily identifiable targets. Individual leaders have enormous personal financial incentives to “play nice.” It is competitive, so a type of “Gresham’s Law” can reward those quickest to bend the knee, encouraging others to follow suit. Its prevailing ideology – maximizing shareholder value – can be used to justify even the most craven acts. It is vulnerable to federal pressure in merger approvals, tariffs, regulatory oversight, and procurement. Its immense financial and technological resources make it an attractive target for those seeking tribute.

The nonprofit sector is just the opposite. We are fragmented and diverse, with literally a million organizations spread across every community. We are less prone to competition. Apart from a handful of elite colleges, we have no resources worth coveting. Our leaders lack high-powered economic incentives that can be threatened. Our voluntary boards have a duty of obedience to our missions and trustees who can resign without prejudice. We have flexible cost structures and operate in areas with low barriers to entry. If any one of us suffers an existential attack, our work should be picked up by other organizations. The administration has limited to tools to attack us since the vast majority of us operate in one location, receive little direct federal funding, and enjoy some level of protection from the cities and states in which we operate.

Why would the administration attack us? Because nothing makes a bully angrier than those who refuse to be bullied. Our mere existence as a largely autonomous bastion of noneconomic, diversified, politically unrewarding, civic endeavor demonstrates the limits of political power. And if we are attacked – probably in the form of a nasty letter mass-mailed to Form 990 filers – even a modicum of collective and individual courage should be more than enough to get us through given the structure of the sector. We have strength in numbers, provided that at least a few of us are brave enough to ignore the letter, fight the case, go to court, or get arrested.

In these difficult times, I am comforted by the idea that regardless of what individual nonprofits do — arts, education, social services — the fact that we do it outside of the political and corporate realm is a form of collective, and conscientious, objection. Playing a small part in this de facto resistance gives me some solace when, like so many nonprofit leaders, I ask myself: “Am I doing enough?”

For the moment, my answer is yes.

John MacIntosh is the managing partner of SeaChange Capital Partners, which provides grants, loans, financial analysis and strategic advice to nonprofits navigating complex challenges.

Share

For six decades, the federal government has both funded and relied on nonprofit service providers to implement a range of policies and programs passed by Congress. But now, this system is collapsing.

The government supports many nonprofits directly, through federal grants and contracts, and indirectly, through funding streams that pass through state and local government. However, the second Trump administration now routinely expresses hostility toward nonprofits and has declared it will “stop funding NGOs that undermine the national interest.”

The administration has made good on this vow with grant reviews and cancellations, spending freezes, impoundments, and recissions. Tens of thousands of nonprofit employees have already lost their jobs. The spending cuts enacted in the One Big Beautiful Bill passed by MAGA Republicans will further crimp federal funding for nonprofits — even as it increases demand for their services.

However, the hybrid system’s demise is not something we can attribute only to the administrative tornado that is the second Trump administration. Tracing the system’s historical evolution indicates that its sudden toppling resulted from mounting contradictions that, like so many termites, ate away at its foundations and legitimacy for decades. In light of these accumulated problems, we should not try to salvage the old hybrid system. But we can reimagine it — and now have little choice but to do so.

The rise of the hybrid system

The public-private hybrid system of service provision originated with liberal reformers in the early 1960s. The Ford Foundation piloted several programs that used community-based nonprofits to deliver services and benefits to urban residents. Democratic Presidents John Kennedy and then especially Lyndon Johnson picked up on and sought to embed these approaches into federal policies. They formed the backbone of Johnson’s War on Poverty and his expansive push for a Great Society through initiatives like Head Start, VISTA, Job Corps, and community action programs.

It was not only liberals and Democrats who favored the federal government’s growing reliance on nonprofits to deliver its domestic policies and programs. In 1977, conservative scholars at the American Enterprise Institute published a report titled To Empower People: From State to Civil Society on how the federal government could and should implement its policies via voluntary groups and congregations. These ideas gave Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush a template to reduce the government’s bureaucratic footprint by turning instead to what Bush later termed “a thousand points of light” in civil society.

The ongoing development of the public-private hybrid system featured prominently in subsequent administrations across both parties. It was embodied in Bill Clinton and Al Gore’s quest to reinvent government, George W. Bush’s initial push for compassionate conservatism, and Barack Obama’s efforts to spur social innovation and fund “what works.” It has been, up until recently, a bipartisan endeavor.

This approach has led nonprofit service providers to become increasingly dependent on government policy and funding streams. A recent Urban Institute survey of nonprofits highlights this dynamic, finding that “in 2022, 68 percent of nonprofits received government grants or contracts and 29 percent of nonprofits’ revenue came from government agencies.” Thirty-eight percent of the responding institutions had directly sought federal grants in 2022, and 27 percent had received them. Ten percent reported that they had received federal contracts.

The fall of the social services industrial complex

From the outset, critics of using the hybrid system for delivering social services flagged its inherent risks. Liberals like Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Independent Sector President Brian O’Connell warned that nonprofits’ growing reliance on government funding threatened their ability to serve as agents of pluralism and countervailing power. As O’Connell put it, “My experience tells me that long-term government support of an agency or complex of agencies creates a quasi-governmental entity with decreasing value as an independent force.”

In Nonprofits for Hire: The Welfare State in the Age of Contracting, an important 1993 scholarly study, political scientists Stephen Rathgeb Smith and Michael Lipsky validated these concerns. They also documented how the hybrid system had led nonprofits to become less voluntary and responsive and more professionalized and bureaucratized. Under its auspices, more and more nonprofits functioned as agents of state authority with the people and communities they served, an ambiguous role that risked muddling the legitimacy of government and nonprofits alike.

Meanwhile, many of the same conservatives who back in the mid-1970s had welcomed the public-private hybrid as a way of empowering people realized two decades later that they had underestimated the threat of government co-option. Under the hybrid system, Peter L. Berger and Richard John Neuhaus observed, “the very vitality that originally distinguished the [nonprofit] institutions from government agencies is destroyed. Indeed they become government agencies under another name. This is not just an eventuality. It has already happened, across the board.”

Reform-minded leaders and civil servants in the Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama administrations sought in different ways to fix the hybrid system by reining in bureaucracy and using data and evidence to fund policies, programs, and nonprofits that delivered better results. However, these efforts did little to stem the massive flow of federal funds to and through federal agencies, programs, and nonprofit service providers that formed what I called in 2012 “the social services industrial complex.”

Collectively, participants in this complex managed to resist efforts to recast the system by presidents and reformers who saw the pressing need for improvements. Ultimately, however, the complex resisted change at its own peril. Its self-defense mechanisms have shown themselves to be brittle indeed in the face of political leaders and appointees determined to “deconstruct the administrative state” and the hybrid system of social service provision that has, over six decades, emerged as an integral part of it.

Where do we go from here?

Transforming the hybrid system would have taken a sustained bipartisan commitment over multiple administrations, with each building on earlier reform efforts. In a parallel universe, where Jeb Bush won the 2016 election, spent two terms implementing a blend of compassionate conservatism coupled with social innovation, and handed over the keys of the federal government to a newly elected President Josh Shapiro, this transformation may yet take root. But here in reality, where Donald Trump won the 2016 election, and then in 2024 was reelected to a second term by Americans who had witnessed his first, the prospect for an inside-the-system transformation has been obliterated.

So long as the MAGA faction remains dominant in the GOP, the consensus needed at the federal level to reconstruct the hybrid system is a nonstarter. Moreover, with the fiscal imbalances facing the federal government — mounting interest payments on huge deficits as far as we can see, and looming shortfalls in funding for Social Security and Medicare — the resources for any such renewal would be increasingly scarce. And given all problems with the hybrid system, we should not attempt one.

Accepting the demise of the hybrid system does not mean we should sit on our hands. The individuals, families, and communities the system was meant to help are no less in need, and many face ever more troubled circumstances. Those of us who seek more effective, sustainable, and legitimate ways of helping them have a lot of work to do. We can begin by anticipating the elements that could comprise a better alternative.

A new framework will not come to life overnight, but we can anticipate some tangible changes and normative shifts that could begin to form a new, more resilient system.

First, nonprofits should shift away from dependence on the now unreliable federal government and work more with state and local governments when it comes to public funding of social services. This will entail widespread experimentation and variation across the many diverse laboratories of democracy in America. Some efforts will fall short. Others will succeed. We can learn from both outcomes.

Along these lines, nonprofits should pursue more holistic and neighborhood-based solutions. Federal programs tend to target individuals or families in need, zeroing in on one problem at a time. But individuals and families often have many needs at once, and many of them are best met through flourishing communities. While the current upheaval in our nonprofit system creates tension points, it also frees up nonprofits and state and local governments to adopt sensible new approaches.

Individual and foundation funders can also reallocate support away from advocacy for federal policies and funding that is not likely to bear fruit. Instead, they can prioritize grants to underwrite effective direct services on problems where the federal government is retrenching. Over the life of the hybrid system, old-fashioned charity became increasingly passé, and “systems change” strategies en vogue among philanthropists. The pendulum is now swinging back.

The hybrid system has long masked what services our government is committed to providing to people in need, and why, and who is responsible for delivering them. This has limited support for these government programs and their nonprofit providers alike. We will need more clarity and less opacity on both of these fronts in the years ahead.

To clarify different organizations’ roles, we may also need new legal entity formats that better reflect how nonprofits primarily funded by the government operate. Such entities are not government agencies, for-profit contractors, or privately funded nonprofits. This leaves room to grant them status and affordances similar to other special entities, like charter schools, so they can flourish in their roles.

Social service nonprofits serve as a critical support for tens of millions of Americans in need. These organizations’ role in our society should not be exploited as a political cudgel. Setting our system on the correct course will require changes both creative and varied enough to confront the litany of shortcomings that weighed down America’s hybrid setup. The goal should be to build a new, better system — not to patch together the vestiges of our old one. We should avoid the trap of thinking we simply need to rewind and repair the disruptions of the past six months. The problems we ultimately need to solve have been accumulating for six decades.

Daniel Stid is a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where his work focuses on civil society, philanthropy, and democratic governance. This essay previously appeared at The American Enterprise.

Share

Alice Waters grew up in post-World War II America, the first era of mass market processed foods. Meals for her generation typically came from the freezer or out of a can.

When Alice went to France in 1965, she experienced a whole new food culture. People went to the market regularly to find the freshest food available. They were happy to pay extra for the good bread. One day, Alice went to a restaurant in Brittany and ordered fish for lunch. As food writer David Kamp recounts, her waiter, part of a husband-and-wife team that owned the place, went out back and caught a trout from the stream that ran alongside the restaurant. He showed Alice the fish while it was still alive and flopping around. Then his wife cooked the fish with vegetables that she had picked from the couple’s garden. This was trout amandine, the French way.

When Alice returned to Berkeley, she knew she couldn’t go back to the way she had grown up eating. She wanted serious change when it came to food. She had developed a passion, and she wanted to build an institution to cultivate it. Her goal was not scale; it was excellence. She wasn’t driven by anger at the system; she was motivated by love for an ideal. She didn’t go to McDonalds and suggest they put riper tomatoes on their Big Macs. She started Chez Panisse.

Chez Panisse was the nation’s first farm-to-table restaurant, the pioneer of “California cuisine.” It serves a prix fixe menu of meats and vegetables with only the freshest ingredients prepared in an open kitchen using French-inspired techniques. Chez Panisse has a claim to be the most influential American restaurant of the past 50 years. A whole galaxy of famous chefs got their start in its kitchen. From Whole Foods, to organic vegetables, to knowing the name of the farm that provided your steak — our universe of food stems from Chez Panisse.

The restaurant represents an approach to social change that David Brooks calls the “some people find a better way to live, and other people follow” way. Because Chez Panisse was excellent, it inspired the right people to also want to be excellent. And the secret to Chez Panisse’s excellence was total alignment around mission. Every role was executed in the service of fresh, delicious food in a comfortable environment. The farmers knew how to raise livestock and grow vegetables that would taste fantastic. Waters and her leadership team knew how to select the right array of fresh meat and produce and arrange the bounty into creative and interesting meals. The line cooks knew how to cut the vegetables and prepare the meats for maximum freshness and flavor. The chefs were excellent at cooking the dishes. The servers knew how to explain the menu to the restaurant’s patrons in an accessible and fun way. And the patrons knew what they were getting when they walked through the door. It would not be quick. It would not be processed. It would not be cheap.

In Greg Berman’s excellent book, The Nonprofit Crisis, he underscores the central importance of nonprofit organizations excelling at their mission. “The hidden crisis facing nonprofits is the declining public confidence in the sector,” Greg writes. Organizations build trust by doing what they say they are going to do. Organizations squander trust by failing to do that.

And then Greg points out that many nonprofits fail precisely where Chez Panisse succeeded — alignment. He relates story after story of nonprofits whose executives say the organization is doing one thing, while program staff or participants are actually doing another. In one story, Berman recalls speaking to a group of Coro Fellows about the importance and challenges of creating alternatives to incarceration. All the Fellows wanted to talk about was structural racism. Berman’s point: Of course structural racism is an important factor in incarceration, but if you want to create alternatives, you have to put the work into designing alternatives and then building them. The people around the table were not interested in learning how to do that.

In another example, two baby boomers started an organization called Youth on Boards, Action on Climate to help young people be good board members of environmental organizations. The effort fell apart because the founders of the organization wanted to teach young people how to hire, fundraise, and set organizational priorities. The young people they were trying to train wanted to focus on calling out harmful systems of power. Again, misalignment. People were not willing to excel at their role in an agreed-upon mission.

I have been a part of this problem. My first job out of college was at an alternative education program that prepared high school dropouts to pass the GED exam, so they could get a high school equivalency credential. It was a small school, with four teachers and about 40 students. I introduced myself to the students by quoting Paolo Freire and telling them they had been victims of racist systems of education and that I was there to raise their consciousness about oppression. A student approached me afterwards, thanked me for my inspiring words, and said that the last teacher he’d had in the program had said much the same thing. He had failed the equivalency exam that year. He wanted to make sure that wasn’t going to happen again. He had a new baby boy and having a GED meant he would make a dollar more an hour at Cub Foods. Was I a good enough teacher to help him pass the exam?

I could feel myself sweating as he spoke. The truth was that I had never prepared students for an exam before, and I had no idea how to. The program had lost its entire staff a few months earlier, and had to hire new people quickly. I had shown up at the right time, showed the proper enthusiasm, and was basically hired on the spot. My speech about racist education systems was one part conviction and one part bluster: I was scared to death that my lack of teaching skill would be discovered.

A friend of mine who serves as a consultant to nonprofit organizations agreed wholeheartedly with Greg’s analysis of the nonprofit crisis. His experience consulting with nonprofits could be summarized in a nutshell: Executives at organizations want to keep donors happy. The staff at nonprofits want to dismantle capitalism. Virtually no attention is paid to aligning around the mission and excelling at your role.

To his great credit, Berman recognizes just how profound the challenge is in his book. It’s not simply a matter of a few strategic planning sessions to get everybody on the same page. Being the kind of chef who excels at cooking farm-to-table cuisine takes years of acquiring knowledge and building skills. When I finally put my mind to being a good teacher, I realized just how much I had to learn in order to help my students pass the GED exam. The work that nonprofit staff do – whether it is running programs for senior citizens or helping homeless people find housing – requires a dedication to craft. Just like you can’t go from being a linebacker to being a shortstop in a week, you can’t go from being someone who excels at protesting capitalism to someone who excels at teaching math in a week.

The Chez Panisse model of social change is based not on scale but on an uncompromising dedication to mission and total alignment. If you thought baking your bread the day before, or freezing your meat, or using last week’s lettuce, was more convenient or less expensive, you were welcome to do that, but just not at Chez Panisse. It’s the excellence that catalyzed the movement. As Brian Eno once said about the Velvet Underground, they weren’t influential because a lot of people bought their albums. They were influential because the handful of people who did buy their albums were so inspired that they started their own bands.

To solve the nonprofit crisis, we are going to need to make sure that our civic institutions have the same uncompromising dedication to mission, and the same discipline around alignment, as Chez Panisse. We should not have lower standards for the nonprofits we support than for the restaurants we love.

Eboo Patel is the founder and president of Interfaith America, the nation’s premier interfaith organization. As a civic leader, speaker, and author of five books including We Need to Build: Field Notes for Diverse Democracy, his work advances pluralism and interfaith cooperation.

Share

Subscribe now

How do you solve a problem like Donald Trump? That question is on the minds of many nonprofit leaders these days.

There are good reasons why: According to the Urban Institute, in the wake of the Trump administration’s decision to cancel hundreds of federal grant agreements, one out of three nonprofits reported a government funding disruption in 2025. The administration’s opposition to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs, and the targeting of high-profile nonprofits like Harvard University, has sent shockwaves throughout the sector – no one wants to find themselves the subject of a civil rights investigation. Almost every month has brought a new shot across the bow, including last month’s federal indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center for alleged financial crimes.

The collective temperature of the nonprofit sector could safely be described as DEFCON 2. And it is safe to say that things could easily get even worse from here – despite a lot of menacing talk, the Trump administration has thus far not followed through on its threats to investigate George Soros’ philanthropy or to revoke the tax-exempt status of disfavored nonprofits.

But underneath all of the many problems that the Trump administration presents for the nonprofit sector, there is a deeper underlying crisis that also requires attention: declining public trust. The trap that Trump presents for nonprofit leaders is that, even as his public approval rating declines, direct opposition to the president is likely to hurt the nonprofit sector more than it hurts him.

Losing the war

In many respects the dilemma facing the nonprofit sector mirrors the factional schism that is currently roiling the Democratic Party, with progressives demanding confrontation while moderates urge the party to engage in self-critique as a first step towards rebirth.

For some in the nonprofit sector, the way forward is obvious: The bully must be confronted head-on. The troops must be rallied, and organizations must shed “nonprofit innocence” in order to embrace bolder advocacy and lobbying. And, because extraordinary times demand extraordinary measures, any reformist critique of the nonprofit sector or philanthropy must be suspended for fear of giving comfort to the enemy.

The ACLU exemplifies the combative approach. After Trump’s victory in 2024, the organization offered no grace note to the president-elect, just a stern warning: “We’re clear-eyed about the chaos and destruction a second Trump administration will cause to our nation. That’s why we’re done with handwringing, admiring the problem, or waiting anxiously to see which unlawful action President-elect Trump will take on Day One. We are ready to take action the minute Trump takes the oath of office.” The ACLU has lived up to its promise, filing dozens of lawsuits and issuing myriad press releases condemning the president.

While it is not a problem if a handful of progressive nonprofits follow the ACLU into full-throated opposition mode, the vast majority of nonprofits would be wise to resist this urge. There are numerous reasons why, but the most obvious is this: It didn’t work the last time.

When Trump was first elected in 2016, many organizations all but officially joined “the #Resistance.” This was justified, in part, because Trump had lost the popular vote and because other unusual circumstances, including allegations of Russian interference, made his election seem illegitimate to many observers.

The concerted nonprofit opposition to Trump, when combined with similar efforts by the media and civil servants, probably did have an impact, at least at the margins. During his first term, some Trump initiatives were delayed, at least for a time. Obstruction from federal workers succeeded in infuriating Trump, leading him to declare war on what he labeled “the deep state.” And the massive Women’s March and the Black Lives Matter protests demonstrated that there was a significant segment of the voting public who did not endorse Trump’s agenda.

But any battles that were won along the way did not add up to victory in the larger war of public opinion. Despite the best efforts of his opponents, Trump managed to increase his support, ultimately winning the presidential election in 2024 — and bringing with him Republican control of the House and the Senate.

Surveying the wreckage, Liam Kerr of The Welcome Party offered this assessment: “The first wave Resistance was fierce, energetic, and often righteously belligerent — a slash and burn approach to saving democracy. That may have made sense as an emotional reaction to Trumpism, but it did not win convincing majorities and does not appear poised to in the near future.”

Daniel Stid, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a former program officer at the Hewlett Foundation, makes the case that philanthropists should not underwrite the Resistance this time around. According to Stid, doing so would provide “MAGA enthusiasts with nearly perfect foils — wealthy and unaccountable elites based in blue coastal enclaves financing efforts to counter the people’s will.” He also suggests that a renewed Resistance would only serve to accelerate polarization “by fomenting an apocalyptic, fear-based politics in which the population is starkly divided into friends and enemies, darkly mirroring the Manichaean worldview of the most vociferous populists.”

I would argue that many, if not all, of the organizations that embraced resistance the last time around ended up doing real long-term damage to the nonprofit sector by allowing themselves to be seen as explicitly political actors. Indeed, if a full-fledged battle for public support were to break out between Donald Trump and American nonprofits and foundations, Trump would be the likely winner.

The politicization trap

According to Yascha Mounk, the author of The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure, the key question for anybody who wants to preserve and protect American institutions is not “Why do they like him?” but “Why do they hate us?” As Mounk has written, “Until the Democratic Party—along with the wider world of the American Establishment with which it is now deeply associated in the minds of voters—is able to give (and act on) an honest answer to that question, every clever tactic for how to resist Trump is doomed to fail.”

In general, politicized organizations are distrusted institutions. This is a point underlined by a recent study that looked at the perceptions of American institutions. More than 3,000 survey respondents were asked their opinions about a variety of institutions — business, the media, the Army, etc. Findings from the study suggest that “higher perceived politicization of institutions consistently predicted lower trust, often with large effect sizes. Similar patterns were observed between institutions, such that the institutions perceived as the most politicized were also the least trusted.”

Provocatively, the research team found lower levels of trust in politicized institutions even among those who shared the political slant of the institution in question. Progressives were less willing to trust left-leaning institutions that appeared more politicized. The same was true among conservatives. The researchers’ conclusion was simple: “Even when ideologies align, people distrust politicized institutions.”

Subscribe now

This is a truth that Ira Glasser knows well. Glasser, who led the ACLU for more than twenty years, has become a vocal critic of the organization, arguing that it has strayed away from its traditional, content-neutral support for free speech in order to become an all-purpose progressive advocacy group. According to Glasser, “Whether you’re the ACLU or (rival civil liberties organization) FIRE, if you’re going to hold Trump accountable when he exceeds the limits of his power, you cannot be in a position of being seen as anti-Trump or of having campaigned against him politically. Otherwise, you will have no credibility, and you will not be effective.”

Trump’s win in 2024 is itself an indicator of depressingly low levels of confidence in American institutions — clearly, concerns about the damage Trump might wreak were insufficient to motivate most voters to pull the lever for Kamala Harris.

Because the nonprofit sector is so diverse, encompassing everything from organizations that are run by volunteers and focused exclusively on a single neighborhood to hospitals with thousands of employees and billions of dollars in operating revenue, it is difficult to get an accurate read of how the sector is viewed by the public. But a recent poll found that, after four years of decline, public trust in nonprofits has inched upwards, with 57 percent of respondents expressing trust in the sector. That’s better than many American institutions, but hardly cause for a ticker tape parade. Delving deeper into the numbers, there are plenty of reasons for nonprofits to be concerned — only 24 percent of respondents trusted nonprofits to avoid partisan politics, for example. More ominously, there are signs that the number of Americans donating to charity is falling. Nonprofits would be well-advised to pay attention to these warning signals.

Back to basics

Restoring public faith in civil society and the nonprofit sector is not going to happen overnight. But it will never happen unless nonprofit leaders make an effort to distance themselves, as much as possible, from the culture wars. Going forward, it is essential that these institutions attempt to speak to all Americans, not just those who are already ideologically simpatico with them.

We should seek to avoid a future where nonprofits are divided into those that serve conservatives and those that serve progressives. But in our over-politicized era, all too many nonprofits are effectively performing exactly this kind of sorting with the kind of language they use to describe their work.

Pick a few nonprofits at random and take a look at their mission statements. If you see words like “freedom” and “prosperity” and “opportunity,” you’ll know that you are looking at an organization that is attempting to signal its conservative bona fides. Words like “equity,” “BIPOC,” and “structural racism” perform the same work in the opposite direction. The idea of persuasion seems to have fallen out of favor — many organizations aren’t even trying to speak to people who don’t already agree with them.

Another problem that nonprofits must confront is mission creep. Too many nonprofits have chosen to weigh in on contentious issues with little apparent connection to their core work. (The Sierra Club offers a well-publicized case in point.) Nonprofits would be well-advised to embrace greater organizational discipline. Less can be more: By remaining focused on their core mission rather than being dragged into controversies beyond their ken, nonprofits can reduce the chances that they will be viewed as politicized actors.

Ultimately, the best way for nonprofits to address the corrosive problem of declining public trust is to do an outstanding job of whatever their core work may be — serving the needy, educating young people, building housing, etc. The real, long-term enemy is not Trump — it’s public cynicism. Unless that enemy is defeated, we are likely to see more presidential results like the one in 2024 in the years ahead.

Greg Berman is the co-editor of Vital City and the author of The Nonprofit Crisis: Leadership Through the Culture Wars (Oxford), from which this piece is adapted.

Share

Subscribe now

There was a time when Silicon Valley and the tech industry seemed — not cool, exactly, but vaguely countercultural and brashly anti-establishment. That was the point of Mark Zuckerberg wearing pajamas to an investor pitch, or tech execs spurning coats and ties: to emphasize that they were unlike traditional elites in every way. They consciously presented themselves as rebels whose products would liberate humanity from the old constraints of authority and tradition.

Back in the early 2000s, it would have seemed far-fetched to imagine that these former outsiders would become an elite themselves. But they now rank among the richest men in history, and in recent years it has become clear that they are translating this wealth into political influence and that the resources and technologies they command have the power to reshape all of our lives. Artificial intelligence, in particular, has reached a point where sane and rational observers are speculating that AI could substitute for human capital to the extent that labor’s share of national income could be reduced to near zero, or that AI companies might amass such a concentration of economic, political, and even military power that they could take over governments. We are therefore also at a moment when we are seeing some of the drawbacks that come with an elite that hasn’t thought much about how (or whether) it should take on the traditional responsibilities of elites toward their own society.

Alex Karp, the CEO of tech company Palantir, last month issued a manifesto that is in part a summons to his fellow Silicon Valley elites to recognize their public responsibilities. Karp calls upon his peers to take an active role in national security, deliver economic growth and security to the public, and defend the culture of the West. The manifesto is drawn from Karp’s 2025 book The Technological Republic, co-written with Palantir employee Nicholas Zamiska. Both the book and the manifesto have drawn harsh criticism from the political left, including the accusation that Karp seeks to bring about an AI-enabled technofascist dystopia.

But in many ways the more insightful critique of Karp has come from the right, most notably from Tanner Greer, a writer and analyst who produces reliably intriguing essays for his blog, Scholar’s Stage. Greer’s review of Karp’s book in the journal American Affairs ranges well beyond its nominal subject to argue that the “Eastern Establishment” — the industrialists, engineers, administrators, and politicians who drove the American Industrial Revolution between 1860 and 1930 — constituted a governing class worthy of emulation by today’s Silicon Valley elite. Greer’s second piece, a Scholar’s Stage post titled “35 Theses on the WASPs,” offers further suggestions for how “the upstart young of the ‘new right’” should think about the rise and decline of this bygone establishment.

Greer’s argument, in a nutshell, is that in the period between the Civil War and the Great Depression, the United States led the way in inventing and diffusing the critical technologies that enabled humanity to transition from the agrarian age to industrial modernity. The Civil War provided a powerful stimulus to American industrialization, and the victorious Union effort gave rise to a new governing class that joined leading industrialists, bankers, managers, engineers, and lawyers with traditional Northeastern political elites. This Eastern Establishment, working through the dominant Republican Party, enacted policies (including protective tariffs, favorable judicial treatment toward corporations, federal land grants to railroads, and the gold standard) that radically accelerated America’s technological development and brought about significant economic growth and improvements in Americans’ standard of living. The Eastern Establishment’s economic and political dominance also translated into social preeminence, partly because its founding members had the foresight to create national institutions (including schools, universities, and cultural organizations) that transmitted their class values to future generations.

This history is relevant to today’s tech elite, Greer continues, because Karp’s desire for a “union of the state and the software industry” is in effect a call for a new governing class. For such a class to be successful, in Greer’s view, it will have to reproduce the critical factors that distinguished the Gilded Age techno-nationalist elite: “a political coalition to which it owes allegiance and over which it exercises influence; an economic base that provides this class with wealth and unites its members around shared material interests; and finally, a set of institutions, rituals, and social customs that give this class a culture distinct from the country at large.”² This combination of political, economic, and cultural power enabled the Eastern Establishment to lead and mold the country in line with its interests and ideals.

Will today’s Silicon Valley elite become that kind of techno-industrialist establishment? Greer believes they have “both the opportunity and the responsibility to shape American life for decades to come,” but that they have so far failed to leverage their wealth and influence to bring about the changes necessary to do so. They want a closer alignment between Silicon Valley and the state without being willing to commit to a coalitional political partner — presumably the Republican Party — or to use their economic and cultural power to bend the nation to their priorities. “You live below your privileges,” he admonishes the tech elite. “You must build the foundations of the world you want your children to inherit. You have the means and the minds to do this. Your problem is that you are not properly ambitious.”³

Greer’s American Affairs essay makes a forceful argument from history. It’s not one I agree with, but I feel strongly that any debate over Silicon Valley’s political role should take into account the historical contribution of American industry and elites to the country’s rise to global preeminence. I wish more people who make impassioned claims about this subject from both the left and the right would study the history of our nation’s corporate, managerial, and financial development as closely as Greer has.

Greer’s analysis of the Eastern Establishment offers real insight into the realities of power and influence in America in the 19th and 20th centuries, but that same analysis also complicates his argument in significant ways. Taking a page from E. Digby Baltzell — the sociologist who popularized the term WASP — Greer describes this establishment as the postwar fusion of a New England-centric patrician class with a rising group of industrial magnates.

People tend to use the term “establishment” to mean the rich, or the upper class, or the elite, or a set of powerful institutions. Paranoids use it as shorthand for the shadowy and faceless conspiracy that they believe pulls strings from behind the scenes. Baltzell, however, had a more precise meaning in mind. Every society has elites — people who occupy positions of power in critical sectors such as politics, business and the professions, the arts and sciences — and most societies have an upper class of families atop the social status hierarchy. But it’s not always the case that these two groups overlap to form an establishment.⁴

In America in the latter half of the 19th century, the upper class was represented by what philosopher George Santayana called “polite America”: the traditional Eastern seaboard aristocracy and its characteristic institutions like Yale and Harvard, which Santayana thought suffered from “inbreeding and anaemia.”⁵ A rising elite group, which Santayana called the “crude but vital America,” was led by self-made magnates from undistinguished origins. The “establishment,” in Baltzell’s terminology, was created when the new urbanized, industrial elite came together with the traditional upper class in the years after the Civil War. It was a process of mutual absorption. The old aristocracy opened its ranks to the talented outsiders, who in their turn funded the creation of new institutions — like the private boarding schools where they sent their sons to learn the moral code and traditions of public service that had given the upper class its legitimacy.

Baltzell believed that American society benefited from the creation of this establishment. In his view, the wealthy industrialists reinforced the power and standing of the upper class while also putting them in touch with the realities of a modernizing world. At the same time, the upper-class code of conduct operated as a check on the magnates who otherwise might destroy the republic through their greed and lust for power.

One of the most interesting aspects of Greer’s essay is his emphasis on the Civil War’s role in forging the new national establishment. The conflict brought together “disparate Northern regional elites, newly united beneath the Republican banner, and the rising class of industrialists and their financiers. The first seized the commanding heights of the Union’s politics; the second built the commanding heights of its economy. War bound them together in a common techno-nationalist project.”₆

After the war, the victorious alliance of elites and industrialists pursued the vision of national integration that had long been thwarted by the South. Their alliance presided over industrialization and nation-building projects like opening the West to settlement, putting up telegraph lines, and building the transcontinental railroad. It was cemented by intermarriage between the two elite groups and the creation (or renovation) of characteristic establishment institutions of this period, including social clubs, summer resorts, Episcopal churches, Ivy League colleges, and the “St. Grottlesex” preparatory schools.

Greer emphasizes the role of these schools in socializing children who came of age without any experience of the Civil War that had been so formative for their fathers. Living arrangements at many of these schools were spartan, suggestive of the barracks and drill grounds. Students were expected to adhere to an austere and rather militaristic code of behavior, one that continued to govern their behavior in adult life. A major function of these schools, according to Greer, was to “cultivate the virtues the Civil War generation revered,” including not just patriotism and the martial values but also self-discipline, rationalism, and professional competence. The New England schools gave the children of a geographically dispersed elite “a shared background, a common set of expectations, and enduring social bonds,” which together with the other establishment institutions (including intermarriage) allowed it to “act with coherence and confidence long after the war had faded from living memory.”⁷

I find this interpretation plausible, with the caveat that most founders of the preparatory schools in the post-Civil War era were more directly influenced by the model of British institutions such Eton and Harrow. Similar claims about the enduring influence of the Civil War can be found in Ulysses Grant’s memoirs, in which the former Union general and U.S. president argued that the country was stronger for having endured the conflict: “We are better off now than we would have been without it and have made much more rapid progress than we otherwise should have made.” Grant further agreed that the war had given a major boost to U.S. industrial and military modernization.

Grant, however, emphasized: “Most important, Union forces had struck a major blow for freedom and equality.”⁸ Greer’s account, in my view, generally underestimates the importance of moral and egalitarian ideals (including the principle of racial equality) in the formation of the post-Civil War leadership. He believes that “The key city in [the Eastern Establishment] constellation was always New York City,” and that the scholarship of historians and sociologists like Baltzell “is distorted by its focus on elites in lesser Establishment cities such as Boston and Philadelphia.”⁹

But this is to dismiss the genuine struggle within the establishment, throughout much of the 19th and 20th centuries, between American commercial impulses embodied by New York and the ideals embodied by Boston. Conservatives who believe that politics is downstream from culture should consider how the post-Civil War histories written in Boston, for example, influenced Americans’ perceptions of national identity and national priorities. Historian Mark Peterson has demonstrated how the South’s defeat in the Civil War allowed Boston “to put its impress on the future of the United States,” not least by enabling Boston’s pioneering historians (including Francis Parkman, William Hickling Prescott, and John Lothrop Motley) to construct new narratives placing the WASP ideals of Boston and New England at the center of the nation’s rise to greatness.¹⁰

Greer faces an uphill battle in trying to reclaim the 19th-century “robber barons” as proper objects of imitation. One can respect the phenomenal growth and innovations produced by Gilded Age business and industry while recognizing the devastating costs that came with that era’s environmentally and socially destructive form of capitalism — and Americans’ determination not to accept this as the necessary price of progress.

There are obvious difficulties with comparing past and present industrial revolutions as well as elites. For starters, the present-day revolution in information technology so far has impacted a narrower sphere of human activity than its earlier equivalents. According to the economic historian Robert J. Gordon, the industrial developments stemming from the steam engine and its offshoots (including railroads and steamships), as well as those resulting from electricity and the internal combustion engine, “covered virtually the entire sphere of human wants and needs, including food, clothing, housing, transportation, entertainment, communication, information, health, medicine, and working conditions.”¹¹ The IT revolution so far has been limited to the dimensions of information, communications, and entertainment — though it’s possible that AI could have a more transformative impact.

The net benefit of these innovations to national productivity and the average person’s standard of living also has been more mixed than those of the earlier revolutions. The innovations of the late 19th and early 20th centuries massively reduced infant mortality and lengthened overall life expectancy, for example. Many of the fruits of the tech revolution — particularly social media — have had a negative impact on our political stability and collective mental health.¹² Earlier techno-industrial revolutions provided millions of blue-collar workers with a path into the middle class; Henry Ford’s gigantic company employed roughly three in 2,000 Americans in 1925 and paid them what at the time was a substantial minimum wage of $5 a day. The tech companies’ core workforces, by contrast, consist principally of small numbers of highly educated professionals — and meanwhile, AI threatens to make millions of white-collar jobs obsolete.

The benefit side of the ledger may well look brighter as the technological revolution continues. Meanwhile, however, many commentators have pointed to the ways in which some of the worst problems of American life in the 2020s resemble those of the late 19th century. Then as now, material well-being and unprecedented technological advances were accompanied by widening extremes of wealth and poverty, and an economy increasingly dominated by unaccountable corporate behemoths. That unchecked corporate power fueled destabilizing trends: cynical and divisive politicians rigging the system and shattering national unity, financial meltdowns, environmental devastation, massive immigration sparking a nativist backlash, riots and revolts, widespread social isolation and atomization, and a despairing sense among many Americans that their country had changed beyond recognition. The Gilded Age also marked the abandonment of Reconstruction and the efforts by Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses Grant to create a more racially inclusive democracy.

While it would take nearly a century for the American political system to begin to live up to its ideals with regard to African-American citizens, Americans pushed back against excessive corporate power almost as soon as they saw it taking shape. The Gilded Age industrial order did not exercise an unchallenged “70-year dominance of American business and government,” as Greer suggests.¹³ The deficiencies of that order provoked major reform movements — first Populism, then Progressivism — along with a growing labor movement and even a robust Socialist Party.

And while many people believe the late 19th and early 20th centuries to have been a laissez-faire era, governments at all levels (including local and state as well as federal) took action not only to support economic growth but also to limit corporate excesses. Landmarks along this path included antitrust legislation and regulatory action, civil service reform, and the institution of progressive taxation as well as the creation of a rudimentary social welfare safety net. The Supreme Court affirmed the breakup of Standard Oil in 1911, and Congress created the Federal Reserve two years later in order to ensure the nation would not have to depend on the good graces of individual bankers to survive the next financial panic. Many of these initiatives were advanced by Republicans with the support of GOP presidents such as Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, which calls into question the idea of an all-encompassing political establishment.¹⁴

Greer’s depiction of a techno-industrial establishment implementing a “blueprint for modern America” in a deliberate and coordinated manner also seems to me to overstate the matter. Companies of that era competed viciously with each other and frequently failed to achieve consensus even within their organizations.[15] The company whose history I know best is the Corning Glass Works — still, as Corning Inc., the dominant manufacturer of specialty glass, including the glass in most smartphones. In researching its origins, I found that the company’s Gilded Age president, Amory Houghton Jr. (1837-1909), couldn’t even agree with his own sons about the need to hire academically trained scientists. When they urged him to hire a chemist, according to family lore, he allegedly responded: “I’ll have no damned college graduates working for this company.” He also refused to automate the lightbulb manufacturing process that would allow the Glass Works to keep up with larger competitors like Westinghouse and General Electric. In the end, Houghton’s sons went behind his back to recruit the scientists and develop the automation that kept the company solvent.¹⁶

As Greer recognizes, the story of the Eastern Establishment unfolded across a span of generations and decades. The continuities between generations are significant, but so too are the discontinuities. Amory Houghton Jr. once lost control of his company to his creditors and lived in constant fear of debt; he told his son that every day he went to work felt like walking along the edge of a cliff. Like Houghton, the corporate founders of the first generation tended to be obsessively focused on securing the bottom line and establishing mastery over their particular fiefdoms. It tended to be the next generations that had the breathing room to consider the wider national and international picture.

Amory Houghton Jr.’s son Alanson (1863-1941) is a case in point. Amory Jr. had only a high school education. Alanson graduated from the St. Paul’s School, where his classmates included John Jacob Astor Jr., William Randolph Hearst, and the two sons of U.S. President James Garfield. He went on to Harvard, where he internalized the college’s Puritan-derived system of manners and values. He also pursued graduate studies in Göttingen, Berlin, and Paris, often alongside his friend and Harvard classmate George Santayana. He returned to the States to take up leadership of his family’s glass company, which he tripled in size before becoming a member of the U.S. House of Representatives and ambassador to Germany and Great Britain.

It would be difficult to make the case that Amory Houghton Jr. belonged to (or took his cues from) a national and associational upper class. His son Alanson, however, was a quintessential Eastern Establishment type, from his corporate and political connections to his baronial mansion and his membership in elite social clubs such as the Jekyll Island Club, where he wintered with Morgans, Rockefellers, and Vanderbilts. But as a participant in a national and associational establishment, Alanson Houghton also moved away from the politics and mentality of founder magnates like his father. In politics a progressive Republican, he believed in social reform measures (such as women’s suffrage), expanded foreign trade, and international engagement. He tried to cool the nativist passions that flared up with the Red Scare that followed the Great War, insisting that even radical criticism of the government should be permitted so long as the changes sought were pursued through constitutional means. He also was a founding member of the Board of Trustees of the Institute for Advanced Studies, serving as chairman when Albert Einstein and other refugee scholars arrived there in the early 1930s.¹⁷

Nor was the rule of this successor generation as short-lived as Greer’s account might lead readers to believe. In Greer’s telling, the Great Depression “ruined a great many Eastern Establishment families” and led to the New Deal, which was “an explicit attempt to downgrade the political, economic, and cultural influence of Eastern elites.” He suggests that the rise of “the national scientific complex” — including the Manhattan Project, World War II industrial developments, and the rise of the Cold War national-security state — posed “a fundamental challenge to older Establishment institutions and cultural authority.”¹⁸ By the late 1950s, according to Greer, the Eastern Establishment had been defunded, disempowered, and displaced in the cultural sphere by the prestige of brilliant scientists (including many émigrés) as well as rival forces like Hollywood.

But the example of Alanson Houghton and the Institute for Advanced Studies highlights that the establishment was present on all sides of this conflict, if it can even be called a conflict. The Rockefeller Foundation funded the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars, which helped bring to this country a constellation of brilliant scientists and scholars that included Einstein, Enrico Fermi, Leo Szilard, and much of the Frankfurt School. Establishment figures like James Conant, Vannevar Bush, and Harvey Bundy were critical to establishing the postwar framework for government funding of science and technology. Henry Stimson, the quintessential establishment paladin, served as Secretary of War under Democratic presidents Roosevelt and Truman, after having served in the same position under Republican President William Howard Taft as well as Secretary of State under Herbert Hoover. And while midcentury Hollywood was culturally a world away from the WASPy Northeast, it’s worth remembering how many actors of that era Anglicized their names or adopted a manufactured WASP persona. It’s also notable that establishment fixture John Hay Whitney financed Gone with the Wind along with a raft of other classic films. In fact, it was not until the 1950s that Americans even began to use the term “establishment” in a sociopolitical sense, and they most certainly believed that it referred to an existing elite and ongoing power realities, not just the country’s history between 1870 and 1930.

There is no doubt that the Depression did discredit the Republican Party and many of the policies it had upheld since the 19th century, which the considerable majority of Americans came to believe had brought on the economic collapse and which offered few solutions for the widespread misery that resulted. Some Old Guard Republicans continued to cling to Gilded Age nostrums. But the party as a whole moved toward moderation during Dwight Eisenhower’s presidency, endorsing parts of the New Deal social welfare safety net as well as policies to educate and empower the workforce — and the result from 1940 to 1970 was both a much faster rate of growth (measured in output per person) and a more egalitarian and cohesive society than in the period from 1870 to 1940.¹⁹

The Eastern Establishment pivoted in response to the Depression, away from knee-jerk association with the GOP and toward the model of Henry Stimson and his acolytes, who offered dedicated public service to both Republican and Democratic administrations as an expression of placing the interests of nation above class. Although many today would dismiss this idea of noblesse oblige as a myth, it was reinforced by the high rate of World War II casualties among graduates of elite prep schools and universities as well as the service of dollar-a-year men in government and the wholesale conversion of American industry to wartime production. The postwar era also saw the movement toward meritocracy in Ivy League universities under leaders like Harvard’s James Conant and Yale’s Kingman Brewster Jr., largely because they believed that elite institutions had national responsibilities that transcended the interests of the class into which they had been born.

Some elites of the earlier era, of course, had argued for taking the opposite course: that is, for placing the perceived interests of their class above those of the nation. One of the bestselling authors of the 1920s and ‘30s was Lothrop Stoddard (1883-1950), a leading American proponent of eugenics in the decades before World War II and author of works such as The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy and The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under-Man. Unsurprisingly, the National Socialist regime in Germany hailed Stoddard as a prophet, and race theorist Alfred Rosenberg incorporated Stoddard’s term “under-man” into Nazi ideology.

Stoddard, who received his undergraduate and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard, was not merely a white supremacist but also a class supremacist. He insisted that the WASP establishment could retain its primacy only through the suppression of “inferior” races and classes, meaning essentially all Americans who did not belong to the Anglo-Saxon elite. He presented this as a program of progressive reform, but added that “our social ills are largely the product of degeneracy,” and that “degeneracy can be eliminated only by eliminating the degenerate. And this is a racial, not a social matter.”²⁰ He looked forward to the day when unruly American democracy would be replaced by a “Neo-Aristocracy” of racially superior patricians and technocrats.

Stoddard’s program was rendered tragically concrete in the forced sterilization of tens of thousands of Americans for reasons of racial unfitness from the 1920s through the 1940s. It also manifested in the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, explicitly eugenicist legislation that drew upon Stoddard’s work along with that of the Boston Brahmin-dominated Immigration Restriction League. Much of the early 20th-century elite was taken in by eugenic pseudo-science to a degree that seems shocking now; Stoddard engaged in friendly correspondence with U.S. presidents and senators, and he and his associates came close to persuading major universities to set up eugenics studies departments.²¹

Eugenics, with its privileging of race and class over the nation, stood in stark contradiction to the principles of meritocracy, equality of opportunity, and disinterested public service that were at the heart of the founding creed of the Eastern Establishment. Of course the members of the establishment frequently honored this creed more in the breach than the observance; Baltzell’s most famous work, his 1964 The Protestant Establishment, lamented that the establishment, by failing to assimilate talented people from non-Protestant ancestry, was becoming a caste and was thereby squandering its legitimacy.²² For all the talk of elite university leaders like Harvard’s Conant and Yale’s Brewster being “traitors to their class” — talk that is seeing an ugly revival in our present day — in pursuing meritocracy to its logical and moral conclusion they showed their fidelity to the establishment’s core principles.

So what lessons should today’s tech titans take from this history? We have yet to see whether this small group of billionaires (and soon perhaps trillionaires) will act as a group, or what coordinated use they might make of their immense power outside of the commercial realm. But, equally or more importantly, we have yet to see how (or whether) the American public and the political system will seek to rein in or channel these elites along with the technologies they command.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has been a strong advocate for the civilizational benefits AI will confer upon humanity in the long run, but he also worries about anti-AI backlash in the short run. His January 2026 essay “The Adolescence of Technology” points out that Elon Musk’s wealth, as a percentage of U.S. GDP, already exceeds that of John D. Rockefeller, the wealthiest industrialist of the Gilded Age. And since Amodei believes that extreme wealth concentration combined with large-scale job losses have the potential to “break society,” he calls for the world’s billionaires to support high levels of progressive taxation. As he puts it, either they can accept the pragmatic argument that it’s in their interest to support a good version of such taxation, or else “they’ll inevitably get a bad version designed by a mob.”

Amodei also notes that “even in the Gilded Age, industrialists such as Rockefeller and Carnegie felt a strong obligation to society at large, a feeling that society had contributed enormously to their success and they needed to give back.” He laments that such a spirit “seems to be increasingly missing today,” particularly among the “many wealthy individuals (especially in the tech industry) [who] have recently adopted a cynical and negative attitude that philanthropy is inevitably fraudulent or useless.” He argues that “Those who are at the forefront of AI’s economic boom should be willing to give away both their wealth and their power.”

Amodei’s worries overlap with Greer’s concern that the tech elite currently bears a close resemblance to the wealthiest groups of the antebellum era, whom Greer described as “suspicious of executive power, distrustful of American nationalism, insulated from the American public,” and seeking the highest return on their investments “regardless of the political consequences for doing so.”²³ Greer recently said on a podcast that “There’s some people in Silicon Valley who have a tactical alliance with Trump world, but there’s not a sense that ‘Oh, we need to take special political care of these parts of the country because they’re part of our coalition, and only if we have a political coalition in charge are we going to make sure that we have energy being sent to our data centers’ or what have you. That sort of consciousness is very rare in Silicon Valley.” It’s a sharp contrast, in Greer’s telling, with the Eastern Establishment’s Republican elites of the late 19th century, who kept Midwesterners in the coalition by backing tariffs to protect wool manufacturers while also shoring up base support through federal spending on Civil War veterans’ pensions.²⁴

But is Donald Trump’s Republican Party the appropriate coalition partner for a techno-industrialist elite? It’s true that the administration until recently had done little to interfere with the tech giants, particularly in AI, partly out of conviction that regulation would allow the Chinese to gain the advantage. Greer, as a full-time researcher on the Chinese Communist Party, has written persuasively on how the United States is engaged in an increasingly adversarial competition with China that resembles the Cold War with the Soviet Union. Greer and coauthor Nancy Yu, writing in Foreign Policy, emphasize that the Chinese government’s primary strategic goal is “to build an industrial and scientific system capable of pushing humanity to new technological frontiers.” The Chinese leadership, in their view, believes human history is at a hinge point in which emerging technologies can topple existing economic and political orders, much as the British Empire and the post-World War II United States “rose to global hegemony by pioneering a global techno-economic revolution.”²⁵

But the administration’s hands-off approach appears to be changing, as AI poses a growing threat to Americans’ job opportunities as well as to national security.²⁶ For example, the Pentagon has attempted to punish Anthropic because CEO Amodei refuses to allow the company’s model to be used in fully autonomous weapons or for mass domestic surveillance.²⁷ More crucially, however, at no point has the administration attempted to mount a serious and sustained revival of the state capacity that would allow us to restore the American manufacturing and scientific-technical prowess needed to compete with China. On the contrary, it has engaged in pointless acts of national self-harm, including its cutbacks to university research as well as government scientific and funding agencies.

This should give our would-be tech establishment pause, as the most obvious model for how the United States might compete in and win a new cold war is how we won the last one. In October 1957, after the launch of Sputnik raised the terrifying possibility that the U.S. had fallen behind the Soviets in critical space and military technology, an organization of business officials (called the Committee on Economic Development, or CED) held a high-level meeting with government officials. According to sociologist Mark Mizruchi, the CED then produced a series of reports “on the need for increased government efficiency, coordination of defense expenditures, economic performance, and a massive upgrading of American education, all of which the group saw as essential to fighting the Cold War with the Soviets.”²⁸ Within a year, thanks in part to the support provided by these business elites, Congress had passed a sixfold increase in federal funding to education compared to the start of the decade. President Dwight Eisenhower shortly thereafter signed the bill that created NASA, then established the Advanced Research Projects Agency that went on to create (in whole or in part) many of the breakthrough technologies that we now rely upon (including the Internet). Over the next decade, federal funding for scientific research increased tenfold.²⁹

Eisenhower understood that science and technology had been essential to victory in World War II and that Cold War success would require unprecedented collaboration between government, universities, and industry. He bolstered the bureaucratic capacity for high-quality policy work that, as he knew better than anyone, had been a critical deficiency of the German and Japanese high commands.³⁰ And he relied upon our allies as force multipliers and invested in critical infrastructure projects including the creation of the national highway network.

By the time of Eisenhower’s presidency, the corporate elite included many of the grandchildren of the Civil War generation of industrial magnates. As a group, they had been chastened by the failures that had led to the Depression, had come to a grudging acceptance of at least some degree of higher taxation and federal regulation, and had been inspired by their partnership with government in World War II.

Unfortunately, there is scant evidence so far that today’s tech elite is evolving toward a similar kind of responsible national leadership. The Republican Party under Donald Trump has neither the interest nor the capacity to impose limits on the tech elite to better serve the national interest, and it’s not clear what other group or groups in society might serve as that countervailing force. Meanwhile, the case studies in tech hubris are too numerous to mention; lowlights include Sam Bankman-Fried’s use of “effective altruism” as cover for financial recklessness, Apple’s global tax evasion scheme, and Elon Musk’s feckless and destructive DOGE initiative.

This elite has so far made little use of its massive wealth to restore American productivity and dynamism, whether through reforming our dysfunctional politics, reviving the left-behind areas of our country, improving our rotten educational system, elevating our decadent culture, or mounting a Gates Foundation-type effort to save lives in this country as well as abroad. It has done next to nothing to push back against the administration’s sabotage of state capacity or its efforts to undercut America’s ability to attract talent from all around the world, without which Silicon Valley would be a shadow of itself. Nor has it stood up to safeguard the freedoms of thought and expression that allowed America to become the world’s leading scientific and technological power in the first place.

To the contrary, there is an obvious pro-MAGA tilt to defense tech — on full display at the recent Hill and Valley Forum in Washington.³¹ Such partisan dalliances only make it likelier that Democrats will take harsh actions against leading Silicon Valley firms when they regain power. My personal opinion is that breaking up companies at the tech vanguard would be a mistake, since history suggests that, like it or not, a handful of massively scaled and massively funded companies are essential to achieving technological breakthroughs and spreading new technologies to the mass market — and the consequences of China winning the AI race would be decidedly negative for America and much of the world.³² The better outcome would be for the tech sector, like the post-World War II establishment, to aim to be above partisanship. Alignment with any party in a polarized democracy puts the sector’s public legitimacy at risk; a national strategic asset shouldn’t be a factional weapon.

A more laudable example of Silicon Valley leadership, suggesting the nonpartisan path the tech elite should follow, comes from the 2024 book Unit X by Raj Shah and Christopher Kirchhoff. It describes how the authors founded the Defense Innovation Unit Experimental — DIUx, or Unit X for short — in an attempt to bridge the gap between Silicon Valley and the Pentagon. Silicon Valley teams, working with nimble units within the government across multiple administrations, bypassed the Pentagon’s change-resistant bureaucracy. They used agile, iterative methodologies to outcompete the big defense contracting companies in a fraction of the time for a fraction of the cost.

Tanner Greer is correct that the Eastern Establishment played an outsized role in American history over a decades-long span because it aligned industrial wealth, political power, and a culture sustained by upper-class rituals and institutions. But what made the establishment durable — and indeed gave it legitimacy — was less lockstep agreement on political issues than an ethos that subordinated class interest to national interest. At its heart was a compromise that involved not just the negotiated mutual absorption of two rival groups but their adjustment to a higher national creed. The New England aristocracy allowed the “crude but vital America” into its ranks, while the industrialists agreed to Puritan-inspired limits on their pursuit of profit at all costs. The establishment that emerged did, at its best, prove willing to incorporate talented outsiders, to adhere to an ethos of disinterested public service, to abide by norms of liberal democracy, and to build institutions that ultimately undermined its own dominance — even while helping to make the United States the most globally competitive society the world had ever seen.

If America’s power centers can reach a similar equilibrium, we may see a new and nationally responsible establishment take shape. If they don’t, the future holds little but destruction — and not the creative kind.

Geoff Kabaservice is Vice President of Political Studies at the Niskanen Center and the author of The Guardians: Kingman Brewster, His Circle, and the Rise of the Liberal Establishment and Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, From Eisenhower to the Tea Party. He hosts the podcast “The Vital Center.”

Share

[1] Philip Trammell and Dwarkesh Patel, “Capital in the 22nd Century,” Philip Trammell (Substack), Dec. 29, 2025.

Philosopher count

Capital in the 22nd Century

1. Introduction…

Read more

5 months ago · 729 likes · 93 comments · Philip Trammell and Dwarkesh Patel

Noah Smith, “What if a few AI companies end up with all the money and power?,” Noahpinion (Substack), Apr. 12, 2026.

Noahpinion

What if a few AI companies end up with all the money and power?

Last year, a lot of people (including me) were wondering if the AI industry was in a bubble. These days it’s looking a lot less likely. The technology has found its killer app — agentic coding, which has upended the software industry as we know it. For power users, AI is no longer just a chatbot — you can tell it to go make you an app, or run some data analysis, and it’ll just do it for you and come back with the results…

Read more

a month ago · 376 likes · 123 comments · Noah Smith

[2] Tanner Greer, “The Making of a Techno-Nationalist Elite,” American Affairs IX:4 (Winter 2025). https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2025/11/the-making-of-a-techno-nationalist-elite/

[3] Tanner Greer, “35 Theses on the WASPs,” Scholar’s Stage, Jan. 12, 2026. https://scholars-stage.org/35-theses-on-the-wasps/

[4] Aaron M. Renn, “Rediscovering E. Digby Baltzell’s Sociology of Elites,” American Affairs V:1 (Spring 2021).

[5] George Santayana, The Genteel Tradition at Bay (New York: Scribner’s, 1931).

[6] Greer, “The Making of a Techno-Nationalist Elite.”

[7] Ibid.

[8] Quoted in Ron Chernow, Grant (New York: Penguin, 2017), p. 518.

[9] Greer, “35 Theses on the WASPs.”

[10] Mark Peterson, The City-State of Boston: The Rise and Fall of an Atlantic Power 1630-1865 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), p. 624.

[11] Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), p. 320.

[12] See for example Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium (San Francisco, CA: Stripe, 2018) and Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (New York: Penguin, 2024).

[13] Ibid.

[14] So too does the history of factional warfare within the Republican Party during this era, including strife between Stalwarts and Half-Breeds and Mugwumps as well as TR’s breakaway Bull Moose Party.

[15] Greer, “The Making of a Techno-Nationalist Elite.”

[16] Amo Houghton Jr., unpublished memoir; see also Davis Dyer and Daniel Gross, The Generations of Corning: The Life and Times of a Global Corporation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).

[17] Jeffrey J. Matthews, Alanson B. Houghton: Ambassador of the New Era (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004).

[18] Greer, “35 Theses on the WASPs.”

[19] Gordon, p. 319; Robert D. Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett, The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020), p. 10.

[20] Lothrop Stoddard, The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under-Man (London: Chapman & Hall, 1922), p. 227.

[21] James Robert Bachman, “Theodore Lothrop Stoddard: The Bio-Sociological Battle for Civilization,” Ph.D. dissertation (University of Rochester), 1967.

[22] E. Digby Baltzell, The Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy & Caste in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1964).

[23] Greer, “The Making of a Techno-Nationalist Elite.”

[24] “From WASP Elites to AI Kings,” Tanner Greer interview with Aaron Renn, The Aaron Renn Show, Jan. 19, 2026.

[25] Tanner Greer and Nancy Yu, “Xi Believes China Can Win a Scientific Revolution,” Foreign Policy, Apr. 30, 2024.

[26] “America wakes up to AI’s dangerous power,” Economist, Apr. 16, 2026. https://www.economist.com/leaders/2026/04/16/america-wakes-up-to-ais-dangerous-power

[27] Julian E. Barnes and Sheera Frenkel, “Anthropic Says It Cannot ‘Accede’ to Pentagon in Talks Over A.I.,” New York Times, Feb. 26, 2026. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/26/technology/anthropic-pentagon-talks-ai.html

[28] Mark Mizruchi, The Fracturing of the American Corporate Elite (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).

[29] Geoffrey Kabaservice, “The Effective Conservative Governance of Dwight Eisenhower,” The American Conservative, Oct. 15, 2022.

[30] Paul Kennedy, Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War (New York: Allen Lane, 2013).

[31] Elizabeth Dwoskin, “Welcome to the war party: The new Trump-tech alliance cashes in,” Washington Post, Apr. 1, 2026. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/04/01/silicon-valley-defense-spending-hill-valley-forum/

[32] Michael Lind, “Why the US economy beats Europe,” UnHerd, Apr. 18, 2026. https://unherd.com/2026/04/why-the-us-economy-beats-europe/?edition=us

If there is one thing that seems to be uniting many policymakers, pundits, and scholars across the political spectrum, it is that the internet and digital media are not the inevitably liberating forces they were purported to be. Apple’s famous 1984 Super Bowl commercial cast its new Macintosh personal computer as a renegade force against an Orwellian Big Brother. But today private companies have accomplished what the twentieth-century state could only dream of: comprehensive tracking of the movements, communications, and purchases of individuals in the United States and across the world.

In her recent essay for Hypertext, Jennifer Burns argues, “Digital media is acting on our politics in obvious ways, but our politics don’t seem to be acting much on digital media.” However, the problems we face today are, unfortunately, not simply the result of political inaction. Instead, they reflect failures of past policymaking. Legal regimes designed long ago have left us with a system that continues to favor the interests of major companies while doing little for many Americans’ concerns about digital media. Of course, we will need to respond more effectively to recent innovations in digital technology. However, we must ensure reforms target the long-standing incentives shaping the tech giants’ decision-making — and recognize that the broader political context matters, too. Often, the features of online life we find most objectionable are symptoms of two deeper problems: (1) the industry’s reliance on digital advertising, which drives its aggressive collection of user data and (2) broader political dynamics that are spurring affective polarization, extremism, and the “dark passions” of hatred and resentment. This essay will focus on (1), as fixing (2) requires a project of liberal-democratic revitalization no digital policy reform alone will be able to accomplish.

Developing an effective tech policy agenda for the 21st century demands conceptual clarity on two dimensions. First, what are the kinds of problems that we are most worried about? To what degree are these problems rooted in technological innovation itself or in the interaction of technology with our political-economic structures? Second, how have policymakers already attempted to govern digital technologies, and what can we learn from these past attempts? It is imperative we keep these questions top of mind so that we avoid wasting valuable political energy on legislative efforts that might sound nice but only exacerbate the very problems they purport to address.

Diagnosing the pathologies of the digital revolution

The most urgent concerns about digital technologies fall under the following categories:

• Fairness, discrimination, and algorithmic bias.

• Disinformation, extremism, and polarization.

• Harmful content, including harassment, abuse, and hate crimes.

• “Addictive” properties of smartphones, social media platforms, and online gambling.

• Free speech and censorship.

• Intellectual property, copyright protections, and rights to publicity and/or personality.

• Data governance, including privacy and portability of data.

• Digital surveillance by public and private authorities.

Many of these problems are cast as failures of content moderation, but that diagnosis just scratches the surface. The deterioration of discourse on the modern internet, including popular social media platforms, is a symptom of a deeper, structural condition: the reliance of most companies on a digital advertising business model. This business model means that companies are incentivized to engage in pervasive data collection and analysis — also known as surveillance —to track and maximize user engagement, and thus advertisers’ click-through rates. That imperative drives product and design choices from top to bottom.

It is the power of surveillance-based targeting that makes many of the aforementioned concerns, like online extremism, so worrisome. Noxious content can be pushed to the people most susceptible to its message because of the data that companies collect about them. Policies that focus on moderating content risk censoring speech without fixing the underlying data governance regime that encourages companies to push that speech into the corners where it will do the most damage.

Nor will better moderation of online content solve the larger cultural problems of which it is as much symptom as cause. Members of traditional media, such as cable news, are also responsible for the mainstreaming of extremism and disinformation.1 And, of course, we cannot forget the public commentators and politicians who legitimate and perpetuate disinformation and violent rhetoric and policies. By failing to hold accountable leaders who take illegal, illiberal, and anti-democratic actions, whether through social censure or appropriate legal and political methods policymakers have forsaken powerful remedies for refuting disinformation and extremism while rebuilding trust within the populace. Political extremism online has become incorporated into this broader fabric of partisanship.

Reforms that target online content moderation are unlikely to resolve problems driven by deeper structural issues with the business model of the modern internet or the pathologies of our politics. In fact, they can backfire by making it harder for vulnerable communities to organize while permitting the giants to comply with the letter of the law but exploit loopholes.

Consider, for example, a recent example of American politicians acting on digital technology companies: the 2018 Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act, known as FOSTA-SESTA because it incorporated elements of another bill known as the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act.

Learning from past political decisions to govern digital media

FOSTA-SESTA amended Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which attempted to reduce pornographic online content. While the Supreme Court struck down most of the Communications Decency Act for violating the First Amendment’s speech protections, Section 230 survived. This section protected online service providers, and now social media platforms, from liability for content users shared. In large part, it responded to the uncertainty produced by two major court decisions regarding early internet forums. Before Section 230, had they moderated comments on early discussion boards, online service providers would be treated as publishers, not distributors, of that content. Consequently, they would be liable for violations of defamation and obscenity laws. This created perverse incentives to either let user-generated content run wild or simply stop hosting such material entirely. In short, Section 230 enables online service providers to moderate content at all. Section 230 does not excuse companies from a plethora of responsibilities, such as intellectual property laws and the enforcement of federal criminal laws. But it enables them to exercise their speech rights to moderate content and host user-driven sites that billions of people find useful.

FOSTA-SESTA removed Section 230’s liability protections with regard to content that promoted sex-trafficking. However laudable its intentions, the law seems to have backfired. Since the adoption of FOSTA-SESTA in and unrelated seizure of backpage.com in April 2018, authorities have found it harder to collect evidence of sex trafficking as platforms have moved overseas and many people involved in the trade now rely on encrypted and disappearing messages on social media platforms.

Victims of sex traffickers and other sex workers must also be able to communicate online and warn each other about dangerous actors. Such protective practices might also seem like “surveillance” or monitoring, but they are survival strategies embraced by a relatively less powerful population. Scholars use the term “sousveillance” to denote the difference. A 2020 survey of sex workers’ experiences in the wake of the 2018 changes found that FOSTA-SESTA gave them “a general sense fear and paranoia” about what information they could legally and safely share online, making it harder to rely on the internet as a tool for finding community, support, and resources for verifying the trustworthiness and safety of new clients.2 While a 2023 D.C. Circuit ruling helped affirm that “sex workers, advocates for sex-workers’ rights, and other online speakers were protected from prosecution,” ambiguities about the law and thus its potential chilling effect remain.

The example of FOSTA/SESTA suggests the potential limits of policy responses that prioritize reducing the presence of morally objectionable content online. Such an approach might successfully roll back undesirable content on mainstream, market-dominant, and domestic websites. But it may accomplish this while also reducing legal, less objectionable, or even morally desirable content, including that which would be produced by the very people that the policy is supposed to serve. It makes it harder for public and private actors to find reliable information about dangerous individuals and groups.

I do not believe taking seriously the criticisms of FOSTA-SESTA means we must give up on the possibility of policy solutions to problems we see online. Rather, within this story we can make out the contours of an alternative paradigm that understands digital life to be part and parcel of our broader political economy. While seeking to hold companies responsible for social harms, we must not lose sight of how ordinary individuals use the internet to empower themselves and their communities, and whether private and public policies undermine or support these capacities.

The internet’s liberating potential is undermined less by objectionable content and more by the massive data collection, analysis, and use that render those individuals and anyone to whom they are connected vulnerable to private and public forms of surveillance. Online data is fundamentally relational, so that companies can collect data about non-users. That means data you provide to private companies can be used to police and punish other people. Consider, for example, users of a popular Muslim prayer app, Muslim Pro, who felt exploited and complicit in the oppression of their peers when they found out the company’s data had wound up being shared with the American military. It is this fundamental business of data that shapes most of the choices that technology companies make, including the promotion of noxious or seemingly “addictive” content. We are likely to see these dynamics of so-called “surveillance capitalism” continue to play out as chatbot companies search for profit models, as seen in OpenAI’s turn to digital advertising.

Privacy reforms need not pursue a total ban on digital advertising; the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation has shifted companies’ incentives away from more personally invasive behavioral targeting to contextual targeting, a trend that American privacy policy could further encourage.3 Federal privacy legislation could limit companies to collecting only the data required to offer an effective service for their consumers; empower users by making further data collection opt-in rather than the default; strengthen existing protections against discriminatory algorithmic targeting with respect to housing, employment, and banking; and prohibit state actors and police from circumventing Fourth Amendment protections against warrantless search and seizures by purchasing data from brokers. To be clear: Because challenging the status-quo data governance regime that favors companies over users would harm the bottom line of most major digital technology companies, it is an unavoidably ambitious project. But if we think we are at a revolutionary moment that will define the future of our ever-more digital political economy, then the time for ambition is now.

Kristen Collins is a Senior Fellow with the F.A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics and a Senior Research Fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Her Substack is Theory of Virtual Sentiments.

Share

Last week, the Department of Defense gave Anthropic an ultimatum: Let the Pentagon use its AI models for “any lawful purpose,” without restriction, by 5:01 p.m. Friday or face the consequences. Those consequences turned out to include a “supply chain risk” designation normally reserved for foreign adversaries and firms associated with them, a presidential directive for every federal agency to cease using Anthropic’s technology, and threats to compel cooperation under the extraordinary powers of the Defense Production Act.

Anthropic refused to compromise on two red lines that ought to put us beyond the realm of “lawful purpose” anyway: no mass domestic surveillance and no fully autonomous weapons without a human in the loop. The Pentagon labeled this defiance. As commenters across the ideological spectrum have pointed out, the administration’s actions are deeply illiberal and its rationale incoherent. It’s also, of course, hard to look past the relationship that some of Anthropic’s competitors have with the administration and not wonder whether they pushed the DoD to take an excessively hard line for their own benefit. Most Americans agree with Anthropic’s position.

And yet, for all the wrong reasons, the Trump administration has tripped and fallen into an interesting question: How should the government think about preserving its own autonomy while it makes use of privately-held AI models?

The administration has attempted to answer this question with allegations that don’t really scan; suggesting, for example, that Anthropic is bad because it is a Trojan horse for effective altruism to “seize veto power over the operational decisions of the United States military” or because “there has been no bigger thief of Americans’ public identity information en masse or creators’ works than by Anthropic.”

As is so often the case, other players in the MAGA ecosystem have now been left to graft logic onto Trump and Hegseth’s impulsive behaviors with varying success. But writing on X, Acting Under Secretary of State for Foreign Assistance, Humanitarian Affairs, and Religious Freedom Jeremy Lewin made one such ex post argument that we should take seriously:

This isn’t about Anthropic or the specific conditions at issue. It’s about the broader premise that technology deeply embedded in our military must be under the exclusive control of our duly elected/appointed leaders. No private company can dictate normative terms of use — which can change and are subject to interpretation — for our most sensitive national security systems. The @DeptofWar obviously can’t trust a system a private company can switch off at any moment.

Lewin is mostly right in principle. No government could, would, or should tolerate a private vendor dictating the terms of how it fulfills its core functions. It’s anti-democratic to outsource so much of your government to private industry that you fail to translate policy goals into real results.

But here’s the thing: Even if we accept the dubious premise that this is a case in which a private company is exercising inappropriate influence over how the government executes its legitimate mission, that is not a new problem. It is, in fact, one of the most common and well-documented failures in federal operations. We just don’t usually talk about it in such dramatic terms. It manifests instead in now-expected tech meltdowns, call centers that don’t scale, and websites that are unusable to the people they need to serve. But it costs us far more in money, failed programs, and degraded public services than any harm Anthropic’s usage policy has ever caused.

And while Lewin correctly identifies this as a problem, the solution cannot be a sudden resort to punitive intervention in the market; this won’t work. Instead, it requires habitual changes inside every agency, office, and program. For anything more complex than a pencil, government contracting poses a classic principal-agent problem: It is difficult for the ostensible boss to track what the ostensible underling is actually doing. Fixing it requires doing something radical: growing the government’s own internal capacity at the expense of an industrial base that has captured large parts of the government and profits by perpetuating dysfunction.

That insight has taken decades to surface, and we struggle mightily to execute on it even now. But AI is going to pour jet fuel on this problem, because it implicates so many normative questions about humanity, ethics, and ownership. We need to ask bigger questions and remain open to bigger answers about how to address this before it’s too late.

We know how to solve vendor capture, actually

The Anthropic fight has captured the public’s interest, but most of the time, vendor capture doesn’t look like a CEO drawing ethical red lines on national television. It looks like an agency that can’t switch IT contractors because no one on the government side understands how the old system works. It looks like a contractor who has maintained a critical system for so long that all the institutional knowledge has migrated to their side of the table. It looks like contracts designed — sometimes deliberately, sometimes through sheer inertia — to make it functionally impossible for anyone else to compete for them.

The practical impact isn’t usually an ideological company imposing its values on public policy. It’s billions of dollars siphoned off through dependency; programs hobbled by vendors who face no real accountability; and a government so reliant on outside firms that it can’t perform even basic oversight of their work.

It’s easy to imagine that this is nefarious, but the reality is generally quite banal. Agencies can’t function without their contractors not because the contractors are so brilliant but because the government has let its own capacity atrophy to the point where the dependency is total. As my colleague Matthew Burton recently explained, vendor capture comes in many forms.

• There’s technological capture, where a vendor controls a government IT system so completely through proprietary code, managed-service arrangements, or contractual terms the agency failed to negotiate that the government can’t even access, modify, or migrate the system it paid to build.

• There’s intellectual capture, where all the institutional knowledge of how a critical system works has migrated to the vendor’s side of the table. This happens sometimes because the agency never required adequate documentation and sometimes because the agency’s best engineer retired and was immediately hired by the incumbent contractor at twice their government salary.

• And there’s psychological capture, where agency leaders have internalized the idea that their vendors are simply better than they are, and stop asking hard questions as a result.

In some senses, this is just a textbook example of the principal-agent problem: because vendors are profit-maximizing entities, they will behave in ways that both self-perpetuate their own incumbency and maximize the “moat” around their position, both at the expense of the very entity that hired them in the first place. This is a well-studied pathology, though one that has gotten worse in the last several decades as the complexity of 21st century technology grows.

Over the past decade, a hard-won consensus has emerged about how to address vendor capture in government. The answer isn’t to threaten vendors or nationalize their products. It’s to close what I call the sophistication gap: the gulf between a government that can barely understand and evaluate what it is buying and a vendor who seems to know everything.

This means the government needs its own technical capacity. It doesn’t need to do everything involved in deploying a system itself — that’s neither practical nor desirable. But it needs to be able to understand the process. It needs product managers who can set priorities and make tradeoffs. This involves the government hiring its own people who decide what to build and for whom, not just contracting officers who check compliance boxes. It needs its own software engineers who can review a vendor’s code, spot architectural problems, and course-correct before the project goes sideways. It needs people to maintain systems in steady state during transitions between vendors, between administrations, and over the long term. The absence of this capacity is staggeringly expensive. Many, many government IT programs fail outright, and many that did eventually launch cost billions more than expected.

We’ve seen what happens when this capacity doesn’t exist and when it does. When a several-hundred-million dollar redesign opf the Free Application for Student Financial Aid collapsed in 2023, the proximate cause was that the main vendors doing the work had produced code that simply didn’t work. But the upstream problem really was that the department ostensibly managing the vendor didn’t know the right questions to ask about their work. When Jeremy Singer, a College Board executive that the White House brought in to manage the turnaround, arrived at FAFSA he found “no ability to check the veracity of what the vendor said as far as status, quality of code — all the things you’d want to do.” Federal Student Aid wasn’t getting a good picture of the actual state of the product because it didn’t know the right questions to ask. “I don’t think the department knew how screwed they were.”

However, the Department of Education didn’t subsequently fix FAFSA by threatening its vendors with forced contracting or arbitrary risk designations. Instead, it managed to right the ship by bringing on a cadre of empowered, senior talent who were capable of reviewing whether contractors’ work was technically sound and explaining tradeoffs to policymakers. This isn’t rocket science and doesn’t require compelling private industry to act at gunpoint.

It’s telling, though, that this lesson had to be relearned. FAFSA was basically in the same failure mode as Healthcare.gov a decade earlier: well-meaning but outgunned policy professionals, unable to manage a vendor doing work they didn’t really understand. We keep making the same mistake because scaling this mindset across the largest enterprise in the country is extraordinarily hard, and because the structural incentives in federal hiring, budgeting, and procurement all push against it.

But AI is genuinely different

Here is where the DoD-Anthropic standoff points at something genuinely new, even if the administration both misunderstood its own problem and then prescribed exactly the wrong medicine.

The traditional answer to vendor capture rests on a key assumption: that if you put a sufficiently skilled person on the government’s side of the table, they can look under the hood. Traditional software is opaque but reconstructable. If a COBOL mainframe has no documentation (and many of them don’t!) you can hire a developer to trace the logic line by line and figure out what it does. It’s expensive, but the code is eventually legible to a competent reader. The architecture is knowable. The behavior is, in principle, fully explicable, even if it’s hard to recreate and expensive to maintain.

AI models are different in kind, not just in degree. The weights and parameters that determine a model’s behavior are trade secrets, but even if they weren’t, the relationship between those weights and any given output is extraordinarily difficult to trace. There is evidence of emergent behavior (i.e., capabilities that arise from training without anyone designing them in) and a long-standing focus by all frontier AI labs on preventing “misaligned” behavior. The companies building these tools do not themselves always fully understand why their models behave the way they do. In fact, AI is so illegible to its own designers that understanding it has become a major area of active research called interpretability.

Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, described this succinctly last year:

Modern generative AI systems are opaque in a way that fundamentally differs from traditional software. If an ordinary software program does something — for example, a character in a video game says a line of dialogue, or my food delivery app allows me to tip my driver — it does those things because a human specifically programmed them in. Generative AI is not like that at all. When a generative AI system does something, like summarize a financial document, we have no idea, at a specific or precise level, why it makes the choices it does — why it chooses certain words over others, or why it occasionally makes a mistake despite usually being accurate.

This difference matters enormously for government accountability. With traditional software, the strategy of closing the sophistication gap works.

With AI, it is not obvious that anyone the government hires could pop open the hood and investigate whether a model was putting its thumb on the scale — purposely or accidentally — in ways inconsistent with the public sector’s priorities. This problem is particularly dire because of the oligopolistic nature of the AI market. There are lots of engineers who could build an alternative software product with enough time and resources, but very few alternative AI models and tremendously high capital costs to train a new one. In such a highly concentrated market, one or two key players declining to work with the government is itself policy-influencing. And, while the switching costs are relatively low between models right now, the market pressure to raise them will be great.

Furthermore, the nature of AI technology is such that the ethics, values, and risk tolerances of its builders are fundamental to the product in a way that isn’t true of more traditional enterprise software. It may simply not be possible to require an AI company to check those values at the door, as the Trump administration seems to be demanding, because of that tight integration. Civil servants are acculturated to speak up but ultimately follow the president’s direction; AI models do not necessarily share this impulse.

One day, this may change as interpretability advances or the market fragments, but that day is yet a long way off. As we ask AI to perform complex tasks, this gap between what the technology can do and what the government understands becomes a significant risk to the public interest.

Imagine the shoe on the other foot

Imagine a future Democratic administration arrives at the Department of Health and Human Services and discovers that Elon Musk’s xAI has expanded its footprint beyond “generation of first drafts of documents and other communication materials” and is now deeply integrated into software looking for patterns of fraud in Medicare data. Per the terms of their contract, xAI declines to explain why the system keeps flagging supposed fraud cases overwhelmingly in blue states. The agency’s technical staff can’t look beyond the outputs they receive. They can’t audit the model’s reasoning because, in a meaningful sense, there isn’t traditional “reasoning” to audit — just statistical patterns baked into billions of parameters that no one can fully trace and that the vendor is under no obligation to provide insight into.

The incoming administrators have no choice but to cancel the contract entirely. The program grinds to a halt while they change vendors. It’s disruptive but ultimately recoverable. You could imagine this same scenario playing out in a law enforcement agency that contracts with Palantir, for example, as ties to the company increasingly become problematic in Democratic primary fights.

Now imagine something more extreme but entirely plausible. A president comes to power deeply opposed to the small number of firms that represent all the major players in frontier AI, perhaps because she made data center opposition a signature part of her campaign. Before the election, those firms announce — as is their right — that they’ll decline to work with that candidate if she wins. But this capital strike would leave an incoming government without options, particularly as citizens have come to expect AI-enabled service delivery. If the IRS is staffed to function with a significant chunk of its filing season call volume being diverted to an AI chatbot, for example, a new administration could find its first 100 days marred by the resulting chaos. The government could go after overt collusion in the above example, but what about the more ordinary and common case: a capital-intensive industry controlled by an extremely small group of people that simply has different political preferences or interests than the people in power?

This is not a technocratic problem. It’s a deep dilemma fundamental to liberal democracy, which has always struggled with the tension between individual liberty and the practical concerns of the state and society. Banning discrimination in public accommodations also impairs free enterprise and free association, but it is understood to be more desirable because it enhances the liberty of everyone else. Some monopolies (e.g., for utilities) are tolerated because astronomical infrastructure costs permit no alternative, but they are regulated more closely as a result. The original idea of the Defense Production Act was similarly reasonable – in a time of total war, it might really be necessary for the government to jump to the front of the line for steel that was being produced anyway. But generally these cases do not involve the compulsion of private action, in particular when that action is expressive.

In a real sense, finding the right balance between these competing interests is the hard work of democracy. Despite what unitary-executive fanatics would have you believe, getting it right requires broad political engagement from all of our institutions and not simply a pronouncement from the president. And, even if you did agree to compel action by a privately held company, would you really want to hinge national security on the work of anyone helping under duress?

The principal-agent problem we can’t solve the old way

The administration’s DPA gambit is a lousy, dangerous, and incoherent answer to this question, but it is not a lousy question. The more the government entwines the private sector in its day-to-day operations, the more difficult it is to ensure that the tail doesn’t wag the dog. This is the heart of it, and it’s easily obscured amid the storm over Hegseth’s tantrum.

We’ve slowly and painfully learned that to solve the principal-agent problem in government technology, we need to put a technically skilled person on the public’s side of the table. It took us a couple decades to reach this insight for regular software development, and we still struggle to act on it. Now, it may be on the verge of becoming obsolete as we get lapped by technology.

This is a bigger claim than “Anthropic should cooperate” or “the Pentagon was too aggressive.” It’s a claim that our entire framework for managing the government’s relationship with its technology vendors needs a radical overhaul, and that we need to get it right much faster this time.

No amount of DPA threats, supply chain designations, or contract renegotiations will fix a structural problem. Rather than threatening to compel industry to work for the government on the government’s terms, an administration genuinely concerned about this should be working with Congress to build something new.

One option would be a publicly-governed national lab for AI structured as a Federally Funded Research and Development Center, perhaps housed at a consortium of public universities across the country or patterned after the national laboratories. It could also look like a direct government capability along the lines of NASA’s early monopoly on space flight – an agency with a Senate-confirmed head, annual appropriations subject to congressional oversight, and all of the transparency requirements that follow from that. It could also look like a venture controlled by multiple branches of government simultaneously. The federal government was in the driver’s seat for many of the most important innovations of the modern age – the internet, GPS, space flight, etc. – and could be again.

This wouldn’t and doesn’t need to replace private AI vendors, but it would give the federal government an independent capacity to evaluate, test, and when necessary, replicate what the private sector is providing. Entities like the National Institute of Standards and Technology are already doing some of this work, but not necessarily with an eye towards replication and without the capacity to deliver service directly. In cases where it would be inappropriate or entirely too risky to deploy a private sector model, having a government-operated baseline would provide some measure of security for policymakers of both parties.

I want to be honest about what I don’t know here. A public AI entity would face enormous challenges: competing with the private sector for talent, keeping pace with a technology that’s evolving at breakneck speed, and operating inside a government procurement and personnel system that was not designed for this kind of work. It’s hard to imagine running an AI lab of any consequence when faced with constant government shutdowns, for instance, or one that has to navigate growing public backlash to data centers and the associated political incentives to tear things down. It would also potentially enable applications of AI on topics that no private lab would be willing to support but are nonetheless choices Congress and the President agree to direct.

But even if we never build a public AI lab, we need new governance models for the vendor relationship itself. If the fundamental problem is that the government can’t verify what’s happening inside the technology it depends on, then we need institutions designed to address that specific gap. This could mean mandatory interpretability standards. It could mean independent third-party auditing regimes with real teeth. It could mean extremely long-term contracts (say 10 years) entered into jointly by Congress and the president. It could mean moving deprecated, well-understood (but still useful!) models into the hands of the government when they “retire” as part of the normal business cycle. It could mean something we haven’t thought of yet.

Act before we’re stuck

We’ve seen a version of this movie before. The federal government’s transition to complex computer systems in the 1980s and 1990s happened without enough serious, careful thinking about vendor governance, and we ended up with exactly the captured, dysfunctional ecosystem we’re now trying to reform: legacy systems held together by contractors who can never be replaced, billions wasted on modernization projects that fail because the government doesn’t have the capacity to manage them, and the feeling that generations of policy professionals have that they aren’t actually in control of the government.

AI is going to turbo-charge this problem. The models are less auditable than traditional software. The market is more concentrated. The dependency, once established, will be harder to unwind. And the stakes, given what these systems will be asked to do, are considerably higher. If AI opens the aperture on disruption, it should also open our aperture for solution.

The DoD’s Defense Production Act debacle is the wrong answer. It’s inconsistent with the liberal values at the heart of the American tradition. It stifles private enterprise and innovation. It supposes that the government can arbitrarily compel action of private citizens without a single vote in Congress or take their property without due process. It does none of the careful balancing between the public’s basic interests in a government not reliant on the good will of a small handful of privately-held companies, the clear right of those companies to decline some work, and the practical challenges of day-to-day deployment. It is odious and wrong on so many levels that it’s not surprising the administration is having a hard time justifying their action.

But there is a glimmer of a good question inside of this whole affair: Who controls the technology that the government depends on, and how do we ensure adequate protection of the public’s interests when that technology is fundamentally opaque?

This has been one of the most important governance questions of the last decade and will only become more important in the next one. We need to start building the institutions to answer it now, before we wake up one day and find ourselves in a government so reliant on private firms as to barely be much of a “public” sector at all.

Gabe Menchaca is a Senior Policy Analyst at the Niskanen Center and, among many other things, is a former management staffer at the Office of Management and Budget and former management consultant. At Niskanen, he writes about civil service reform, the state capacity crisis, and other government management issues.

Share

Subscribe now

This essay originally appeared on If You Can Keep It, the Protect Democracy Substack.

In the timely Star Wars spinoff Andor, the young rebel Karis Nemik writes, “Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle.”

This is the lesson of history. Authoritarianism is not new. It has appeared throughout human civilization. But we live in a largely free world today because of Nemik’s observation: Authoritarianism has been — at least historically — unstable. It has relied on imperfect information, fallible human enforcers, and coercive systems that strain under their own weight. And because of that brittleness, people have repeatedly been able to correct away from tyranny and toward freer, more democratic societies.

But what if that were to change?

In his recent essay, “The Adolescence of Technology,” AI executive Dario Amodei opens with a different science-fiction reference: a scene from Carl Sagan’s Contact meant to illustrate a sobering idea — that societies capable of achieving immense technological power must also learn how to survive it.

Amodei, co-founder of the leading AI lab Anthropic, lists the threats we have grown accustomed to hearing about: human extinction, human subjugation to misaligned AI, mass unemployment. But he adds a danger to the list that needs far greater amplification and attention: the possibility that AI could undermine the historical dynamic Nemik describes, the very dynamic that has been democracy’s salvation. That AI could harden authority rather than expose it. That it could seal the cracks through which freedom has always eventually re-emerged.

In short, Amodei is warning that powerful artificial intelligence may be the first technology in human history capable of making authoritarianism permanent — not by violently overthrowing democracy but by eliminating the possibility of democratic counter-movements.

If that is correct (and, as Amodei acknowledges, there are still plenty of uncertainties that remain regarding both whether AI will achieve such advanced capabilities and the speed at which this would occur), we are not merely facing another technology policy challenge. We are approaching a civilizational threshold.

What’s more, while Amodei’s assessment largely looks to a future moment when AI has become powerful enough to be the equivalent of a “country of geniuses,” the harms caused by AI in the hands of authoritarians are all too real today. If we are to preserve the possibility of democratic pushback, we must act now.

Why authoritarianism has always failed

Authoritarian regimes have always appeared formidable from the outside. Yet their defining feature has been fragility.

They suffer from information problems. Fear distorts reporting; loyalty replaces truth. The “Dictator’s Trap” is that everyone around an authoritarian is afraid to deliver bad news and so provides him with misleading information that leads to overreach and error.

Authoritarians rely on human agents who hesitate, defect, or leak information and who have capacity constraints by dint of their very humanity. Such leaders must tolerate inefficiencies and often breed and encourage corruption to maintain control.

And because repression is costly — politically, economically, and psychologically — it tends to provoke resistance, fracture elites, and invite external pressure.

Even the most brutal regimes of the 20th century eventually broke. Fascist states collapsed under war. Communist regimes stagnated, splintered, or reformed. Military juntas gave way, sometimes suddenly, sometimes haltingly, to civilian rule.

The lesson is not that democracy is inevitable. It is that authoritarianism has never been able to fully close the loop. Something always leaked.

Amodei’s warning is that “powerful AI” could change this equation:

Current autocracies are limited in how repressive they can be by the need to have humans carry out their orders, and humans often have limits in how inhumane they are willing to be. But AI-enabled autocracies would not have such limits.

Authoritarian lock-in

Amodei identifies a convergence of sufficiently powerful AI-enabled capabilities that, taken together, threaten to eliminate the mechanisms through which authoritarian systems have historically failed:

• Total surveillance: Systems become capable of ingesting vast amounts of data on communication, movements, and behaviors so that there’s no escaping or hiding from the controlling apparatus of the state. Resistance can be identified and rooted out before it can bear fruit.

• Personalized propaganda: Persuasion is optimized at the level of the individual, leveraging intelligence on emotional states, social context, and psychological vulnerabilities that is collected by scraping data from digital (and potentially even real-world) interactions. Individuals can be manipulated into consenting to giving up their freedom, rights, and willingness to dissent.

• Autonomous weapons: The state has the ability to enforce suppression at scale through automated tools capable of responding with full force to every transgression and every minor act of dissent or organizing — and to do so potentially autonomously and thus unconstrained by the capacity and accountability limits of human bureaucracies.

• Strategic mastery: With a “country of geniuses,” a leader or entity bent on power could strategically outmaneuver any domestic or international opposition that is not similarly equipped, extending indefinitely the totality of their control.

Together, these capabilities point toward what can be described as authoritarian lock-in: a condition in which a regime does not merely suppress opposition but structurally prevents it from ever becoming effective enough to displace it.

The danger is that powerful AI could seal authority rather than strain it — closing the feedback loops through which societies have historically corrected themselves. Once these feedback loops are closed, the society never matures beyond its “technological adolescence”; it simply ossifies.

This concern differs in a significant way from concerns about human extinction or human subjugation at the hands of powerful AI. Serious as they are, those concerns are speculative and await the advancement of powerful AI, whereas the scenario of AI being used to empower authoritarian suppression has already arrived.

China is using AI to track Uyghurs with facial recognition, to identify potential dissidents with predictive policing, to suppress speech at scale with content moderation. The Chinese Communist Party is exporting this technology to other authoritarian regimes. And here in the U.S., the current administration is already implementing some of these tools.

The question that follows: What do we do about it?

Within the AI community and U.S. political community, there is already a dominant answer to this question.

Most leaders and thinkers closest to frontier AI — including Amodei himself — identify the primary danger as the possibility that China develops powerful AI first.

The reasoning is straightforward. China is already an authoritarian state. If it acquires powerful AI systems capable of total surveillance, predictive repression, and overwhelming strategic advantage, it would not merely entrench authoritarian rule at home. It could utilize its AI-enabled power advantage to extend its control abroad, potentially even achieving global hegemony under a totalitarian umbrella. Authoritarian lock-in, but without borders.

Fear of China’s global hegemony augmented by these tools often points to a single overriding imperative: The United States must beat China to the most powerful AI. The Trump White House has put it in those terms, declaring that “to remain the leading economic and military power, the United States must win the AI race.” On Capitol Hill, the message is even more explicit. Senate Commerce Committee Chair Ted Cruz has argued that “the way to beat China in the AI race is to outrace them in innovation,” urging policymakers to “remove restraints” that slow development.

Industry leaders echo the same logic: Microsoft President Brad Smith told lawmakers that the “number one factor” determining whether the U.S. or China “wins this race” is which technology is adopted globally, warning that “whoever gets there first will be difficult to supplant.” Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt has repeatedly warned that AI leadership will shape the global order. The result, as the Washington Post observes, is a “near-consensus” among senior officials and top executives that the U.S. must let companies “move even faster” to maintain its edge over China.

It is for this reason that Amodei himself describes advanced chip export controls as among the most important interventions available to democratic governments. The underlying theory is clear: If AI is dangerous, it is far more dangerous in the hands of an authoritarian state than a democratic one.

This assessment has profoundly shaped the orientation of the U.S. AI ecosystem.

The perverse dynamic it creates

The China-first framing is not wrong. But it is dangerously incomplete.

If beating China to powerful AI is the overriding objective, the logical conclusion is speed at all costs. Minimize regulation, remove friction, treat guardrails as liabilities, and view caution as complacency. This logic pushes U.S. firms to race ahead, consolidate power, and resist democratic constraints — all in the name of preventing authoritarian lock-in abroad.

But that same logic leaves us exposed to a second, equally serious risk: authoritarian lock-in at home. Amodei himself recognizes this risk in acknowledging that “a hard line” must be drawn “against AI abuses within democracies” with “limits to what we allow our governments to do with AI, so that they don’t seize power or repress their own people.”

Last year, one of us spoke with a founder of a leading AI lab. When we asked what worried them most, their answer was immediate: not China, but the possibility that extraordinarily powerful AI systems might come online while a leader with a deeply instrumental view of power controls the U.S. government.

This was not a partisan remark so much as a structural one. AI dramatically lowers the cost of surveillance, enforcement, and control. It centralizes authority. It weakens accountability. Those effects are dangerous in any system — but maximally so when wielded by leaders who already reject institutional constraints.

And as President Trump said just last month, “I don’t need guardrails. I don’t want guardrails. Guardrails would hurt us.”

The domestic authoritarian risk

The Trump administration largely accepts the China-first theory. It has embraced AI as a strategic asset and treated governance as an impediment to innovation. It has sought to remove guardrails in the name of competitiveness and national strength.

At the same time, our government is led by a president who has repeatedly demonstrated contempt for checks on his own power — attacking courts, undermining independent oversight, threatening political opponents, and praising strongman tactics. The administration has sought to expand surveillance authorities, suppress dissent, and consolidate executive power — directionally aligned with the very risks Amodei warns about. Ironically given a strategy ostensibly grounded in concern about what China would do with powerful AI, Trump has praised Xi Jinping’s leadership style, calling him a “brilliant” leader for “control[ling] 1.4 billion people with an iron fist.”

The uncomfortable reality is this: The problem is not only which nation gets powerful AI first but who controls that nation when it arrives.

If AI hardens authority, then leaders tempted by authoritarian methods, whether in Beijing or Washington, pose a similar structural threat. If we have one quibble with Amodei’s essay, it’s that it seems to underplay this domestic risk, perhaps because naming it explicitly carries costs for an American company right now. But that itself underscores the problem. And so we’re taking one of Amodei’s pieces of advice (“the first step is … to simply tell the truth”) and naming that risk more explicitly here.

Political economy makes this worse

Layered on top of this dilemma is a brutal political economy problem.

Frontier AI development is extraordinarily capital-intensive. Compute, data, and talent are concentrated in a handful of firms. Those firms command immense economic power — and increasingly, political influence.

As Amodei notes, AI is such a powerful economic and geopolitical prize that the risks of regulatory capture are intensified. Already, more than $100 million has been committed to an industry-backed super PAC committed to preventing regulation, and the pool of capital available to augment that is virtually bottomless. Democratic checks, already strained, risk being overwhelmed not just by urgency and fear of falling behind but by a huge campaign finance war chest.

The result is a convergence of concentrated private power and concentrated state power at precisely the moment democratic safeguards matter most.

Amodei acknowledges this problem but doesn’t offer a realistic proposal for solving it. If there’s a glaring failure in his essay, that is it.

The only durable solution

If AI can produce authoritarian lock-in, then preventing it requires more than choosing the “right” geopolitical winner or slowing development “slightly” (to use Amodei’s term) at the margins. It requires actively designing AI and its governance to advance democratic practices and values.

It will not be enough merely to anticipate how AI may harm democracy and impose penalties for its abuses and harms. Instead, the only durable solution is to account for AI’s risks to democracy in its development and deployment while using it to affirmatively make democracy work better.

That means AI systems that increase transparency rather than secrecy; that strengthen accountability rather than weaken it; that distribute power rather than concentrate it; that help citizens understand, deliberate, and participate rather than manipulate or surveil them.

These goals must be built into the design choices being made about AI now, at the market level, the corporate level, and the governance level. They need attention, investment, and innovation — today.

From insight to institution: the AI for Democracy Action Lab

This recognition is why Protect Democracy launched the AI for Democracy Action Lab.

What is missing in the AI ecosystem is not analysis, white papers, or technical benchmarks, nor efforts focused on existential risk to humanity (though those are important, too). What’s missing are institutions explicitly dedicated to defending democratic pushback — the capacity of societies to correct course when power is abused. And getting there means building AI in a way that both anticipates and wards off the risks of authoritarian lock-in while advancing and improving democracy and democratic commitments.

When one of us spoke to another top executive at a frontier lab recently and asked about the tenor of conversations in their c-suite and lunchroom about how AI might shape the battle between democracy and authoritarianism, their answer was, “What conversations?” While that might have been hyperbole to make a point, it illustrated an imbalance that Amodei’s essay nobly strives to correct. We must invest far more attention and energy on the risk AI poses to democracy and democratic reversal.

That’s what the Lab is designed to do by focusing on three fronts:

1. Defending democracy from AI-enabled authoritarianism through litigation, regulatory measures, and effective governance.

2. Ensuring AI contributes to a healthy civic media ecosystem.

3. Harnessing AI to strengthen democracy by creating products that augment democratic practices.

This work is not only for civil society and government. It is the real challenge for AI companies themselves. For Anthropic and others who take Amodei’s warning seriously, avoiding authoritarian lock-in cannot be a secondary concern. It must be a design principle.

The choice before us

Nemik was right: Tyranny has always required constant effort. It has broken because it is brittle.

As Amodei argues, powerful AI threatens to eliminate tyranny’s inherent vulnerability. It threatens to seal authority, automate control, and make correction impossible.

And this is not just a shoe we expect to drop at some point in the future. The AI of today is already redefining authoritarian capabilities inside and outside the U.S.

Whether AI will make democratic governance more capable than it has ever been or render it obsolete will not be decided by the technology itself. That question will be decided by us as AI’s shapers and wielders. We are the factor that determines whether action is taken before authoritarian lock-in becomes irreversible.

We have argued that the contest between democracy and authoritarianism is the test of our time, and it is now clear that one of the central fronts of that contest will be which side AI advantages.

It is up to us to get that right before it’s too late. The clock is already running.

Ian Bassin is co-founder and executive director of Protect Democracy.

Nicole Schneidmann is head of the technology and data governance team at Protect Democracy.

Share

Subscribe now

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Remember the “techlash”? A few short years ago, expectations were widespread that discontent with the Silicon Valley giants could result in major political and legal change. The Economist suggested that corporate break-ups, bans on mergers, utility regulation, and changes to content-liability rules could be in the offing.

Indeed, the European Commission and the Biden administration took some ambitious steps. The EU chastened Apple, Meta, Amazon, and Google with antitrust actions; more significantly, it passed laws setting conduct and content standards for large “platform” companies and imposed new data protections that created annoying pop-ups but also gave users more control over their information. The Biden administration also went to court, launching antitrust cases against Amazon, Google, and Meta, and a separate suit against Amazon that recently yielded a $2.5 billion settlement. Shifting from brakes to gas, Congress passed the CHIPS and Science Act to assert national control of a vital industry. Acting out of national-security motivations rather than social ones, Congress banned TikTok (until Donald Trump voided the law). Perhaps most consequentially, the social media giants face an avalanche of personal-injury lawsuits and litigation from state attorneys general in echoes of the 1990s cases that bludgeoned Big Tobacco.

Those are instances of government baring its teeth, changing how the tech giants handle data and tweaking the industry’s structure. But so far, it remains far short of a bite that would give the mass public a lasting grip on a sector that is transforming our culture, economy, and politics at breakneck speed. In the United States, the last two years have seen a dizzying rise of artificial intelligence free of any comprehensive policy framework to mitigate risks and encourage provision of public goods, with the Trump administration signaling it will pursue “minimally burdensome” regulation; the ever-deepening intrusion of social media into our lives, lawsuits notwithstanding; and a political realignment that has seen the Silicon Valley elite scrambling to get on the right side of a president with a penchant for crony capitalism.

To critics, the meager results reflect the reality that the techlash never ran as deep as its champions proposed. “It was never the people v. tech, it was a fight between media and tech,” writes the entrepreneur and investor Erik Torenberg. But half of Americans have consistently said tech should be more heavily regulated, and nearly 80 percent believe social media companies have too much power, according to a 2024 study from Pew.

Now, there are signs that a new wave of revolt is gathering. AI’s embodiment in grimly purpose-built data centers is drawing grassroots opposition from across the political spectrum. Deeper fears of AI doom are generating proposals for more serious regulation of the technology. The EU has already acted. And the ever-growing anxiety over the cultural acid leaking through our phones is leading many schools and parents to clamp down.

Will we get a political movement that is equal to the challenge this time?

Our new Hypertext forum asks why Big Tech is so hard to rein in, and how we might generate the cultural and political power to build a digital political economy that enhances our democracy rather than eroding it.

• Historian Jennifer Burns recalls that the last industrial revolution seemed no less overwhelming to those who lived through it and was only tamed after 60 years of effort — one that required cultural change as well as political organizing. “Someday,” she writes, “we might look back to Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation and place it in the same category as Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, the expose that forever changed American factories.”

• Longtime journalist and editor Christopher Allbritton argues we are trapped in a “fragmentation flywheel.” Unregulated tech platforms exploit their users and deploy the profits to build successor platforms; those users then flee to the new place, restarting the cycle. Meanwhile, the tech barons’ power is not just economic and political, but narrative. As Allbritton notes, “The muckraking that forced Standard Oil to accept regulation doesn’t work when the monopolist owns the megaphone.”

• Niskanen Center Senior Fellow Adam Garfinkle argues that we have not yet fully recognized what we are confronting, not least because the technology is designed to obscure it. “The level and nature of addiction to digital devices is misunderstood and thus underestimated,” he writes, “and constitutes a species of Catch-22 paralysis new to the history of attempts to grapple with communications revolutions.”

• Finally, my colleague Brink Lindsey invokes the 19th century temperance movement in America to wonder if we could do something similar for media. “Just as the antebellum temperance movement changed attitudes about alcohol, using moral suasion to reveal it as inherently addictive and dangerous, so a modern-day movement needs to raise public awareness of the addictive spell that virtual experience can cast on us — and the cognitively compromised nature of that virtual experience.”

In his landmark book The Revolt of the Public, Martin Gurri explained that digital technologies are enormously powerful in generating outrage and protest, but much less suited to building durable movements. That insight applies to backlash against technology itself for all the reasons Allbritton and Garfinkle elaborate.

But as Burns points out, the problem of adjusting to an economic order that shifts social and material relations in ways that undermine community building and protest is not new. When factories began mushrooming across the landscape, it took much time and a good deal of bloodshed for laborers to fashion unions that could effectively advocate on their behalf.

In America, early industrial development spawned a class of “mechanics” who sought their champion in Andrew Jackson. But the Jacksonian dispensation proved better at conquering new land for settlement than at managing an industrial economy; Jackson’s successor, Martin van Buren, became known as “Van Ruin” for presiding over a deep depression. Later, as the mechanics gave way to a true industrial proletariat, the Knights of Labor combined a progressive solidarity across ethnic divisions with a radical politics and enjoyed spectacular growth, but eventually found itself supplanted by the American Federation of Labor, which notched wins with a more exclusive strategy focused on highly skilled workers. Only after decades did the Congress of Industrial Organizations develop the techniques to effectively represent workers in the full range of jobs within a single industry.

Countervailing movements are slow to develop during a time of rapid industrial changes because people need time to invent new systems of organizing. Along the way, they must develop not only a negative agenda — knowing what they are against — but also a positive vision that moves the clock forward, with the new technology, rather than backward, against it.

In his recent essay “Abundance for what?” Lindsey suggests that a far more ambitious version of the abundance agenda could provide the basis for such a positive vision. As Lindsey writes:

This wider cultural turn against the sordid excesses of online life could be the wave that carries that abundance idea from its current niche status — the preoccupation of technocratic elites — and transforms it into a genuinely popular social movement. The negative motivations are already in place. Fears of genuinely dystopian dangers have been awakened — and what’s more, the people most exposed to those dangers are our children, rousing our passions all the more.

The idea here is to appeal to ordinary people — not technology enthusiasts who thrill to the ingenuity and brilliance of the new and pathbreaking, but regular, risk-averse folks who tend to be suspicious of change because of their natural focus on holding onto what they’ve already got. To generate mass support for a resumption of large-scale progress in the physical world, you’ve got to hold out the prospect of big, tangible gains in ordinary people’s lives.

That something, Lindsey suggests, is not just a turn back to real-life community, but the prospect of making improvements back in the physical world that drive the cost of living down far enough to free people from the necessity of lifetime employment.

It’s a vision that may sound utopian in this era of low trust and low hope. But that underlying despair is precisely what we are trying to beat. We’ve done it before.

David Dagan is director of editorial and academic affairs at the Niskanen Center. Find him on LinkedIn.

Share

Americans used to drink like fish.

For an impressive example, look no further than the Father of Our Country. On September 14, 1787, near the close of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, George Washington dined and drank at City Tavern as the guest of the “First Troop,” a cavalry corps that had crossed the Delaware with Washington and endured Valley Forge. And here, for the guest list of 55 gentlemen, is what they drank: 54 bottles of Madeira wine, 60 bottles of claret, 22 bottles of porter, 12 bottles of beer, 8 bottles of cider, and 7 large bowls of punch. No other details about the evening are available, but it seems safe to assume that a good time was had by all.

By the standards of the day, it doesn’t look like the evening was anything especially out of the ordinary. According to W. J. Rorabaugh’s The Alcoholic Republic, in the early 19th century Americans older than 14 averaged 7 gallons of 200-proof alcohol a year – well more than double the current U.S. average. In the 1820s, roughly half of all adult men were drinking at least six shots of liquor a day. Drinking water was widely considered unsafe so alcohol was served at every meal, liquor was cheap, and taverns served as centers of local social activity. Visitors from abroad regularly commented on Americans’ hard-drinking ways.

But by the middle of the 19th century, the situation was completely different. According to Rorabaugh, alcohol consumption had plummeted to under 2 gallons annually – below current usage rates. What could have happened to provoke such a dramatic change in the space of a couple of decades?

What happened was the American temperance movement, part of a much larger wave of moralizing and reform unleased by the religious revival of the Second Great Awakening. America had known religious enthusiasm since its earliest settlers, but by the early 19th century religiosity in the country was at a low ebb. The influence of the Enlightenment among the well-educated could be seen in the large number of deists among the Founding Fathers; meanwhile, as the country expanded westward, its frontier was wild and largely unchurched. In an 1822 letter to a friend, Thomas Jefferson predicted, “I trust there is not a young man now living in the Unites States who will not die a Unitarian.”

But even as Jefferson was writing those words, a spiritual revolution was in the offing. As I described it in The Age of Abundance:

During the early decades of the nineteenth century, a surge in evangelical fervor that came to be known as the Second Great Awakening swept over the young nation. In New England, Nathaniel Taylor and Lyman Beecher (Harriet’s father) spearheaded the development of “New School” Presbyterian theology. Charles Grandison Finney honed soul winning into a science with his massive revival campaigns in New York and the Midwest; Finney’s ministries were credited with achieving hundreds of thousands of conversions. Camp meetings in the South and the Appalachians sparked explosive growth of the Baptist and Methodist denominations. Between 1780 and 1820, Americans built 10,000 new churches; over the next four decades, they added 40,000 more.

The revitalized American Protestantism that emerged from the Second Great Awakening broke decisively with the Calvinist past. Specifically, it rejected Calvinism’s central dogma of predestination and asserted the individual’s free moral agency… In its more optimistic strains, the new American religion went beyond mere free will to claim the possibility of human perfectibility… “If the church will do all her duty,” Finney proclaimed in 1835, “the millennium may come in this country in three years.”

This massive mobilization of spiritual energy, fired by a vision that exalted bourgeois respectability as Christian virtue, inspired a series of moral crusades. Most noteworthy was the rise of the abolitionist movement, as anti-slavery sentiment shifted from support for gradual resettlement in Africa to campaigning for the immediate and unconditional freeing of slaves. William Lloyd Garrison started publishing The Liberator in 1831, and helped to found the American Anti-Slavery Society two years later. Within a mere five years, the Society had over a thousand local chapters and 250,000 members.

Other campaigns for moral uplift proliferated – against gambling, bear-baiting, and cockfighting; against public whipping and mutilation for crimes; against premarital sex (in New England, it’s estimated that one bride in three was pregnant in the late 1700s; by 1840 it was one bride in five or six); and last but not least, against the scourge of alcohol. The American Temperance Society was founded in 1826, and within a dozen years it boasted some 8,000 local groups and over a million members.

The key innovation of the new temperance movement was to see alcohol as inherently dangerous. Although drunkenness was always considered sinful, as was gluttony, alcohol was seen as no more blameworthy than food; the fault lay entirely with those who overindulged. “Drink itself is a good creature of God, and to be received with thankfulness,” declared the Puritan clergyman Increase Mather back in 1673, “but the abuse of drink is from Satan.”

Lyman Beecher, one of the co-founders of the American Temperance Society, delivered a series of sermons on “intemperance” in 1826, which were then published and went on to enjoy brisk sales for decades. He disputed the common opinion that someone who drinks regularly with no signs of intoxication is doing nothing wrong: “Whoever, to sustain the body, or invigorate the mind, or cheer the heart, applies habitually the stimulus of ardent spirits, does violence to the laws of his nature, puts the whole system into disorder, and is intemperate long before the intellect falters, or a muscle is unstrung.”

“The effect of ardent spirits on the brain, and the members of the body, is among the last effects of intemperance, and the least destructive part of the sin,” Beecher maintained. “It is the moral ruin which it works in the soul, that gives it the denomination of giant-wickedness.”

At the heart of alcohol’s evil, according to Beecher, is its effect on the will – that is, its addictiveness. An ardent abolitionist (recall he was the father of the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin), he argued that submission to alcohol was another form of slavery:

The demand for artificial stimulus to supply the deficiencies of healthful aliment, is like the rage of thirst, and the ravenous demand of famine. It is famine: for the artificial excitement has become as essential now to strength and cheerfulness, as simple nutrition once was. But nature, taught by habit to require what once she did not need, demands gratification now with a decision inexorable as death, and to most men as irresistible.

We execrate the cruelties of the slave trade—the husband torn from the bosom of his wife—the son from his father—brothers and sisters separated forever—whole families in a moment ruined! But are there no similar enormities to be witnessed in the United States?

Every year thousands of families are robbed of fathers, brothers, husbands, friends. Every year widows and orphans are multiplied, and grey hairs are brought with sorrow to the grave—no disease makes such inroads upon families, blasts so many hopes, destroys so many lives, and causes so many mourners to go about the streets, because man goeth to his long home.

The Jacksonian-era temperance movement radicalized over time, calling for total abstinence rather than mere moderation and seeking legal prohibition to ban alcohol production and sales. But its greatest achievements came from its incrementalist moral suasion. Beecher started with his own profession, speaking out against drinking by the clergy. He moved on to campaign against employers serving liquor on the job: “It is not too much to be hoped, that the entire business of the nation by land and sea, shall yet move on without the aid of ardent spirits, and by the impulse alone of temperate freemen.” We can see in such tactics an analog to the “clear and hold” approach to anti-insurgency: pacifying the threat in some particular location, creating conditions that ensure the threat will not return, and using the momentum from such partial victories to carry the fight to other domains.

(I’ll note that the temperance movement petered out with the outbreak of the Civil War, but was reconstituted in the 1870s. This later temperance movement culminated in Prohibition – oops, a bridge too far. So I’m focusing here on the more modest, and more effective, earlier movement.)

The Second Great Awakening more generally, and the antebellum temperance movement in particular, hold important lessons for us today. First, they show us that – contrary to a pessimistic strain of opinion common on the right – a society’s “moral capital” is not just some inheritance from the pre-modern past that is inevitably drawn down as the old traditions fade. Broad-based moral regeneration can occur under the conditions of modernity, and it can be rapid and dramatic. More specifically, the temperance movement shows us how a free society can respond to the challenges of addictive activities that subvert individual autonomy. In a free society, we generally presume that people should be allowed to do what they want. But informed by the distinction between liberty and license, we recognize that sometimes we face a conflict between our “first order” and “second order” wants: we may simultaneously desperately want a drink and desperately want to be free of that desire. The temperance movement shows that education combined with moral suasion – raising awareness of the threat posed by some addictive activity, and liberally wielding praise and blame to incentivize right conduct – can be effective in keeping self-defeating abuses of freedom in check.

Today we are faced with a number of deepening social ills as a result of another species of intemperance – overindulgence in the consumption of mass media. According to Nielsen data, American adults averaged a little more than 11 hours a day consuming media in the first quarter of 2018: 4 hours, 46 minutes watching TV; 3 hours, 9 minutes using a smartphone or tablet; 1 hours, 46 minutes listening to radio; 39 minutes using the internet on a computer; and 39 minutes playing games. As for young people, the New York Times reports that, as of 2019 (i.e., prior to the Covid-related school closings that drove numbers even higher), the average amount of time staring at screens stood at 4 hours, 44 minutes a day for tweens (ages 8 to 12) and 7 hours and 22 minutes for teens (ages 13 to 18). It’s no wonder that the word “binge” now more commonly refers to TV viewing than to going on a bender.

These aggregate figures are eye-popping, and on their own reveal that all is far from well. Even if all the content consumed were wholesome and edifying, the sheer bulk of the time expended suggests serious problems of opportunity cost. And of course, we know that a great deal of media content is mental junk food at best and at worst can badly distort our sense of reality – whether by inundating us with images of airbrushed physical perfection that accentuate our own inadequacy, or by spreading conspiracy theories and other arrant nonsense. Accordingly, it is now widely accepted that current media habits are unhealthy and that screen time is associated with all kinds of negative side-effects – including obesity, loneliness, anxiety, and depression.

Let me make clear that I am far from puritanical about such matters. Over the course of my lifetime I’ve watched great gobs of TV, much of it eminently forgettable dreck, and these days I spend the bulk of my waking hours staring at a screen – mostly for work, but with lots of time-killing frolics and detours along the way. And yet it hasn’t stopped me from reading widely and deeply, traveling all over the world, and enjoying deep and abiding personal relationships. Indeed, shared media experiences with friends and loved ones have served to strengthen our bonds and now make for some of our fondest memories.

So I want to home in on four particular aspects of contemporary media consumption that I believe are especially problematic and in need of a concerted remedial response: (1) social media; (2) solitary consumption; (3) crowding out of deep literacy; and (4) media coverage of politics.

I won’t say much about social media, as so much has already been written and the issues are already so familiar. Social media sites promise to bring us together and strengthen our connections to friends and family, and they do sometimes deliver on that promise. It’s typical for those of us who were adults when Facebook hit the scene to have a longish list of folks from our past with whom we’ve reconnected; and for parents with kids, keeping grandparents, aunts and uncles, and family friends in the loop for all their various milestones is now almost effortless. Yet it has become painfully clear that social media has a deeply troubling dark side, especially for younger people. As I’ve written about previously, the past decade or so has seen a spike in mental health problems among adolescents, and the fact that this has occurred just as social media usage was taking off does not appear to be a coincidence. At the heart of the problem seems to be social media’s encouragement of “upward social comparison” – judging ourselves on the basis of a flood of highly selective and manipulated images and text designed to show people in the most flattering possible light.

This and other problems caused by social media aren’t just unfortunate side effects: the leading social media sites are designed to be unhealthy. They market themselves as helping people to connect, but their overriding priority is to keep us connected to the site no matter what. “Like” buttons, in particular, drive engagement through the dopamine hits we get when people respond positively to our posts. But the existence of those buttons turns social media into a ruthlessly precise, nonstop, global popularity contest, in which the vast bulk of us are destined to come out on the short end of the stick.

In much of life, what we’re doing matters less than whom we’re doing it with, and that’s true of consuming media as well. TV programming can be as shallow and mindless as you like, but watching and laughing and commenting with other people can make for an enjoyable and enriching social experience. Video games may be a huge time suck, but whiling away those hours with buddies isn’t time wasted in my book. The problem is that TV and the internet lend themselves so easily to solitary enjoyment – since they provide a kind of ersatz companionship. Think of old people living alone with the television constantly on in the background to chase away the silence; think of teenage girls sitting in their bedrooms, scrolling through Instagram for hours. Media usage makes it easier for people to withdraw from the world and avoid the real human contact they so badly need.

My Niskanen colleague Matt Yglesias wrote a good Substack post on this point titled “Sitting at home alone has become a lot less boring, and that might be bad.” Here’s a sample:

I’m obviously not going to give up the convenience of streaming home video, and neither are you.

But it is true that if my home viewing options were worse, I’d probably be inclined to ping friends a bit more frequently to see if they want to go see a movie. And those friends would probably be a bit more inclined to say yes to such invitations. They’d also probably be a bit more inclined to ping me about going to the movies…

And I’m inclined to say we’d probably all be better off for it.

To sit home, alone, and stream (which, to be clear, I do a lot!) is fun and easy and convenient. But it strikes me as potentially fun and easy and convenient in the same sense that it’s easy and convenient to not exercise or fun and easy to gorge yourself on Pringles. We’re weak creatures and can be easily tempted into patterns of behavior that we would reject if we had the ability to program our short-term behavior to align with our long-term goals.

It’s not just logistical convenience that links media consumption to self-isolation – it’s psychological, emotional convenience as well. Real, flesh-and-blood people are sometimes moody, sometimes demanding, sometimes boring, sometimes annoying; real people can’t interact with each other over the long term without some friction. By contrast, TV characters never argue with you, porn stars never reject you, you can restart games at the precise spot you messed up, and you can mute yourself and disappear from social media the second anything gets boring or uncomfortable. The more habituated you get to this undemanding, frictionless substitute for genuine social interaction, the more difficult and burdensome the real thing can start to seem. (For more on this, read my earlier essay “Choosing the Experience Machine,” and in particular check out the excellent Freddie deBoer essay I discussed there titled “You are You. We Live Here. This Is Now.”

Excessive media consumption isn’t just making us fat, lonely, anxious, and depressed; it’s making us stupider as well. I’ve also written about this before, so I won’t belabor the point; instead let me once again point you to my friend Adam Garfinkle’s essay “The Erosion of Deep Literacy,” as well as Neil Postman’s decades-old but still well-aimed jeremiad Amusing Ourselves to Death. The bottom line is that the cognitive culture of print is much intellectually deeper, richer, more complex, and more demanding than the cognitive cultures of either television or the internet. Reading books requires sustained focus and attention, logical thinking to follow and assess elaborate exposition and argument. TV viewing, by contrast, is passive, unfocused, carried along by moving images and emotional cues, while internet scrolling confronts our fractured, overloaded attention with jumbled mishmashes of disconnected information and hot-button stimulus. I believe that we can see our passage to a post-literate culture in the 21st century phenomenon of the “reverse Flynn effect”: after a sustained rise in raw IQ scores in advanced countries from the 1930s through the 90s (discovered by IQ researcher James Flynn and named after him), more recently the trend is going in the opposite direction. In my view, the original Flynn effect reflected our adaptation to the more complex and cognitively challenging environment of technology- and organization-intensive industrialism; brains trained on Tik Tok videos and emojis are generally not going to be as capable at maintaining focus and reasoning abstractly.

Finally, our current media environment is flatly inconsistent with the healthy operation of democratic politics. Here again, this is ground I’ve covered already. The fundamental problem is an ineradicable conflict between the profit motive and democracy’s need for a well-informed public. This conflict can be managed well enough when media competition is restrained (as it happened to be, in both newspapers and broadcast, during the first three-quarters of the 20th century); but when, as now, there is intense competition for readers’ and viewers’ attention, media providers will inevitably stoop to conquer. That is, they will be driven to transform the coverage of public affairs into another species of entertainment, offering up hot-button sensationalism, cartoonish contrasts of black and white, and an overriding focus on the competitive drama of who’s up and who’s down instead of on the substance of governance.

More specifically, it remains underappreciated the degree to which the rise of contemporary authoritarian populism here in the United States was the creation of a small group of media entrepreneurs. First talk radio, then Fox News, then the right-wing internet used technological innovation to reach audiences not aligned with the centrist liberalism of the old media establishment; they courted and built that audience by pandering to its prejudices and offering up a steady red-meat diet of outrages and demonization. Decades of such pandering created the contemporary GOP base, totally detached from consensus reality and demanding ever-more lurid political theater. Once Trump came on the scene, mainstream media took the bait and, cashing in on the intense media interest that right-wing demagoguery generated, cast themselves as leaders of the “resistance” and offered counter-theater to thrill their progressive constituents. CBS Chairman Les Moonves said the quiet part out loud when he admitted of Trump’s candidacy, “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”

Here then are my proposed targets for a 21st century media temperance movement: (1) social media use, especially among young people; (2) solitary media consumption; (3) the decline in reading the printed page; and (4) political infotainment. While these are the specific abuses that the movement would seek to remedy, the broader campaign should be to instill in the public, or at least a critical mass of the educated public, a healthy suspicion of virtual experience in general. Just as the antebellum temperance movement changed attitudes about alcohol, using moral suasion to reveal it as inherently addictive and dangerous, so a modern-day movement needs to raise public awareness of the addictive spell that virtual experience can cast on us – and the cognitively compromised nature of that virtual experience. Every time we switch off the real world to tune in the mediated one, we should feel a little twinge of discomfort, as if we’d stepped into a disreputable dive bar in the middle of the day. We should be on our guard.

With regard to the specific abuses I’ve enumerated, the movement should aim to be ambitious, starting with changing attitudes and moving on to changing actual habits. Age limits for access to social media should be raised and enforced; parents should see teen phone use in the same light as teen drinking. Initiatives should be launched to design non-addictive social media sites that respect user privacy and autonomy. The general sense of guardedness toward the virtual world should be heightened when entering it alone; excessive solitary media consumption should be regarded as worrisome, while family viewing time and neighborhood watch parties should be celebrated and encouraged. Book reading should be promoted for all ages, with sponsorship of book clubs and public book-reading events and public service messages featuring media celebrities as class traitors. Online “political hobbyism” should be stigmatized as vulgar and creepy; cable news viewing of whatever ideological stripe should be actively discouraged through organized boycotts.

Could such a thing actually come to pass? The raw materials for a media temperance movement are already lying around at hand: there is widespread awareness of the general problem, and there are already numerous groups actively working on many of the movement goals I mentioned above. Whether these disconnected responses can mobilize into a coherent and energetic movement is anybody’s guess. But this much seems clear: it’s hard to picture a dramatically better society without a dramatically improved media environment.

This essay first appeared on Brink Lindsey’s Substack The Permanent Problem.

Even well-intentioned and well-organized communities have trouble fixing problems for which they lack a general consensual idea of cause. When it comes to social and political complaisance in the face of a tech-driven rewiring of the social order, our problem is not a paucity of explanations — quite the opposite. Just a short list of reasons commonly cited for the near-unchallenged ascendancy of the tech firms would include:

• the cumulatively deep depletion of social trust—Robert Putnam wrote the seminal essay for Bowling Alone all the way back in 1995, thirty years ago!—which makes self-propelled community organizing more difficult to start and less robust to sustain even when it can be started;

• the shocking erosion of deep literacy, which depletes social reservoirs of empathy and keeps knowledge of social media harms limited to mostly college-educated adults, whose cognitive styles are frequently off-putting to others in a burgeoning populism-friendly cultural environment;

• the generally numbing and reality-blurring effect of a culture in the throes of an onrushing entertainment-technology singularity, what David Foster Wallace called Total Noise in his 1996 novel Infinite Jest, defined by a situation in which “the marginal cost of an additive unit of entertainment trends to zero”;

• the Gattling-gun level of spectacle-besotted distractions coming from the White House alone;

• and more besides.

Most of these factors, however, are peripheral or additive to the main reason for our passivity, which breaks down into two parts: Socially, our cyberaddiction is more widespread and more pernicious — and thus more demobilizing — than is generally appreciated. And politically, the superhuman returns to scale generated by information technology have created an industry that rivals government itself in revenue and power. Neither part of the answer, alas, is simple or obvious to most observers, and that works to compound the problem.

Social media is only one facet of a larger and more generic technological juggernaut — the cybernetic revolution, or what I call the cyberlution. Norbert Wiener coined the term “cybernetics” in 1948 to mark the burgeoning study of information flows in complex systems. Cybernetics is now in digital mode and on the portal of a vast artificial intelligence expansion. We are hurtling toward that future in a culture that has only the faintest understanding of how the cyberlution has already transformed our politics — and our minds.

The doom loop of digital distraction

The key to the passivity most observers espy on the socio-cultural side is that the level and nature of addiction to digital devices, especially smartphones but also gaming systems and certain other gadgets, is misunderstood and thus underestimated. It constitutes a species of Catch-22 paralysis new to the history of attempts to grapple, legally and otherwise, with earlier communications revolutions, including those pertaining to telephony, photography, radio, and television.1 It is important to understand why this is before proceeding further.

What we observe as inherent to contemporary digital communications technology is partly old and partly new. What is old is two-fold. As Charles Horton Cooley, arguably the father of American sociology, argued in a seminal 1897 essay entitled “The Process of Social Change,” communications techniques feed what he called the “social mind,” that cloud-like normative structure in every culture that individuals are socialized into, influence only at the margins usually, and then ultimately pass out of. In that essay Cooley coined the term “social media,” which only hit the big time, beyond the reach of sociology professors, in somewhat altered meaning about a century or so later. And as Harold Innis put it at the portal of the television era in 1951, it is very nearly a law of social dynamics that all “sudden extensions of communication are reflected in cultural disturbances.”2

So much for what is old, not that most people actually understand any of this despite its hoary pedigree. What is new about the digital phase of the internet era can be expressed with reference to just three words: hyperconnectivity, disintermediation, and anonymity.

• Hyperconnectivity: The size and transmission speeds of today’s digital communications networks are orders of magnitude larger and faster than before, and their interactive transmission capacities at scale are unique.

• Disintermediation: Also unique, essentially no filters exist in the United States on digital communications transmissions, whether professional or governmental, except the very meek and limited ones designed for liability protection applied by the tech corporations themselves.

• Anonymity: It follows from radical disintermediation that senders of communications need not, often are not, and usually cannot be accurately identified by recipients of communications if senders so desire. This authorial ambiguity is characteristic of the whole digital internet era well beyond social media, and will only deepen with the rise of artificial intelligence — and the deepfakery we have witnessed thus far, while hardly trivial, will look like child’s play in a few years if current trajectories are left to unfurl unhindered.

The cyberlution has thus teleported us into an information environment of hyper-connectivity with rapid feedback loops, disintermediation that shatters quality control, and anonymity that shreds accountability for content. These features have created an online world of attention-seeking in the form of spectacle — a world, in short, that has gotten most of us addicted to distraction.

This cyberlutional addiction, quite aside from affecting many more people than earlier communications technologies, is different and more pernicious than most realize.

Most addictions are relatively easy for the sufferer to detect, even if he or she chooses to deny them; but once detected and confronted, they can often be treated and overcome. A gambling addict, for example, can see evidence of addiction in a dwindling bank account and an accrual of debt, and often enough in an array of riled up family relationships. Someone addicted to distraction, on the other hand, has a harder task. Timelines disappear for lack of any solid empirical referent that something is amiss, and as soon as a rare sign of a problem begins to dawn on the victim, whoosh, it’s gone, thanks to the next distraction. It short, addiction to distraction describes a virtual closed loop with no easy way out. It certainly does not help that so many people are now affected that addiction’s symptoms seem normal, even though they are anything but. We have long defined addictions as anomalous behaviors, so we are baffled into silence when they turn out to be as common as they have become.

This is important. The origin of any and every addiction is an illusion, a kind of fiction that some marvelous pleasurable reward may abide in one’s future. A person sets off in pursuit of this reward only to find that the faster he or she runs the more elusive the reward becomes. With substance addictions the usual response is to use more of the substance to sustain the same level of pleasurable hope that the ultimate reward can be grasped. With behavioral addictions like gambling, thrill seeking, and sex the usual response is to escalate the behavior in question. Since the ultimate reward is fictional, however, it will never be attained no matter the level or pace of the pursuit.

The same goes with addiction to digital technology, but differently, because the fiction is honed to near statistical perfection by algorithmic teasing. As Jaron Lanier put it, “The algorithm is trying to capture the perfect parameters for manipulating a brain, while the brain … is changing in response to the algorithm’s experiments.” But, continues Lanier, “because the stimuli from the algorithm doesn’t mean anything, because they are genuinely random, the brain isn’t responding to anything real, but to a fiction. That process — of becoming hooked in an elusive mirage — is addiction.”3

So for any practical purpose, all the elements of cyberaddictions are packed into an individual’s headspace, making them more insidious than conventional addictions even as they tend to be both less dramatic, less unhealthy in a manifest bodily sense, and — again — much less socially anomalous.

Moreover, cyberaddictions do not settle into a grind in the same way as substance and ordinary behavioral addictions. They are ever novel and endlessly attractive. One reason is that the push notifications that sparkle and the dings that resound from iPhones do not anticipate only one class of rewards. They can signal a new email, or a new text message, or a new YouTube video, or a calendar notification, or a recorded voicemail — and many if not most of these possibilities raise the expectation of a social connection, a force that in other cases arguably helps to navigate out of addiction. Even incidental, passing social connections seem to be more salient psychologically than most of us realize. So unlike the treadmill psychology of substance addictions in particular — that anticipatory, joyless “oh no, here I go again” feeling — the thrill is not gone (apologies to B.B. King), is never gone, from cyberaddictions.

This helps to explain why so many are in denial about the nature and dangers of cyberaddictions. They do not disable us as readily or as rapidly as do substance and behavioral addictions. They are subtler. They even let us remember the benefits of the technology, which can be real if the user manages to remain the master and not become the slave, remain Pavlov and not become the dog. But confidence that we will always be the master, and hence the too easy assumption that most others probably will be too, is a fool’s wager if ever there was one.

Look around, and keep in mind that addictions permanently change the brain, literally reshaping the dopamine dispersal network. When one reads descriptions of thorough-gone addicts who have plunged into the quasi-metaversal world of unbundled, short-form social media, it is hard to imagine soft landings that could reintroduce such mentality-disabled people to reality as it actually is.

More important to society at large, even in the majority, we generously assume, of non-extreme cases, social media immersion and the general lure of being online has shot the attention spans and quality attention capacities of tens of millions of Americans to hell. It has radically reduced the readiness of most students (and not only students) to read books and write their own essays— in other words, to learn how to think, manage time, and constructively plan on their own, without crutching on a ChatGPT bot.4

It has worsened our society’s alienation from nature and made us more, not less, lonely and isolated from each other, thus magnifying already sharply eroded social trust.

It has, thanks partly to its anonymous nature, helped to mainstream regressive zero-sum attitudes and expressions of hatred that have contributed to political polarization and incivility. It has also stimulated extreme and ahistorical debates, deranging our stock of knowledge and experience about scores of vital issues.

It has abetted the sexualization of children and the growth of conspiracy theories and cults, simultaneously pushing kids toward adulthood and adults toward childishness.

It has magnified the cognitive gluttony that is everywhere in the culture, further enshrining entertainment as the ultimate goal of an otherwise aimless civilization.

It has furthered the decay of moral reasoning and self-discipline, and accelerated the nadir of the Abrahamic faith communities that imbued American society with both, for there is little those communities can do to compete successfully with the graphic fantasy spectacle of the attention economy.

Over a mere few years, it laid the foundation for a fantasy-inflected, reality-television presidency, duly and fairly elected now twice. As a result, it has put the future of the United States as a constitutional, classical-liberal democracy at risk and, with it, arguably jeopardized the security of the entire global commons.

And in combination with other factors it has given rise to an immensely powerful digital oligopoly — an oligopoly of a very large scope and largely novel nature that even Robert Michels’ “iron law” never imagined and Theodore Roosevelt’s “malefactors of great wealth” barely touches. This oligarchy has arisen largely by dint of the Net Effect — and so we are brought willy-nilly to the second part of our answer.

The Net Effect, cost disease, and the new corporatism

While the critical attention social media has attracted is certainly justified, it tends to crowd out perception of other harms flowing from the broader technological stream of the digital revolution. Clearly, the ambit of the internet’s uses and hence its cultural influence since the world wide web went live in 1991 is far wider than its social media dimension.

This distinction is important because it turns out that the failure of U.S. politics to land any punches as it is beaten senseless by social media turns on these other, less widely recognized facets of the cybernetic revolution. We now behold a new and insidious form of corporatism in the Trump 2.0 administration, the direct antithesis of the ur-definition of classical liberalism, which separated economic power from political/coercive power. Today, the would-be looters of the domestic (and international) commons are inside government itself, and are largely directing its efforts, as opposed to ostensibly being regulated by it. Just as the Trump administration has switched sides, shockingly to many, in global geopolitics, it has also switched sides in terms of classical political economy definitions and functions. That is, or should be, even more shocking still. Most obviously, Elon Musk and his acolytes were put in charge of the henhouse, and though their initial rampage has ended, their influence lingers throughout a federal government that spends billions on contracts with the mogul; Trump illegally voided the TikTok ban to arrange a marriage that benefited his donor Larry Ellison and other supporters; and an assortment of crypto bros has provided the president with staggering wealth in exchange for his regulatory benedictions. In other cases, tech and tech-adjacent firms appear to be the willing victims of extortion, as in the case of the government’s claims on shares or revenues from Nvidia, AMD, Intel, and a trio of rare-earth miners.

How, in brief, has this happened?

The cyberlution has sired the Net Effect, a structural shift in American economic life that has literally outsized implications for our existing civil society and political institutions.

The Net Effect refers to an inherent characteristic of information technology innovation, especially in digital form: It aggregates a wide range of human transactions that were formerly more dispersed. Technology scales, and cybertech scales better due to its very nature, than any previous information science-cum-communications technology ever has. But human community and empathy do not similarly scale, nor do scientific-rational cognitive templates, at least not in the current American entertainment-centric culture. The result of this core characteristic of the Net Effect has been the relatively rapid transformation of American economic life, reshaping, and fragilizing, a generally affluent political economy in ways few understand.

As general observations go this one is at base not new. The relationship between advancing technology and advantages to scale in most things — manufacturing, banking, trade, investment, and more — is a staple insight into the core dynamic of the industrial revolution. It resounds in David Landes’ 1969 masterpiece The Unbound Prometheus, for example, but perhaps its most insightful succinct description is one from 1955, by John von Neumann:

In all its stages the industrial revolution consisted of making available more and cheaper energy, more and earlier control of human actions and reactions, and more and faster communications. Each development increased the effectiveness of the other two. All three factors increased the speed of performing large-scale operations — industrial, mercantile, political, and migratory. … Since most time scales are fixed by human reaction times, habits, and other physiological factors, the effect of the increased speed of technological processes was to enlarge the size of the units — political, organizational, economic, and cultural — afforded by technological operations. That is, instead of performing the same operations as before in less time, now larger-scale operations were performed in the same time.

Because, as many have noted, the cyberlution substitutes machine power not for human muscle but for selected human brain functions, the result is an exponential elaboration of von Neumann’s insight. If we substantially substitute machine-brain functions for human ones, especially in communications, we lift many of the limitations of “human action times, habits, and other physiological factors” from organizational processes, manufacturing and management processes alike. Indeed, as von Neumann later added, “. . . improvements in control are really improvements in communicating information within an organization or mechanism. The sum total of progress in this sphere is explosive.” Explosive, indeed: von Neumann saw at least dimly in 1955 much of what 2025 would look like.

The explosive progress von Neumann foresaw takes us far beyond descriptions of technology’s relation to scale during and after the industrial revolution. It multiplies advantages to scale dramatically, incentivizing gigantism decisively as an organizational goal. It thus transforms our intellectual inheritance of capitalism, since supply and demand no longer match up invisible-hand-like to produce price-points from massively dispersed economic agents engaged directly, without technological mediation, to create markets. Rather, digital information technology — which, again, is prior to and has little directly to do with social media — inherently conduces to oligopolistic, potentially even monopolistic, conditions.

In fact, the enormous size and swath of the tech companies are functions of the technology itself. Precisely because there is neither a product nor much of a human-devised service, output can increase instantly with the algorithmically-induced demand. Until recently, the capital investment required to provide the underlying computing power was a trivial problem; adding a server is much easier than adding a factory. Only with the extraordinary computing demands of AI has capital investment begun to represent a potential limit.

The Net Effect ramifies across the economy as nondigital businesses take advantage of the new technology to hoover up customer data, find new clients more quickly, and pursue ever-more complex financial wizardry. The resulting efficiencies could in theory be passed on to the consumer, but in key industries that are either oligopolistic, otherwise supply-constrained, or heavily regulated — including healthcare and housing — large providers instead use them to extract more profit. Even major grocery stores in cahoots with Instacart and various data-management firms — all far smaller than the truly major digitech corporations — have been using algorithms to sort buyers into categories that result in different people paying different prices for the same goods at the same time at the same store. This amounts to an ingenious (and not yet illegal) means of effecting wealth transfer from individual consumers to huge corporations’ managers, investors, and shareholders. And rather than just providing a tool for already-big service providers, the ease of monetizing data and the asymmetric advantages of complexity actively incentivize consolidation. The Net Effect thus aggravates what is already a nasty and novel case of cost disease.

So now finally, why has the U.S. federal government not reacted more assiduously to the harms posed by social media? Quite aside from the absence of pressure to do from below on account of the generally immobilizing nature of cyberaddictions, the fact is that the major digitech corporations, in informal cahoots in this regard despite their competitive relations in other regards, have more influence over the federal government than the federal government has over them. The combined annual revenue of the Big Five alone for 2024 summed to about $1.68 trillion — about double the size of the U.S. defense budget for FY 2024. The Big Five plus a few other huge tech corporations like Oracle account for, at last count, about 34 percent of U.S. stock market capitalization. Even the Treasury Department can’t readily touch that.

This situation puts the government on the losing end of a somewhat unusual, and hence opaque to many, collective action problem. All the Big Five, plus Oracle and Palantir and so on down the scale line, oppose regulation of their industry, all strenuously oppose any antitrust actions aimed their way, and they all share the same reasons for both. They are all also massively deep into government contracts and congressional campaign contributions. Compared to the federal government as a whole, they know what they want on what matters most to them, but the government—which we imagine as unitary but which in fact is a highly fragmented collection of public organizations—is all over the place, unable to concert any kind of coherent policy toward Big Tech.

This asymmetrical arrangement biasing policy in a generally passive direction held for years before January 20, 2025. Now, as noted, the MAGA Republican administration is actively abetting what amounts to a new corporatism in which digital mega-corporations are first-tier players. This accounts for why new techno-anarchist corporatists in the MAGA camp have in some cases mounted and in others supported efforts to intimidate those monitoring the internet for misinformation.5 Meanwhile, MAGA spinmeisters try to persuade their largely populist, post-literate constituency that the accursed monstrous bureaucratic/administrative state run by Marxist/Communist/Socialist/antifa elites is their enemy, deflecting attention from the major tech corporations and others algorithmically targeting their brainstems and manipulating their novelty bias in order to strip-mine their sanity and turn them into Eloi with debit cards.

And what of the opposition in what remains of America’s liberal democracy? The Democratic Party is ideally positioned to foster a major social reform movement against digital oligarchy in league with new corporatists, and the harm they do to the commons: It is national in scale, and has an organized presence downward in each and every state, town, and county. And yet in that regard it has done about as little as can be imagined under the circumstances. Why?

To be fair, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren has called repeatedly for the regulation and breakup of the major digitech corporations, and she and several others in the party, notably Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy, are volubly aghast at the politicized media consolidation antics we have been recently witnessing. Not very much active company have she and Senator Murphy attracted, however, from among their peers.6 They all know what’s happening, many of them, to one degree or another, but they say and do very little about it even amid their own state and local constituencies.

The Biden administration did throw the spear of antitrust litigation at the tech giants and other industries it viewed as overly consolidated, marking a break with the party’s friendly posture toward an industry long viewed as an ally. But Democrats are too feckless, divided, and unpopular to win the kind of mandate that might allow them to think bigger—only a 27 percent national approval rating at last measure, so in single digits in many if not most beyond-xburbs parts of the country. This is true not least because the social media snare has also trapped left-wing politics, fueling the woke ideologies and purity tests that have turned off so many Americans.

Will this change? Growing signs of discomfort and tumult over social media harms, and some glimmers of action in the culture and even in the courts, suggest it might. We may hope so, but as has been often been recited, hope is not a policy. In any event, we are bound to find out.

Adam Garfinkle is founding editor of The American Interest and a Senior Fellow at the Niskanen Center. Before founding the magazine in 2005, he served in 2003-05 as speechwriter to the Secretary of State.

Share

Sixty years. That’s how long it took Americans to organize a coherent political response to the predations of 19th- and early-20th century industrial capitalism. From the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 to the codification of the New Deal in the late 1930s, the country lurched through Grange halls and union massacres, through Populist defeats and Progressive victories, through muckraking exposés and constitutional amendments. The response, when it finally came, was a genuine transformation: antitrust law, labor protections, financial regulation, the administrative state itself.

But the response to the latest economic revolution in the United States—the fourth, if you’re counting—marked by the internet, social media and AI, has so far not been as productive. We have disruption, polarization, a youth mental health crisis, and an economic concentration of wealth that would make the robber barons think maybe we’ve gone a little overboard. What we lack is a coherent political movement that offers a real alternative. Bans on phones in schools and Australia’s crackdown on social media for kids, along with a few lawsuits here and there, represent the most visible stabs at reform. But they feel less like the beginning of a genuine movement in the mold of the old trust-busting Progressives and more like the exertions of passengers trying to bail out a sinking ship with teacups.

The usual explanations for the tech industry’s dominance–regulatory capture, a polarized and gridlocked political environment, and the sheer complexity of digital technology–have merit. But they miss an even larger problem. The absence of a mass-scale, coordinated response isn’t necessarily a failure of imagination or political will; it may be a feature of the system itself.

To see this at work, start with the Big Tech business model and the concentrated wealth it generates. Cory Doctorow’s framework of “enshittification“ has become something of a meme, but underneath the coinage lies a sophisticated diagnosis. Platforms follow a predictable arc: At first, they’re good to users to achieve growth. Next, though, they exploit users to court business customers such as advertisers and publishers. Finally, with everyone locked in, they squeeze them all to satisfy shareholders. In 2008, Facebook promised not to spy on us; today, Facebook is a rent-extraction machine optimized for engagement metrics that correlate well with human misery.

But Doctorow’s framework needs an amendment. After the extraction phase, something else often happens. Not all that captured wealth goes into manipulating the regulatory environment to increase profits. Some is plowed back into the next wave of disruption, like Google Ventures, Microsoft’s $13 billion OpenAI bet, Amazon’s $8 billion Anthropic investment, and Meta’s pivot to AI (up to $65 billion in spending in 2025 alone). The enshittification of Platform A generates the venture capital financing for Platform B, thus creating a self-fueling flywheel.

The system doesn’t just extract and decay; it extracts, decays, and innovates, often simultaneously. That innovation makes it hard to dismiss the current system as one of mere corruption (although it certainly is corrupt). The corruption, for better or for worse, funds further innovation. And the innovation, in turn, resets the cycle: A new platform, a new promise, a new wave of users being treated well until they’re not.

This new dynamic represents a virtuous cycle for tech capital, but a vicious one for everyone else.

Add politics to the mix and the picture gets even grimmer. Tech wealth buys lobbying power. Lobbying power prevents regulation (or captures it, which amounts to the same thing). Unregulated platforms accelerate the extraction of wealth, which fuels another spin of the flywheel, each faster than the last. We’ve watched this play out with Section 230, with antitrust enforcement that arrives a decade too late, with privacy legislation that somehow never quite passes.

The flywheel, in other words, includes a political capture loop in its rotation. And unlike older forms of regulatory capture, it generates innovation while also extracting rents. The railroad barons could only lay so much new track. The platform barons keep building new products, finding new frontiers, dominating new markets.

There’s another, more profound difference. In the Gilded Age, economic and narrative power were separate.

The media industry wasn’t consolidated like it is today. When Upton Sinclair published The Jungle or when Ida Tarbell exposed Standard Oil, people like railroad magnate and financier Jay Gould might have been able to bribe or threaten individual editors, but they couldn’t suppress the story everywhere. Muckrakers like Sinclair and Tarbell found outlets. Populist newspapers reached farmers. Gould could buy legislators, manipulate shipping rates, and deploy strikebreakers against his workers, but he couldn’t control what farmers thought about him. The media environment was too diffuse and fragmented. The robber barons’ attempt at corruption simply couldn’t scale.

That’s no longer the case. Elon Musk owns a platform used by around 200 million people a day, including tens of millions who get their news there. He can, and does, algorithmically boost his own posts, suppress his critics through shadow-banning, and test messages in real time to see what resonates. He doesn’t need to bribe columnists. His engineers can just decide what those columnists’ audiences see or even if they see the columnists at all.

This poses severe challenges to one of the Gilded Age’s primary mechanisms for reform. Sinclair’s Jungle changed federal law because as powerful as they were, the lords of Packingtown couldn’t make the book disappear; they didn’t own the presses (for the most part). But platform barons like Musk and Zuckerberg today exert immense sway over the means of information production and distribution both, giving them outsized control over the media environment. The muckraking that forced Standard Oil to accept regulation doesn’t work when the monopolist owns the megaphone.

And yet, the political and social paralysis can’t be explained solely by an information stranglehold. People are genuinely angry. Scroll through any social media feed and you’ll find raw fury at tech companies, algorithms, and the attention economy devouring childhood. The energy and desire for a political movement seem to exist. So why doesn’t it gel?

Look at what the Progressive Era’s response actually required: Lots and lots of patient, face-to-face, grinding work. Meetings at settlement houses and union halls. Investigative journalism sustained over years, not news cycles. All of it depended on repeated in-person contact, trust-building, and the slow accretion of solidarity despite racial and social differences.

Social media, on the other hand, is optimized for precisely the opposite. Outrage gets engagement; nuance doesn’t. Identity politics fragment potential coalitions. Viral moments dissipate like flash paper before anyone can form durable organizations around issues. Herbert Croly’s Promise of American Life, which became a “manifesto of Progressive beliefs,” according to the New Republic, took nine years to write and publish. Today we have Substack and 280 character limits.

The irony is obvious. The technological tools we could use to build a resistance infrastructure are controlled by the very forces we need to resist. We’re forced to organize on digital terrains owned by the very forces we seek to rein in. And when things get too hot for the platform barons, they shift the terrain. By the time you’ve built a coalition around one grievance, the platform has already moved on, generating new harms and new distractions.

In short, the flywheel generates disruption faster than responses can form. The platforms shatter the coalitions that might demand their regulation. Each turn of the cycle produces more capital for the next wave of innovation that atomizes the public further.

The Progressive Era was 60 years of patient organizing. Try getting someone to watch a TikTok reel of more than 60 seconds.

The Progressives found success when the crisis of the Great Depression met decades of organizing and capacity building. But they had to go through hell to get there. The Populists lost. William Jennings Bryan lost not only while leading them, but twice more while leading just the Democrats. The labor movement was shot and beaten for 40 years before the Wagner Act. Perhaps we’re in the “failing repeatedly” phase. That would be historically normal.

But what if the flywheel’s velocity has changed the math? Maybe the cycle now spins fast enough to outrun patient preparation. Maybe the platforms now so thoroughly control the online equivalents of union halls, where organizing might happen, that we can never quite prepare the ground. If that’s the case, then the politics adequate to this moment may never arrive.

The missing response isn’t an accident or a failure of nerves. The system in need of reform is the same system that prevents reformers from organizing. The flywheel spins, the opposition scatters, and the politics we need keep slipping out of reach.

So what can we do? The historical precedent offers cold comfort, but it’s not entirely bereft. Union organizing is having a small renaissance in the form of workers at Starbucks and Amazon. The most effective movements will combine offline solidarity with online amplification. And local politics are still relatively unmediated. The platforms haven’t entirely colonized every organizing space

Capacity-building will matter when a crisis hits, even if we don’t know what an equivalent crisis might be. It could be a catastrophic platform failure, an AI incident, a tech-driven financial collapse. But that capacity-building during the losing phase still matters. The Progressives didn’t know the Depression was coming, but they were ready when it did.

Christopher Allbritton is the executive editor for The Media Copilot, covering AI adoption in journalism and newsroom transformation. He has covered conflicts in Iraq, Lebanon, and Pakistan, including the killing of Osama bin Laden as Reuters’s Pakistan bureau chief.

Share

Call it the information age, the fourth industrial revolution, the cognitive era. Call it whatever you like, but it seems clear we are in the midst of an economic transformation as profound as those that sent medieval serfs to the cities, yeoman farmers to conquer the Western frontier, huddled masses to the United States.

The birth of industrial capitalism in America’s Gilded Age created the outlines of our political, economic, and social order, from the modern presidency to the eight-hour day to the unionized family wage. Facing mass immigration into overflowing cities, dirty and dangerous factory work amid machines of unfathomable power, and behemoth corporations that fundamentally changed the dynamics of economic competition, Americans of the late 19th and early 20th centuries banded together in myriad political and social movements attempting to tame the beast, from settlement houses to temperance movements to Theodore Roosevelt’s Bull Moose Party. Whatever their excesses and flaws, these movements preserved capitalism’s essential core of creative destruction while drawing a protective membrane around the social fabric that it threatened.

Today, the transformations of capitalism work on our minds, not our bodies. Their power is no less profound, from the acceleration of polarization to the youth mental health crisis to the usurpation of our basic cognitive processes by AI. Yet there has been a strange passivity in the reaction. Nobody likes social media, but nobody logs off. Suggestions of regulation, restriction, or modification are met with shrugs. We are told technology’s dominance of our private lives, families, and workplaces is inevitable. Everyone else is doing it, and there is no way out. Why this pervasive sense of powerlessness? Digital media is acting on our politics in obvious ways, but our politics don’t seem to be acting much on digital media. What will it take to rouse a coordinated reaction—or has one perhaps just gotten started?

When reflecting on the social response to Gilded Age capitalism, it’s important to remember how long change took, and the many channels through which it flowed. The last era of capitalist reform stretched for roughly 60 years, from the 1869 completion of the transcontinental railroad, which supercharged economic growth, to the end of the 1930s, when Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal codified in federal legislation worksite policies first pioneered on the state level. What makes it into the history books is landmark legislation and constitutional change. But these six decades brought a variety of interlocking responses responding to the ripple effects of industrial change in society and culture. Courts had to work out just who was responsible when a railroad took life or limb. Temperance crusaders had to coax women out of the home and into public life to agitate against the saloon, that great destroyer of families. Workers were shot and killed with regularity along the path to safe working conditions, from the Homestead Strike of 1892 to the 1932 Ford Hunger March. Varieties of unionism rose and collapsed. College-educated elites conducted studies, ran for office, and exposed corruption. Urban bosses organized immigrant voters and constructed patronage systems that doubled as a proto-welfare state.

Critically, as industrialization proceeded, its booms and busts began to create common cause between American farmers, urban immigrant workers, and their champions in the professional class. The central dividing line of mass politics — tariffs — had long split agrarian communities from manufacturing towns. But now both found they needed something new from politics. It’s as if today the rise of artificial intelligence threw blue and red states together into a new order that erased the diploma divide. Back then, it took crisis upon crisis, campaign upon campaign, until a new syntax of politics emerged in books like Herbert Croly’s Promise of American Life and Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion, which both called for a new politics to meet a new era, providing a vital rallying call for political leadership.

It’s also important to remember how overwhelming this change was to those who lived through it. Railroads cut time and space to ribbons. At one time in our history, the vast majority of Americans were used to moving no faster than their feet could carry them — or at the speed of a horse, if they were lucky. It must have been profoundly disorienting — albeit thrilling — to watch the landscape blur through a train travelling in hours a distance that once took days. Standing before the belching iron horse, what American could believe they had the power to impact this stupendous triumph of technology, this iron god? Likewise, today it seems impossible to imagine that digital technologies could be reshaped by political or social pressure, given their ubiquity, their usefulness, their addictive qualities. The problem seems even more intractable given how digital mediums have become indispensable to the cultivation and maintenance of political power. If the changes digital technology has wrought are less tangibly obvious than the railroad, the steamship, the industrial factory, or the automobile, they are no less overwhelming when taken together.

Yet it is possible to glimpse the emerging contours of a comparable politics, starting with the stirring of diffuse social movements and reactions. Someday, we might look back to Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation and place it in the same category as Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, the expose which forever changed American factories. The movement to ban phones in schools is one of the first organic social responses to the new world we have entered. From silent book clubs to the Reconnect movement on college campuses to the consortium of authors that sued Anthropic, the signs of resistance are everywhere. This transformation in culture is essential. Before the tobacco litigation of the 1990s, for example, came a widespread recognition that smoking was harmful, and a decline in social acceptance.

Slowly but surely, Americans are recognizing the naivete of our first gee-whiz reaction to the internet, which was imagined by both political parties as a new zone of freedom and celebrated with inane slogans like “information wants to be free.” But the problem is our laws and norms date from that era. The time has come for a rethinking based on what we now know — that data wants to be expensive, cyber surveillance is unavoidable, and the hours spent on social media have wreaked havoc in the real world.

Until the shooting of Charlie Kirk, there was no national political figure willing to take on this cause. But when the national spotlight swung to Utah Governor Spencer Cox, Americans heard the first serious case against social media from a political leader — one driven by tragedy, but that nonetheless offered a studied reflection on what technology has wrought. “‘Cancer’ probably isn’t a strong enough word,” Cox declared in the aftermath of Kirk’s death, going on to call social media algorithms “evil.” This religiously inflected language may sound jarring at first. But the passion it channels is exactly what powers effective political movements. Cox too has a target in mind: “these companies with their trillion dollar market caps … They’re hijacking our free will with these dopamine hits, same chemical reaction as fentanyl.” It’s a populist take that mirrors the diagnosis once aimed at the beef trust and Standard Oil.

What would a politics that squarely confronts the change wrought by the fourth industrial revolution look like? It might look like the Utah legislation that Cox championed, requiring robust age verification, that has been stalled by lawsuits. Cox’s reference to fentanyl suggests it could look like the opiod lawsuits, and indeed suits against social media and AI platforms for a range of harms are wending their way through the courts. It could look like legislation to make public the algorithms that shape platforms, or a requirement that makes consumers the owners of their data. National security concerns around TikTok suggest another dimension to the problem — both the recognition that adversaries are actively using these platforms to sow internal dissent, and the powerful forces that resisted legislation.

Charlie Kirk’s shooting may accelerate the politics of reform. Until recently, there has been little incentive for political elites to rein in digital media. Like Kirk, after all, many owe their careers to its successful use. But political violence — and the widening of targets beyond national-level politicians to state-level leaders, organizers, and activists — may change the calculus dramatically.

The tech companies have an edge — they control much of what we see, feel, and think. But the farmer who needed to pay exorbitant rates to the railroad seemed powerless too. So did the recent immigrant with nothing to offer but their labor. What made them strong was a shared sense of purpose, legitimate grievance, and political leaders willing to respond. The last time around, it took nearly half a century to marshal the social, political, and legislative forces to meaningfully alter the fallout from industrialization. Today, technology itself has sped up the clock, so it might be later than we think. But if capitalist upheavals are coming faster than ever before, maybe so can the response.

Share

Jennifer Burns is Edgar E. Robinson Professor of United States History at Stanford University and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. She is the author of Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right and Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative.

Image: Lawrence strike, 1912 , Digital Public Library of America. Modified with ChatGPT.

This essay builds on themes from Brink Lindsey’s new book, “The Permanent Problem.” In D.C.? Join us tomorrow night (Friday, 1/16) for a book launch party! RSVP required.

RSVP now

The past year has shown that the concept of “abundance” has legs. A bestselling book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. An expanding shelf of other well-received volumes on similar themes. Policy organizations with abundance in their name. The simultaneous emergence of a more right-coded “progress” movement that identifies many of the same problems and offers similar solutions. An annual Abundance Conference, the most recent with 15 different organizations represented on its host committee. A new, bipartisan, abundance-themed congressional Build America Caucus. And a vociferous, sometimes hysterical opposition whose main impact is to Streisand-effect its target to even greater prominence.

OK, so abundance has legs — but what kind of creature are they attached to? And where are those legs capable of taking us? What are the appropriate contours of the concept — we want an abundance of what, exactly? And what’s the social vision behind this desire for more — we want abundance for what?

What fits inside the abundance frame?

An early challenge for the abundance movement is figuring out — and limiting — its scope. “I think we could all use a reminder that while ‘abundance’ has real value as a conceptual frame,” my Niskanen Center colleague Matthew Yglesias wrote recently, “there are limits to what we can address through lumping.” He elaborated here:

What matters is whether the ideas are good. It would be easy to think up policies to make alcohol more abundant, but that would be bad — alcohol fuels crime and traffic accidents and is unhealthy. America’s recent experiment with an abundance agenda for sports gambling seems to have been harmful. More broadly, though I have already disavowed the “smartphone theory of everything,” it absolutely seems to me that the superabundance of streaming video that we now enjoy is creating a lot of problems for society.

My old friend Adrian Wooldridge has made the case for an “anti-abundance agenda” to address the addictive junk that we can’t stop stuffing into our mouths and minds:

The abundance agenda needs to be balanced by an anti-abundance agenda. For in many significant areas of life, we suffer from a crisis of overproduction rather than underproduction — too much stuff (or stimulation) rather than too little. This overproduction is bad for our physical and mental health. And the bizarre combination of too much bad abundance and too little good abundance (like too much bad cholesterol and too little good cholesterol) is at the root of our civilizational malaise.

The birth of abundance: A sense of brokenness

The idea of an “abundance agenda” made its first appearance in a Derek Thompson piece for The Atlantic in January 2022, and a growing group of wonks and scribblers has been running with it ever since. The unifying theme of this developing agenda has been combating dysfunctional government policies and institutional structures that restrict the supply of key goods and services. Either the government is actively blocking private actors from meeting market demand, or it’s unable to get out of its own way in providing public services.

The “Big Three” core concerns that have emerged thus far are housing, energy, and transportation:

• In housing, zoning and other land-use regulations have resulted in a rolling affordability crisis for would-be homebuyers in metro areas across the nation.

• In energy, over-the-top permitting restrictions are slowing the transition to clean energy.

• In transportation, a tangled mess of “state capacity” deficits has sent costs per road- and track-mile in the U.S. soaring to multiples of those in other advanced countries.

Meanwhile, efforts to broaden the abundance agenda have focused on problems as varied as the bureaucratization of scientific research, which gets its own chapter in Klein and Thompson’s Abundance, and the host of supply constraints that drive up healthcare costs.

From the dots connected thus far, we get a pretty clear picture of the kinds of policy issues that fit comfortably within the abundance frame. The point isn’t to boost the supply of every bit of frippery that 21st century affluence can support a market for. The abundance idea has taken off because of its focus on core inputs to a high-functioning economy and core elements of a typical family’s budget. When you can’t afford a decent home anywhere near where you work, the economy feels broken no matter what the topline stats may say. When a big public construction project can’t get completed without huge delays and cost overruns — or maybe can’t get completed, period — government feels broken.

The abundance movement has arisen in response to this sense of brokenness.

Furthermore, there needs to be some identifiable bottleneck that is holding back supply and driving up prices: A reform agenda needs something dysfunctional to reform. When you examine the targets for reform that the abundance movement has identified and look for the underlying causes of dysfunction, you generally find some combination of regulatory capture, in which powerful insiders dominate the policymaking process and twist the rules to feather their nests by restricting competition — and thereby limiting supply — and a lack of state capacity typically brought about by the buildup of “red tape,” the old-fashioned name for what we’re now beginning to refer to as the “procedure fetish.”

Abundance and the atoms/bits divide

Though the ideas behind the abundance movement originated in technocratic policy wonkery, they resonate at much deeper levels. That’s because when you look at where abundance is most conspicuously lacking — namely, the movement’s central targets of housing, energy, and transportation — you see that that the common denominator is blocked action in the physical world — the world of atoms as opposed to the world of bits.

The idea of lost abundance thus ties into the disillusionment with the digital revolution — and, with it, the growing recognition of the need to reprioritize and reengage with the physical world — that has been steadily building cultural momentum over the past decade or so.

This cultural turn started with the same kind of narrow, technocratic focus that has animated the abundance movement to date — namely, disappointment in the wake of the Great Recession with the slow pace of productivity growth and underlying technological progress. Out of these discontents has emerged the fledgling “progress” movement, which overlaps substantially with abundance in its analysis and goals while expressing them in more right-coded terminology. We can trace the origins of this movement to Peter Thiel’s memorable lament from 2011: “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.”

Previously, in the decades since Ronald Reagan first won the presidency, boosters of free markets and low taxation (i.e., people like Thiel) had been almost uniformly bullish on U.S. economic performance and ongoing technological prowess, dismissing concerns about “deindustrialization” voiced by generally left-leaning advocates of “industrial policy” during the during the 1980s and early ’90s. “Computer chips, potato chips — what’s the difference?” a quote attributed to Michael Boskin, George H. W. Bush’s chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, summarized their viewpoint. What mattered was the overall level of GDP, not its components.

The internet boom that began shortly thereafter — and with it the resumption of robust productivity growth after a prolonged slump during the 1970s and ’80s — only strengthened the belief on the free-market side that the “dematerialization” of economic life was the path of progress. (The roaring stock market of the ’80s and ’90s didn’t hurt, either.) If anybody ever looked backed at the old midcentury dreams of continued progress in the physical world — moon bases and underwater cities, nuclear fusion, supersonic air travel, and, yes, flying cars — it was only in rueful acknowledgment of the impossibility of predicting the course of technological advance. When I read Robert Heinlein’s great juvenile sci-fi novels aloud to my boys back in the ’90s and early ’00s, we all laughed when they used slide rules to calculate the jump to light speed.

Then came the Great Recession and the subsequent collapse of productivity growth, which triggered a rapid shift in perspective. No longer did the ’90s boom look like a resumption of normal vitality after the temporary slump of the ’70s and ’80s; now the ’90s looked like an exception to the new normal of low growth. In 2011, the same year that Thiel’s oft-repeated crack about flying cars first appeared, Tyler Cowen came out with The Great Stagnation, which includes Thiel in its dedication. J. Storrs Hall followed up in 2018 with his Thiel-inspired Where Is My Flying Car?, a quirky, brilliant book that derided the cultural turn of the 1970s that knocked us off the path of progress in the physical world and which I’ve termed the anti-Promethean backlash. The following year, Cowen teamed up with Stripe cofounder Patrick Collison to write “We Need a New Science of Progress” for The Atlantic — and the new progress movement was off the ground.

This turn in ideas was occurring just as changing circumstances provided both a push and a pull in the direction of renewed interest in “hard tech” — i.e., innovation in the world of atoms. The looming threat of climate change, combined with the emergence of China as a technologically formidable adversary, posed serious and difficult challenges that could not be met with a new phone app.

Meanwhile, a couple of unexpected spurts of technological progress — rapidly declining production costs for solar and wind power, and SpaceX’s similarly spectacular reductions in launch costs — reawakened entrepreneurial optimism and ambition in the hard-tech sector. Now we’re seeing promising developments and increasing investment in nuclear energy, including nuclear fusion, and in advanced geothermal power and supersonic flight.

Can the abundance movement scale?

The combination of the progress movement and the hard-tech mini-boom is helping to reorient policymaking elites toward reengagement with the physical world, an unabashedly good thing. However, worries about the long-term rate of growth and the organization of scientific research are far too abstract and recondite to stir the wider public and provoke changes in mass culture. The problems of affordability that the abundance agenda targets are much more salient to the everyday concerns of ordinary people but on their own aren’t enough to awaken the passions out of which broad-based social movements arise.

What is packing an emotional wallop is our growing disenchantment with the other side of the atoms/bits divide. Here, Thiel really was ahead of the curve with his “flying cars” line: He was throwing shade at social media just as the hit movie The Social Network was inspiring a new generation of tech founders, and as the early hopes of the “Arab Spring” seemed to demonstrate social media’s power to promote positive change through “people power.”

Trump’s surprising 2016 win, and the surrounding controversy over Russian and other online “misinformation” during the campaign, marked the turning point. While fears of the purposeful manipulation of public opinion have proved overblown, we have met the enemy online, and it is us: The broader perception that social media elevated extremists and degraded discourse overall was spot on. Is it even possible to imagine Trump’s rise in a pre-Twitter world?

From there, the bottom dropped out of the dream that the internet would “connect the world” and bring us all together. On the contrary, it became increasingly clear that our smartphones were weapons of mass distraction that we were training compulsively on ourselves. Teenage driving, after-school employment, and just hanging out with friends all declined as kids withdrew into the virtual simulacrum. Not coincidentally, mental and emotional problems among the young began skyrocketing. People even started walking blindly into traffic while staring at their phones, or falling off cliffs while posing for selfies — these were outliers, but most of us have sat at a dinner table in stony silence with everyone lost in their own social media feeds. Virtually all of us have felt our attention spans slipping. A century of “Flynn effect” increases in raw IQ scores has begun to reverse itself. Personality tests reveal precisely the trends you might expect: rising neuroticism, falling extraversion and agreeableness, and a collapse in conscientiousness.

‘Mass brain rot’

The latest twist has come with the astonishing breakthroughs achieved by ChatGPT and other large language models. Once again, we are confronted with a miraculous technology that can amplify our brainpower in potentially transformative ways. And once again, we are watching it steadily evolve, under the selection pressures of ferocious commercial competition to monopolize and monetize our attention, into yet another source of mass brain rot. Students are using it en masse to cheat themselves out of the hassle of learning anything in school. It’s a problem that started well before ChatGPT showed up and now reveals itself, even in the most elite institutions, in the widespread inability to work through and comprehend college-level reading material.

Moving from the pathetic to the outright creepy, we’re seeing increasing reports of desperately lonely people getting hooked on “relationships” with chatbots, as a result of which “AI-induced psychosis” has now entered our vocabulary. And employing the utter shamelessness that has emerged as the characteristic vice of the 21st century, Elon Musk’s xAI has already come out with pornographic “waifu” AI companions, and now OpenAI plans to follow suit in December.

Just as the post-2009 slump prompted a reconsideration of the past half-century of U.S. economic performance, so has the one-two punch of social media- and AI-related dysfunction triggered what looks like the beginnings of a wholesale reappraisal of the mass media era. The “What, me worry?” side of the debate points out correctly that dire warnings about media consumption are nothing new; in centuries past, people got the vapors over the deleterious effects of novel reading. This kind of response used to carry the day, but increasingly people are coming around to the idea that, at least since the advent of TV, the Chicken Littles have had a point. Here’s Matt Yglesias, for example: “The multi-generation moral panic about improved video entertainment driving social isolation is largely correct. The technology keeps improving, but it’s not making our lives better.”

I’m certainly an example of this: I had no use for Neil Postman’s diatribe against TV when it came out in the 1980s, and now I can’t stop quoting the man. And I’m not alone: Postman is cropping up all over the place these days. Derek Thompson dropped this amusing footnote after citing him recently:

Believe me, I tried to keep old Postman out of this — he’s over-exposed enough these days — but as I wrote, I could hear the ghostly thump-thump-thump of his posthumous fists knocking on the door of this essay, and I had to let him in.

Worries about “post-literacy” are now going viral.

And this shift in opinion isn’t confined to scribblers. The movement to ban phones in schools is gaining traction and registering wins all over the world. A recent survey found that 68 percent of Gen Z adults feel nostalgia for times before they were born — i.e, before the digital tsunami swallowed everything. Jake Auchincloss, a Democratic member of Congress from Massachusetts, refers to social media, online pornography, and online sports gambling as “digital dopamine” and proposes that we treat them like we treat alcohol or tobacco: restrict use by children and subject online providers to special sin taxes — for example, on advertising revenue.

Thompson, who interviewed Auchincloss for his podcast, sees him and Republican Utah Governor Spencer Cox, who castigated social media as a “cancer on our society” in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, as representing a new “touch grass populism.” “Rather than identify the enemy of America as specifically left, or right, or corporate, or foreign,” Thompson wrote on X recently, “the enemy they name is the digital hellscapes that summon the worst demons of our nature. They call us to re-invest our attention and our resources in the world of people and atoms.”

Raising the abundance movement’s ambitions

This wider cultural turn against the sordid excesses of online life could be the wave that carries that abundance idea from its current niche status — the preoccupation of technocratic elites — and transforms it into a genuinely popular social movement. The negative motivations are already in place. Fears of genuinely dystopian dangers have been awakened — and what’s more, the people most exposed to those dangers are our children, rousing our passions all the more.

What is needed now is something clear and compelling to fight for. Abundance proponents must raise their ambitions and offer a bold, long-term vision for social change — one capable of inspiring hope and excitement, one that can unite people across current divisions and galvanize them into action.

The idea here is to appeal to ordinary people — not technology enthusiasts who thrill to the ingenuity and brilliance of the new and pathbreaking, but regular, risk-averse folks who tend to be suspicious of change because of their natural focus on holding onto what they’ve already got. To generate mass support for a resumption of large-scale progress in the physical world, you’ve got to hold out the prospect of big, tangible gains in ordinary people’s lives.

Jerusalem Demsas did an excellent job of making this point in a recent essay in her new publication The Argument, so let me quote her at some length:

Technologists and techno-optimists need to realize that the way we talk about innovation in articles, in ads, and in manifestos is often suboptimal for the goal of trying to convince skeptics of the value of progress. Take this 2023 “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” from Marc Andreessen that speaks in grandiose terms about the value of technology. I agree with much of what he writes, but it reflects an orientation toward scientific achievement that is more focused on the adventure of invention than it is the point of all that progress….

The broader problem for technologists is the widespread impression that their “progress” is merely about accomplishing something technically impressive even if that breakthrough has limited or destructive impacts on humanity. I don’t care that it’s incredibly difficult and impressive to create addictive short-form video platforms. I care that it’s wasting our time. I don’t really care if Mark Zuckerberg is a genius if the impact of his brilliance has been to create platforms that degrade social trust.

I want a techno-optimism that is focused on human progress. I want vaccines and geothermal energy and supersonic flight and high-speed trains. I want to venerate the boring technological achievements like the doctor who halved the C-section rate at his hospital and lowered the maternal mortality rate in California by recommending a “hemorrhage cart” that prevented new mothers from bleeding to death. Technology isn’t just about pushing the frontier. It’s about making people’s lives better.

So how can physical abundance transform lives for the better? We’re not talking about just piling up more random stuff; the offsite storage industry exists because we already have more stuff than we know what to do with. And we’re not talking about more trivial, enervating comforts and conveniences — not another “Uber for X,” not “smart” refrigerators and toasters with endless features that normal consumers can’t be bothered to learn and use.

What we want is a vision of the future in which physical abundance acts as a genuinely liberating force. But what is it that most ordinary people still yearn to be liberated from? Well, for one thing, people are increasingly feeling trapped in the endless digital maze and yearning for reconnection to the IRL physical and personal. A world in which the built macro environment is once again, after decades of stagnation, visibly changing and improving could go some ways toward restoring our collective sense of groundedness and real-world efficacy.

What I’m looking for, though, is some important deficiency in life offline that abundance can remedy. We are already so rich that economic growth and technological progress have substantially erased — to the extent they are capable of doing so, at any rate — various great deficits that traditionally menaced and degraded human existence: hunger, physical drudgery and suffering, ignorance, and premature death. Our main problem with food these days is too much of it. Our lives are now so sedentary that we pay money to go to gyms to get the physical exercise our bodies need. We have all the world’s knowledge available at our fingertips, just a click away on our phones — if we can be bothered to choose learning something new over the umpteenth TikTok video of the day. Funerals for children are now as rare as they are soul-wrecking; they were just as soul-wrecking before, but dreadfully commonplace.

The promise of abundance is that it can take us to the next level of rich, one in which another pervasive deficit that shadows our lives is progressively whittled away. It’s the deficit of freedom that comes from dependence on a lifetime of paid employment and that gives so many of our lives such ceaseless precarity.

The premise of my new book is that the “economic problem” as John Maynard Keynes defined it has been solved. The threat of serious material deprivation has been pushed to the margins of life; as a result, the “permanent problem” of humanity — how to “live wisely and agreeably and well” with all our blessings — has now come into view.

But while it’s true that the vast majority of us in rich countries can now expect our basic material needs to be satisfied — and a whole bunch of less urgent needs and wants as well — it’s true subject to an important qualification: We can expect to satisfy our basic needs and many more besides provided we spend a big chunk of our waking hours throughout our decades of adulthood working at some job to earn the money to pay for it all. And for most of us, that job requires us to do work that we would never choose to do for its own sake. A lucky minority is employed in work that, even if we might not keep doing it if we won the lottery, is sufficiently challenging and absorbing that we derive many intrinsic rewards from it as well as the extrinsic reward of the paycheck. But for all too many of us, those intrinsic rewards are few and fleeting, outweighed considerably by spiritually emptying tedium and stress. And even if we hate our jobs, we usually hate the idea of losing them even more. Yet this happens regularly, often for reasons completely outside our control.

The implicit vision of progress that underlies our current economic order — and it’s rarely stated explicitly, maybe because too many people would immediately see through it — assumes that mass adult employment, with employment-to-population ratios comfortably above 50 percent, is a necessary and enduring feature of modern economic life. Progress, then, takes the form of better (i.e., more intrinsically rewarding) jobs at higher pay with a steady rollout of new and improved gizmos and doodads to buy.

No wonder people are pessimistic about the future. I’ve come to the conclusion that the overall quality of paid employment opportunities is unlikely to keep improving. And we know that many of the new and improved gizmos and doodads we’ve been buying are actually making our lives worse; there’s certainly no reason to expect that we’re going to get to living “wisely and agreeably and well” through a wider array of possible consumer purchases.

But there’s another possible future, and the idea of physical abundance points the way. Imagine a future in which core elements of a household budget — housing, transportation, energy, healthcare — are now so cheap that it’s possible to fund a comfortable retirement with a fraction of the lifetime working hours needed today. Imagine a social movement — or perhaps a competing variety of social movements — that seizes upon this possibility and encourages lifestyles designed to minimize dependence on paid employment. You’d see lots of people retiring in their 30s and 40s, a higher share of part-time workers among those who do work, and more people entering and exiting the labor force episodically as life circumstances change. And you’d see a lot more small businesses, online or in the home.

This is the next level of rich that abundance-based policies can get us to: societies in which mass full-time employment is no longer the norm — not because people are dropping out of the workforce under competitive pressure from machines, but because people are “graduating” from work for pay because they now have better ways to spend their time. The prize that abundance offers us, then, is a big and ongoing increase in the ranks of the independently wealthy.

Earlier this month, Ross Douthat posted a piece headlined: “The liberal order can’t heal itself.” The very next day, Jonathan V. Last exhorted liberals: “Stop the masochism.”

The two essays didn’t reference each other, but they represented poles of a crucial debate. Douthat lamented that there are “no current resources inside liberalism commensurate” with the challenges it faces. Last countered: “Liberalism’s great liability isn’t ‘wokeness.’ It’s a lack of self-confidence bordering on masochism.”

Last would have liberals just buck up; Douthat would have them give up.

So which is it? Was liberalism—understood as the broad political tradition, with both left- and right-leaning variations, in support of liberal democratic capitalism—working fine before Trump stormed onto the scene, such that what we need now is an assertive campaign to restore the normal order? Or was liberalism already so feeble that MAGA’s home remedies were the only medicine left, and who knows? They may even do some good?

The firewalls Donald Trump still needs to break through to take us from constitutional democracy to Caesarism will prove stronger if they are buttressed by the confidence of liberal elites, both right- and left-leaning. So it matters what opinion leaders like Last and Douthat believe—especially since both are conservatives whose readers could shape the trajectory of the Republican Party. But the debate between them posits a false choice.

The answer is that we need neither liberal despair nor a liberal restoration, but a liberal reconstruction. It’s a play in four acts, or four states of mind: confidence to know what we did well in the period after the Cold War; clarity about what we face now; humility to see where we went wrong and what needs repair; and determination to harness liberalism’s powers of renewal rather than submit to fatalism.

We can build on pieces of Last’s and Douthat’s arguments to get through the first two acts, and part of the third. But a winning performance also requires something new.

What we face

1) Economic underperformance is insufficient to explain the rise of Trump, and a restoration of widely shared growth—already under way during the Biden years, inflation notwithstanding—will not suffice to arrest right-wing populism. The “affordability” debate now raging in Washington is substantively important and electorally devastating for the administration, but it is not a key out of our long-term crisis.

Douthat and Last agree that for all the flaws of the pre-Trump economy, the United States had a sound and widely accepted economic model that remains relevant today. Last focuses on the elite, arguing the nation had achieved a “neoliberal” consensus that capitalism works best but requires a muscular government to soften its excesses and secure global markets, with plenty of debate around the margins.1 Douthat focuses on performance:

Overall, Americans got richer across the neoliberal era, the populist and socialist alternatives yield slower growth and more corruption, and a lot of the specific economic problems cited by neoliberalism’s critics (housing costs, say) would actually be ameliorated by a stronger dose of deregulation and free markets, the old liberal prescription made new.

Inflation almost certainly got Trump elected a second time. But the forces that allowed him to remain viable after Jan. 6 were not animated by pocketbook concerns. Trumpism reflects deep cultural grievances—and fuses them to dark passions.

2) “Trumpism” is guided by illiberal and authoritarian ideas and impulses, but those ideas and impulses aren’t shared by all his supporters. Blatant lawlessness, flagrant and massive corruption, contempt for constitutional restrictions on power, demonization of opponents, shameless bigotry and stoking of racial resentment, celebration of violence, performative cruelty – these hallmarks of Donald Trump’s political vision mark him as a dangerous demagogue with deeply illiberal and authoritarian ambitions. And for core supporters of the so-called MAGA movement, Trump’s illiberalism is central to his appeal.

Many political insiders have grown weary of this argument, dismissing it either as outraged “virtue-signaling” or simply naivete about how politics works in the new Washington. But a liberal strategy must begin with clarity about the chief problem, and the chief problem is how to counter a movement that has taken control of one of our major parties, and the federal government itself, while repudiating core liberal values. As Last puts it: “For some people the turn to Trumpism was … born of frustration at being ill-served by the economic and social order. For many, many others, it was about something else.”

But liberals must be equally clear that authoritarian and racist impulses alone are far from sufficient to explain Donald Trump’s electoral wins. Many who voted for him did so in spite of the dark lurch away from America’s founding principles; they were simply voting against inflation, against border chaos, against a visibly diminished incumbent and the vice president who covered up for him. Indeed, instead of rejecting liberalism, many were reacting against illiberal “woke” excesses and threats of worse on the left. Finally, the deep discontent gripping the nation and underlying the rise of MAGA has to do with the sense that somewhere along the line, a whole range of institutions just stopped working for people. That brings us to the third point.

3) The substantive problems that liberalism must grapple with have grown much deeper than mere growth and redistribution. Douthat’s list is instructive but incomplete: technological alienation; the confluence of declining fertility and rising nativism; and the rise of hostile foreign powers who exploit the liberal order only to undermine it. That last point should be broadened to include contemporary liberalism’s tendency toward naivete about the enemies it faces, both foreign and domestic – which is why point 2 is so vital.

The cultural crisis of liberalism is not self-doubt, but separation

What both the Last and Douthat essays ignore is a deeper cultural crisis underlying economic complaints: the gap between the working classes and their professional-managerial counterparts. This is a problem the Trump-era New Right has diagnosed accurately, but often in feverish terms of conspiracy theory.

For their part, liberals have yet to reckon with the full depth of this problem, which goes far beyond voting coalitions. The many symptoms of the disease include a kind of blindness among the professional class, which is what allowed it to stumble headlong into censorious cultural orthodoxies that only fueled MAGA populism over the last decade. Left-liberals are coming out of that fever, and if all highly educated liberals come to grips with the class divide in our country, they can help return liberalism to the difficult road it has always tried to walk—forging the grand bargains that ensure peace across both cultural identities and classes.

Last acknowledges that thinkers like George Packer who emphasize the ways in which liberalism had grown stale are “almost certainly correct.” At the same time, he downplays this kind of grappling as crossing the line between “healthy self-interrogation and pathological scrupulosity.” He argues that “MAGA is not really a reaction to adverse economic consequences or ‘elite failures,’ but an affirmative preference for illiberalism.”

In fact, the lesson of the last decade is that a reaction to adverse economic consequences and elite failures can turn into a preference for illiberalism when complaints fall on deaf ears. Untangling this knot is our generational challenge. To meet it, liberalism needs to prove that it can tackle the big problems of security, economics, and culture that preoccupy Americans now. Not the problems of yesteryear—the problems of today.

Debating where liberalism has gone wrong in these matters is not a sign of weakness; it is a signifier of strength. It is not apology, but armor. Intellectuals should be forthright about this. And if we proceed with the assumption that a huge swath of the country is irredeemably authoritarian, rather than deeply misguided, we lose our power to persuade.

Which leads us to the final point.

4) The last act: Only liberalism, with its ability to deliver prosperity and its insistence on human dignity and the free exchange of ideas, can find solutions to these problems. In doing so it can draw on its rich tradition of synthesis with religion, national pride, and theories of civic virtue.

Thinkers who purport to transcend the liberal inheritance and cheerlead the politicians who despise it are wandering into caves rather than out of them. As Laura Field shows in her new book Furious Minds, even the most credible postliberal intellectuals dabble in conspiratorial and fantastical ideas that too often wish away our history and pluralist reality. And as Jonathan Chait observes in his recent essay on “the conservative movement’s intellectual collapse,”

Identifying and correcting errors is an important role for a political movement’s intellectuals … It is impossible to fulfill this role when a lone man defines what counts as success or failure — often in self-contradictory ways and regardless of the evidence.

We might add that in the age of social media and short-form video, this danger goes beyond Trump. An intellectual movement, left or right, will swiftly cease to be intellectual if it seeks its north star among mercurial media personalities with gullible audiences.

Intellectual life can only thrive and find real solutions within the parameters of liberalism, which encourages wide-ranging debate anchored by a set of principles that protect against the bigoted idiocy that is now surging on the extremes, boosted by the president himself.

As to a restoration of our broken culture, it may be true that the barebones liberal assumptions driving a microeconomic model are inadequate to the job. But in assuming that this represents the actual reality of liberalism, we sip far too deeply from the postliberal well. In a discussion of our crisis of despair and alienation, Douthat writes:

[While] hopefully culture and politics will adapt, those adaptations will not themselves be liberal in either a philosophical or a post-Cold War political sense of the term. They might be postliberal in the sense of political regulation of technology or in the sense of religious-moral regulation of individual choice—but they will not just emerge organically from the proper application of John Stuart Mill or Milton Friedman.

This caricature of liberalism represents precisely the kind of “masochism” Last warns against. Solutions to social problems that call on us to reckon with global conflict and cultural disaffection are not foreign to the liberal tradition. They are central to the liberal tradition. It was this tradition that grew out of Europe’s wars of religion, and much later won two world wars and a Cold War. It was this tradition that created the space for the flourishing of religious communities throughout American history.

It was also this tradition that was merged more or less seamlessly with a “republican” tradition that prized civic virtue and the formation of citizens. Generations of schoolchildren memorized Daniel Webster’s speech that ends, “Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable,” not because it prescribed ruthless individualism enforced by a national government, but because it sought to forge a national culture in which Americans from Maine would feel kinship with Americans from Louisiana.

Contemporary liberalism has indeed strayed from that tradition. As Field observes:

Liberalism was invented in part to sidestep and quell the flames of ideological fanaticism. Partly as a result of that history, liberals have for far too long accepted a minimalist self-understanding that avoids all talk of virtue and ethical vision; they have similarly refused to acknowledge and cultivate the moral worlds and traditions that sustain our lives.

But the solution is not to concede an impoverished vision of liberalism and declare it bankrupt; it is, as Field insists, to “become more upfront about the core ideas and ideals of liberalism: about what liberalism values and why, in language that can be broadly understood.”

The United States cannot return to the liberal status quo ante that prevailed before 2016. It was already past its expiration date then, and the transformations we are living through have only accelerated.

But the good news about liberalism is that it’s like the sourdoughs so many of us began baking during the pandemic. We can always make it anew. There’s no need to dump powdered sugar on a batch that has gone bad. But there’s no need to throw out the starter, either.

David Dagan is director of editorial and academic affairs at the Niskanen Center. Find him on LinkedIn.

Subscribe now

Share

It is a truism that the solutions of one generation become the problems of the next. But sometimes, reformers in the present rediscover problems that their predecessors never solved, only sent into abeyance.

“The federal government is filled with good people trapped in bad systems. When we blame the people and impose more controls, we make the systems worse. No one would offer a drowning man a drink of water.”

Those are, slightly out of order, the evocative lines the Clinton administration used 31 years ago to introduce its ambitious government-reform initiative, known as Reinventing Government. It is a diagnosis that parallels almost exactly what abundance-oriented thinkers like my Niskanen Center colleague Jen Pahlka offer today. Just as Pahlka does, the authors of Reinventing Government noted the specter of auditors ready to snap at any violation of procedure. As they grimly concluded: “Federal employees quickly learn that common sense is risky — and creativity is downright dangerous … Those who dare to innovate do so quietly.”

That raises an uncomfortable question. As my colleague Gabe Menchaca puts it: “If the federal government figured this out 30 years ago, why are we still in the same place?” This issue of Hypertext aims to answer that question, excavating the project of Reinventing Government for lessons we can apply today.

• puts Reinventing Government in the broad context of American debates over how bureaucracy should interact with democracy. She warns that neither the Trump administration nor the abundance movement have adequately grappled with some enduring questions.

• argues that Reinventing Government went wrong by turning headcount reductions into a goal rather than one measure of progress — and that the Trump administration has made the same mistake.

• offers a more balanced view of Reinventing Government, noting that some of its enduring changes were for the good — but that its efforts to transform bureaucratic culture did not last.

• says Reinventing Government went wrong because it turned work that at the state level had been focused on policy outcomes into a federal project framed mostly in political terms.

• And to conclude, Menchaca argues that Democrats’ great error in the Obama and Biden administrations was to fool themselves into thinking they could manage around government dysfunction rather than work with Congress to tackle it head-on — a mistake they cannot afford to repeat.

One answer to why Reinventing Government failed is that its authors misunderstood the problem, or preferred not to understand it. In this view, the problem is not that good civil servants are trapped in bad systems. It is that civil servants constitute a “deep state” that undermines elected officials and does the bidding of an unaccountable elite. Whatever the merits of this position, the second Trump administration has advanced a breathtakingly extreme version of it. In the words of Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, the administration’s mission is to rescue us from a “postconstitutional” order and from “the late stages of a complete Marxist takeover of the country, in which our adversaries already hold the weapons of the government apparatus, and they have aimed it at us.”

If that is the world we live in, then the best we can do is slash government to the bare minimum and bludgeon civil servants into obeying the commands of their political superiors, making expertise conditioned on loyalty. That counsel of despair won’t get us a high-performing government, but it will restore electoral accountability, save us a few bucks in taxes, and allow the economy to rip — at least until investors realize they no longer have the statistics, macroeconomic stability, emergency services, disease surveillance, and other public goods that make business tick.

Another answer to the question of why Reinventing Government fell short is that the problem of bureaucratic reform is hard. That means it requires not only brilliance at building organizations but also sustained political commitment. Such a political commitment must grow out of a vision of how bureaucracy can enable democracy and be anchored by substantive policy goals. Believers in that vision must then be relentless and willing to absorb costs in order to advance it over the long term.

How long? We could date the Progressive Era from the 1880s through the 1920s – a 40-year stretch that was followed by even more sweeping changes with the New Deal. Reinventing Government may have been the start of something, not the end. As early as 1994, its authors appreciated the size of the challenge we face today: “As the Industrial Era has given way to the Information Age, institutions — both public and private — have come face to face with obsolescence.”

It’s time to stare back, study the lessons of history, and start again.

David Dagan is director of editorial and academic affairs at the Niskanen Center. Find him on LinkedIn.

Share

On the morning of September 7, 1993, President Bill Clinton and Vice President Albert Gore Jr. shared a lectern on the White House’s South Lawn flanked by two yellow forklifts, each groaning under the weight of thousands of pages of paper. Thousands more pages, in fat binders, were stacked on pallets next to the trucks. They were filled with rules governing the management of the federal government. After their speeches, Clinton and Gore — self-styled “New Democrats” — strolled around the columns of paper, marveling at all this evidence of waste and bloat.

Did U.S. Army cooks really need several pages of instructions for how to bake chocolate chip cookies? Did the Department of Commerce really need to use more taxpayer dollars purchasing a floppy disk than an ordinary American consumer would spend on the exact same item at Office Depot? Clinton and Gore’s answer was clear: Of course not.

The South Lawn spectacle on that fall morning three decades ago fêted the first report by Gore’s National Performance Review, popularly called “reinventing government.” Later rechristened the National Partnership for Reinventing Government, this initiative ultimately continued through Clinton’s departure from office. Its first administrative head, White House advisor Elaine C. Kamarck, pointed out two decades hence that it constituted the longest continuous “government reform” project in U.S. history.

Kamarck told Congress in 2013 that the initiative had, among other achievements: reduced the federal workforce by nearly half a million employees; shredded the “equivalent” of “640,000 pages of internal agency rules;” and eliminated wasteful expenses like Department of Agriculture subsidies for sheep and goat farmers (since reintroduced). Advocates of “reinventing government” including Gore and Kamarck — none of whom ever spent much time in the private sector — were keen to emphasize how their reforms made the federal state more businesslike or even “entrepreneurial,” an implicit claim that government was, ipso facto, ineffective and wasteful. But the litany of recent dysfunction recounted in Jen Pahlka’s Recoding America, and the declaration of Biden National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan that “it is crazy the extent to which we have clogged up our delivery,” suggest that despite its ambitions, Reinventing Government did not turn the aircraft carrier away from the rocks.

To understand why, we must not merely look at how Reinventing Government was implemented, as Kevin Hawickhorst and Gabe Menchaca ably explain. We need to understand the origins of the campaign within the project of reforming the Democratic Party in the 1980s. Government reform, I believe, ought to take shape as a method for achieving a positive policy goal. It should not comprise a political end in itself. By contrast, the Clinton-Gore initiative emerged as a political project unmoored from broader policy objectives. That is why its substantive results remain contested, and its electoral footprint is invisible. When politicians set “reform” as its own outcome, the effort will tend to focus purely on cuts or on mainly cosmetic fixes for small problems – or, conceivably, blend both into a bureaucratic farrago! Before embarking on institutional reform, policymakers need to very clearly define what it is they are optimizing government to do. Ideally, this should be an ambitious growth agenda.

In our own age, yet again “reinventing government” for its own sake, even if individual procedural reforms are salutary, will likely prove both politically and substantively perilous. Hubris and incompetence played no small role in the many blunders of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, but Elon Musk’s team was able to run so wild in part because DOGE suffered from a more extreme version of Reinventing Government’s problem: It was untethered from broader policy aims.

Less is Gore

Clinton and Gore borrowed the argot of “reinventing government” from an eponymous 1992 book coauthored by public policy consultant David Osborne and Ted Gaebler, former city manager of the tony Bay Area suburb of San Rafael. Osborne and Gaebler’s Reinventing Government explored how state and local governments were achieving results with fewer resources by adopting less rigid bureaucratic hierarchies, adopting new technology, and collaborating with the private sector. Osborne, who subsequently worked in Gore’s office, described his and Gaebler’s book as about “replacing large, centralized, command-and-control bureaucracies with … decentralized, entrepreneurial organizations … driven by competition and accountable to customers.” Existing public agencies were “Industrial-era,” unsuited to the new “postindustrial” knowledge economy. Osborne joined Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign as a policy advisor, where his and Gaebler’s calls to technologize bureaucracy and improve personnel management complemented a key Clinton interest: modernizing the workplace and upskilling workers along the lines suggested by the candidate’s old Rhodes Scholarship confrere Robert Reich.

As historians Nelson Lichtenstein and Judith Stein describe in A Fabulous Failure (2023), the public-sector innovations Osborne and Gaebler chronicled arose from three successive and interlocking challenges: urban decay since the late-1960s, “tax revolts” modeled on California’s 1978 Proposition 13, and reductions in state and local funding by the Reagan administration. In other words, the long fiscal crisis battering American states and cities across the 1970s and 1980s necessitated governmental rethinks.

Critically, it was recognized that the most successful of these adaptations did not merely aim to manage austerity with abstract ideals of “efficiency.” Instead, they were anchored by a clear vision of desired social and economic outcomes. None other than David Osborne made this exact point just four years before he and Gaebler inspired Clinton and Gore. In Laboratories of Democracy (1988), Osborne profiled the efforts of six governors to do “more with less.” Some of the book’s subjects presided over states whose industrial economies had been hollowed out: Michigan’s James Blanchard and Massachusetts’s Michael Dukakis (both, like Clinton, avowed “New Liberals”); moderate Republican Richard Thornburgh in Pennsylvania; and center-left sweetheart Mario Cuomo in New York. The New Liberal governors firmly believed in high-technology “sunrise” industries. They sought to inject private-sector “performance standards” into more “entrepreneurial” public administration. As this efficiency jargon implies, these governors had true technocratic impulses. But they embedded them within broader efforts to use state governments to shape and manage growth — a leaner species of what is called “market-crafting” today. Indeed, efficiency-oriented government reform tended to take a backseat to the broader agenda.

For example, Massachusetts’ Dukakis talked a good game about apolitical technocratic management. Programs like the Bay State Skills Corporation (an existing agency focused on retraining) were, in Osborne’s words, “demand-driven”: They would only fund projects that private-sector businesses agreed to co-finance. Other measures seemed like classic government “efficiency;” for example, Dukakis contracted out some state tax-collection services. Such measures helped illustrate Dukakis’s political argument that he was not simply a “big government” Democrat (Time frostily dubbed this “liberalism on the cheap”).

But efficiency was secondary to the broader agenda. Dukakis channeled significant public resources into existing, and multiple new, agencies. These usually drew on outside expertise to help the Bay State get money to its people and businesses (Dukakis’ administration was stuffed with advisors from business and academia). A newfangled “public venture capital fund” offered early-stage loans, made equity investments, and brokered private funding for tech firms with long-term innovation potential. An industrial financing agency invested in infrastructure and funneled cash for modernization and technological upgrades into older industries. An existing “community development” agency was retooled to support housing development. Areas outside of affluent Boston, like the Berkshires or southeastern Massachusetts, received more funding later in Dukakis’ governorship. Osborne (who was scrupulously sober in his assessments and didn’t claim his governors got “everything” right) reported that Dukakis focused as much on trying to regionalize development and “redistribute growth” as he did on top-line economic numbers. In the 1980s, manufacturing employment gains in Massachusetts outpaced most of the country. The 1990-1991 recession struck New England hard; Massachusetts’s leading role in computing was largely ceded to Silicon Valley. But its innovation ecosystem — comingling government, business, and universities — inculcated first economic resurgence in the 1990s and then Massachusetts’s 21st-century global leadership in biotech and R&D.

Clinton, whose time as governor Osborne also wrote about in Laboratories of Democracy, tried to take notes. Clinton created several state agencies similar to those in Massachusetts and endeavored to cultivate a tech sector in a state that had historically lacked an industrial economy as sophisticated as those in the Northeast and Midwest. (Returning from a tech conference in 1989, one of Clinton’s aides cheerily reported that “someone in Manhattan had asked … if Arkansas was becoming ‘a little Boston.’”) And his efforts in Arkansas appeared to work in the short- to medium-term: By the mid-’80s, the state’s manufacturing jobs were increasing at 11 times the national rate.

Results among states, sometimes within states, varied. For instance, Pennsylvania — and especially Pittsburgh, the hometown of Governor Thornburgh, whom Osborne had profiled — is equally praised and criticized for its postindustrial record. But I believe the core insight of Osborne’s earlier book is that government reform needed to be in service of a broader agenda.

Fishing in the “mainstream”

What seems to have been lacking when Clinton and Gore decided to “reinvent” government from the White House was the joining-up of government reform with a positive vision akin to New Liberals’ earlier growth agenda. And the key fault for this lay with the Reinventing Government initiative’s biggest champions: the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC).

The DLC’s role in Reinventing Government was a microcosm of the Council’s agenda writ large. Popular narratives suggest that the DLC was the engine room of New Liberal politics. In reality, it brought together a variety of New Liberals in order to advance a particular electoral, political agenda — not a grand policy program. Its cofounder Al From described this as a “mainstream agenda” concerned with “values” like “responsibility” and “patriotism.” In one 1990 memo, From suggested backing away from “government clients, government workers, minorities and organized labor … whose values are hostile to those of middle America.” An uncomfortable truth for today’s Left is that From was onto something. Council members from Missouri’s economic-populist congressman Richard Gephardt to Arizona’s pro-business but environmentalist governor Bruce Babbitt (profiled in Laboratories of Democracy) won over middle-income, often suburban or exurban voters who might otherwise have been GOP-curious.

At the same time, the DLC’s narrowly political focus meant that Clinton found its policy cupboard a little bare once he entered the White House. Marquee DLC ideas like a national service program for America’s youth were occasionally handy for political ads but substantively inconsequential. And DLC staff leaders saw everything through a purely political lens, a point Lichtenstein and Stein illustrate in A Fabulous Failure. For instance, to Al From, a seismic internal budget debate over industrial policy v. deficit reduction (in which DLC figures played basically no role) was simply about Democrats’ “tax and spend image” — not long-term policy goals. Welfare reform, which ended up being highly consequential, interested From and DLC policy guru Bruce Reed mainly because it “demonstrates … willingness to break with old Democratic orthodoxy,” not because of precise policy details or aims for social programs themselves.

The story was largely the same for Reinventing Government, which became, apart from welfare reform, the biggest policy the DLC pushed in the Clinton White House. The DLC recruited Osborne as an advisor, but when he went to work in the White House, the fuller picture so expertly limned in Laboratories of Democracy seemed to be left behind. The push by Vice President Gore (a DLC member long before Clinton) to “reinvent” government too often lapsed into messaging untethered from a clear agenda like “market-crafting” growth. Indeed, some of the NPR’s flashiest horror stories of government waste turned out to be wrong. Remember those overpriced Office Depot goodies? A Government Executive reporter soon uncovered evidence that the government had actually been paying less for them than had commercial buyers. As Gabe Menchaca and Kevin Hawickhorst demonstrate, the emphasis on demonstrative efficiency rather than policy outcomes led into a trap: Bureaucratic capacity was often hollowed out, but bureaucratic culture did not change.

When we ask how successful “reinventing government” was at the federal level, it is vital first to ask what motivated it and how these motivations shaped its goals. And would-be government reformers today should consider what it is they want a reformed government to achieve.

Rethinking “Reinventing Government”

Many state and local officials took up “reinventing government,” usually focused on performance management systems and performance-based budgeting. But in a 25^th anniversary retrospective on the Reinventing Government initiative, Governing’s John Bunting noted sorrowfully that many of these systems wound up hardening into “just another stale compliance regime.” Mourned Bunting: “Despite a generation of reinvention, government is less trusted than ever before.”

The great flaw, I believe, is that setting measurable standards often wound up becoming more important than setting the right goals and achieving buy-in for them. “Reinventing” the state is too often construed in terms of procedures themselves, rather than what bold ideas the better procedures may instantiate. In this way, government reform à la Clinton-Gore risks becoming a sort of strange mirror image of modern liberalism’s “procedure fetish.” Put another way: The abundance movement has persuasively argued that today’s Democrats tend to try and “do too much” in policymaking. Equally, we should be wary of government reform efforts inverting this problem by doing too little. Democrats’ north star should be policy outcomes. They should design the most effective government mechanisms to attain them, but the north star should not be “efficiency” itself.

Reinventing Government, according to political scientist Paul Light, produced “a shell game” in which streamlining via job cuts as offset by “contract- and grant-generated jobs.” Did this improve American state capacity? The last two decades suggest that it did not. To repurpose the framework of Dan Wang’s new contribution to debates about state capacity, “abundance,” and America’s future: It is not necessarily enough to replace our “lawyerly society” with a new “engineering state.” (Who, incidentally, have been America’s only engineer presidents? Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter.) What matters most of all is what we want to engineer.

Henry M. J. Tonks is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for the Study of American Democracy at Kenyon College. His academic research focuses on the transformation of American liberalism since the 1960s. Find him on LinkedIn and Twitter/X.

Share

The pink slips have been flying in Washington of late. The Trump administration has axed civil servants by the tens of thousands, and the country is tuned in: Journalists cover it, citizens protest it, and judges are ruling on it. In response, observers are looking back to the Clinton administration’s Reinventing Government initiative, which similarly cut the federal workforce.

Current commentary has focused on the blow those personnel reductions dealt to bureaucratic capacity. But this story overlooks the fact that Reinventing Government was a comprehensive effort to revitalize the federal bureaucracy; the layoffs were just one part. The full history of Reinventing Government’s civil service overhaul offers broader lessons in what makes government reforms either take root or fade away under later administrations.

Reinventing Government — at the time the most ambitious federal reform effort since the 1940s — sought a more dynamic and entrepreneurial government. In civil service reform, as in other issues, it shunned hierarchy and commands, instead aiming to inspire the bureaucracy. While this approach led to short-term successes, the effort only left a lasting mark through its institutional reforms. The initiative claimed to break with bureaucracy as usual, but the lasting reforms were those that embraced bureaucracy.

Reforming government reform

Presidentially sponsored government reform efforts like Reinventing Government have a long pedigree, running from the Theodore Roosevelt administration to DOGE today. The improvements that these efforts sought ranged from modernizing government technology to streamlining procedures for hiring and firing bureaucrats. For most of the 20th century, these efforts aimed to strengthen top-down management of the bureaucracy, perhaps most successfully in the Hoover Commission of 1947–1949, which, among other efforts, advocated for giving Cabinet secretaries greater power over their agencies’ budgets, personnel, and internal organization.

Reinventing Government was another such effort, but it rejected this managerial orthodoxy as a relic, declaring that the main problem was “industrial-era bureaucracies in an information age.” Like past efforts, it aimed to speed up hiring and modernize government technology. But unlike previous reforms, Reinventing Government was inspired by the perceived failures of top-down management. It drew upon contemporary management styles such as Total Quality Management and the Reengineering movement, which aimed to flatten hierarchies to move faster. Above all, it was inspired by (and named after) the book Reinventing Government by journalist David Osborne and city manager Ted Gaebler. This collection of stories of entrepreneurial local government was a favorite of Bill Clinton’s, whose 1992 campaign included promises to bring the same approach to the federal leviathan.

Following Clinton’s victory, Vice President Al Gore took on Reinventing Government — formally the National Performance Review (NPR) — as his signature initiative. NPR alumnus Morley Winograd told me that Gore got the job by process of elimination — healthcare reform was First Lady Hillary Clinton’s issue, and welfare reform was reserved for the president himself, leaving government reinvention available for Gore. In March 1993, Gore was given six months to review the government’s performance and offer proposals for improvement. He carried out his job with gusto and convened roughly 250 career civil servants to study government procedures such as budgeting, as well as individual government agencies. When he and his team reached the September deadline, they presented their main report, From Red Tape to Results: Creating a Government that Works Better and Costs Less, which was bolstered by 38 accompanying reports. The administration then moved from research to implementation, which lasted until the end of Clinton’s second term.

One main pillar of Reinventing Government was personnel reform, where it aimed to “redefine accountability in terms of results” through decentralization, deregulation, flexibility, and delegated authority. It pursued these goals through four main lines:

• giving agencies flexibility in personnel procedure;

• offering training and awards to employees to inspire better performance;

• judging government managers on outcomes;

• and laying off central staff to lock in this new culture.

Streamlining procedure

Reinventing Government attacked cumbersome personnel procedures that its leadership viewed as impeding agency flexibility. For instance, the Department of Agriculture’s HR procedures weighed literally half a ton when printed out. The reformers declared that HR offices must instead henceforth “assume the primary role of consultant, providing expert advice and assistance, not acting as an obstacle to progress.” Accordingly, they reformed the governmentwide personnel requirements that they saw as rigid, one-size-fits-all solutions.

The federal government had a single standardized form for job applications, SF-171, an eight-page document that took eight hours to complete on average. Much worse was the Federal Personnel Manual from the Office of Personnel Management, which set HR policies for the entire government. The 10,000-page tome was notoriously complex — the guidance for merely handling notices of personnel actions took 900 pages. As if this weren’t enough, individual agencies added their own additional requirements.

Reinventing Government pared back centralized solutions so that agencies could craft simplified procedures tailor-made for their unique needs. SF-171 was eliminated, allowing agencies to accept resumes. Meanwhile, the Federal Personnel Manual was condensed into a tidy 350-page OPM handbook. NPR officials even made a show of tossing the unlamented Federal Personnel Manual into a dump truck. Gore and company hoped they had ushered in a new era of flexibility.

Over the longer term, the outcome was positive but limited: red tape had been cut, but the hoped-for benefits were mainly unrealized. Replacing the incomprehensible Federal Personnel Manual with a streamlined handbook was an impressive accomplishment — but agencies mainly didn’t use the flexibility it offered. Meanwhile, the complex SF-171 was replaced by equally complex formats for federal resumes. Agencies still followed the old way of doing things and the Office of Personnel Management still distrusted innovative proposals. Reinventing Government’s improvements had focused on eliminating bad procedures instead of creating better procedures, whereas system change would have required training agencies on their new flexibility and demanding that they use it.

Awards and training

NPR’s second personnel initiative was creating new awards and training to promote government innovation. The reformers believed that bureaucratic culture was stymied by the risk-averse oversight that their report called a “theater of the absurd.” To combat this risk-averse culture, NPR aimed to teach entrepreneurialism and highlight government successes.

To that end, Reinventing Government created the “hammer awards,” jokingly named after a notorious (if mythological) symbol of government waste, a $400 hammer purchased by the Pentagon. Hammer awards recognized government teams that streamlined bureaucracy, saved money, or delivered better service to the public. More than 1,200 teams received this award, which consisted of a hammer, ribbon, and note from Vice President Gore. One bureaucrat, for instance, reformed the permitting process for building fish ladders over dams, cutting one and a half years off the average approval time.

This investment in bureaucrats was also seen at the Federal Executive Institute (FEI), which trained top career government officials. Since its founding in 1968, FEI had mainly featured academics who lectured on constitutional law and civics. Clinton appointed the first director with a business background, Barbara Garvin-Kester, who revamped the curriculum by bringing in lecturers from local government and business who taught a can-do attitude. FEI took its own medicine: It began offering online education and, for the first time, began measuring the impact of its training. Director Garvin-Kester had been pleased to conclude, for instance, that an Army reform proposal — crafted at an FEI training session during her tenure — had saved $387,000.

But despite saving money and briefly changing agency culture, the reforms didn’t last under the next administration, which had different priorities. Following 9/11, federal training under President Bush was swiftly refocused on improving interagency cooperation, which might have prevented the tragedy. The Clinton administration’s Hammer awards were closely associated with the defeated Gore and were discontinued. These reforms were only the administration’s pet projects and, as they were never institutionalized, didn’t last.

Performance bonuses

The third personnel initiative was focusing top government managers on results by tying their bonuses to agency performance targets. Agencies had traditionally ignored results in favor of outdated and frequently meaningless procedures. NPR’s deputy director John Kamensky told me of his amusement at discovering, for instance, that one agency maintained a travel reimbursement policy that still included stabling a horse.

The administration attempted to reorient agencies towards results by setting customer service standards and negotiating performance agreements with them. Working with Congress, the administration codified this approach in the Government Performance and Results Act of 1993, which it then invested significant effort into implementing. As part of this effort, the administration made the bonuses of members of the Senior Executive Service — the top government managers — depend upon hitting the law’s targets, as well as upon improving public and employee satisfaction.

Tying bonuses to Performance and Results Act goals had been intended to get agencies invested in the law’s success, and by the end of the Clinton administration it was fully implemented. Moreover, its implementation was continued and even expanded by the succeeding Bush administration, which went so far as to rearrange seats at meetings to move high-performing agencies closer to the president. Today, while SES bonuses are no longer necessarily tied strictly to agency performance targets, the Government Performance and Results Act is well established. The law, in turn, codified useful new tools for presidential management and congressional oversight — so it lasted.

Government downsizing

A final personnel initiative was, famously, reducing the federal workforce. The elimination of 426,000 positions — mainly in back-office roles such as procurement — was intended to lock in flexibility by eliminating the staff viewed as imposing burdensome procedures. This measure was controversial, with internal disagreement about whether publicly committing to workforce downsizing would capture the public imagination or prove to be a damaging gimmick. It all might have gone differently: David Osborne told me that Gore made the final call after more than 24 hours without sleep. He decided in favor of downsizing. The main report accordingly called for slashing hundreds of thousands of jobs.

To accomplish this, the administration established the President’s Management Council, in which the deputy heads of agencies jointly set managerial priorities and shared best practices. This council’s first major task was implementing the job cuts. The deputy directors discussed best practices for identifying redundant positions and shared progress updates. They then used their knowledge for congressional outreach and, as the council’s first public initiative, won legislative approval for workforce reductions.

These workforce reductions were accomplished mainly through voluntary buyouts: Employees would be paid a bonus to resign, which they would repay if they accepted federal employment again. Congress granted the authority for these buyouts in three statutes from 1994 to 1996. The great majority of workforce reduction was accomplished via these buyouts (and ordinary attrition), with merely 25,000 employees being laid off.

Although the cuts were intended to lock in Reinventing Government’s flexibility reforms by eliminating the central bureaucracy that rigidity had wrought, they instead hollowed out the government’s capacity. In the short run, the downsizing eliminated the talent that agencies needed to capitalize on their newfound flexibility. The long-term consequences were much worse: In the succeeding Bush administration, the War on Terror demanded complex acquisition programs that the government could no longer competently handle, thereby empowering contractors at the expense of government.

This initiative ultimately was a double-edged sword. As commentators today note, the workforce reduction, despite being the signature initiative of Reinventing Government, was in many respects the least successful. And it was a lasting failure, because it was written into law in the buyout statutes. However, these commentators overlook the initiative’s underappreciated success: The President’s Management Council was continued by succeeding administrations and played a major role in improving management. Ironically, the machinery created to implement the layoffs was more successful than the layoffs themselves, which never led to the intended cultural changes. Institutionalized change was what lasted.

Reform in the eras of grunge and DOGE

On the whole, these four personnel initiatives gave the U.S. a hard-charging bureaucracy during the Clinton administration. They shared a common mindset: that inspirational leadership and the removal of perceived obstacles would lead to lasting cultural change. But these hopes were dashed. By contrast, institutional changes —new laws, new regulations, new organizations, and yes, new vacuums of capacity—were Reinventing Government’s lasting impact.

This history should inform the work of reformers who once again aim to reshape the bureaucracy. DOGE, unlike Reinventing Government, is focused on spending and personnel cuts above all else. It should nonetheless heed the lessons of the Clinton years. DOGE is similarly unlikely to change the bureaucracy’s culture through its personnel cuts (which, unlike with Reinventing Government, have not even been written into law). Instead, lasting impact will require new laws and regulations, and a commitment to implementing them well. The Trump administration has, for instance, issued personnel reforms that attracted bipartisan praise, and is rewriting government acquisition procedure. However, experience suggests that unless agencies are compelled to use this improved procedure, these reforms will go nowhere. DOGE and any successors will only defeat the bureaucracy by embracing bureaucracy.

Today, with decades of hindsight, Reinventing Government shows that far-reaching change is possible, but it is only achieved by examining the guts of bureaucracy. So why didn’t Clinton’s reformers focus more on institutions? In a sense, they did; had Gore won the narrow 2000 election, a further eight years of reinvention might have led to these reforms taking root. As it happened, under the Bush administration, the War on Terror led to totally new priorities for the bureaucracy, causing reform efforts to be abandoned that might otherwise have continued. If history had gone differently, their approach might have succeeded institutionally.

But this qualified defense doesn’t change a basic truth: The very unpredictability of the future is one of the strongest arguments for locking down reforms. Even observers at the time criticized Reinventing Government’s disregard for institutions. Ultimately, the effort was a product of the 1990s — more comfortable with stories of corporate transformation than with government personnel manuals. And yet, it still led to reforms that help the government succeed today.

Looking back on the era of reform he inspired, David Osborne noted, “It was very much of the time.” But Reinventing Government’s influence endures because it sometimes rose above its time.

Kevin Hawickhorst is a Research Fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation.

Share

It’s the gag Americans of several generations grew up with: Wile E. Coyote hanging in midair, having chased his interminable enemy, the Road Runner, so fast that he doesn’t realize he’s run off a cliff. We watch him hang there as he realizes his predicament, and then plummets to his painful fate.

Since their debut in 1949, the pair have been locked in an endless battle waged with ACME Corporation anvils, pianos, explosives, and lots of falls. If there’s a moral kids are supposed to learn from these cartoons, it is perhaps that gravity always wins, eventually: Even a cartoon can’t outrun the laws of physics. No matter how hard Wile E. Coyote tries, he always seems to rubber-band back down to earth.

Over the last 20 years, Democrats have kept finding themselves in a similar predicament. They pass a major piece of legislation, and when the time comes to implement it in the real world, they wind up disappointed. Time and time again, they have found themselves out beyond the edge of the cliff, running really fast until they look down and physics kicks in: on Healthcare.gov, on the post-financial crisis stimulus, on the FAFSA student-aid form, on the Inflation Reduction Act, on the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, etc., they keep plummeting into the Looney Tunes canyon. At some point, Democrats have to ask themselves why this keeps happening and what can be done about it.

If Wile E. Coyote cartoons are really about the laws of physics, then these unfortunate episodes are about the laws of management. These laws – not immutable, but rather set by Congress and codified in the U.S. Code – determine how the government can hire people, buy things, budget for IT investments, etc. And, like the laws of physics, they define what’s possible for the government to achieve (or not). Much of the recent policy discourse about the Biden administration, for example, is really about these laws. For all their success in passing really large policy bills, the Biden team could not translate them into lasting wins because the rules on the books prevented the government from moving fast enough to matter.

But, unlike the immutable laws of physics, Americans can change the laws of management by pushing Congress to pass a bill, asking the president to sign it, and implementing it zealously. So why don’t they try? Why did neither the Obama nor the Biden administrations even ask Congress to make their lives easier when they were trying to implement the CHIPS Act or the Affordable Care Act?

Because, as the Democratic Party has increasingly been defined by managerialism, Democrats have convinced themselves that they are able to outsmart the systems they operate in, or “hack the bureaucracy.” That they – unlike their myopic neocon predecessors or vulgar Trumpist opponents – were capable of managing the place so well that changing the laws was a luxury rather than a necessity. That if they just deployed their considerable human capital advantage to address hard problems – like bringing in civically-minded digital experts and sprinkling them across the government – they didn’t need to bother with the slow, frustrating, uncertain, unsatisfying political process of changing laws about how the government does its business. That if Democrats just implement really hard they can hit escape velocity to defeat the laws of gravity.

Democrats need to start approaching governing with a level of humility about what management alone can accomplish. This means acknowledging an uncomfortable truth: no matter how smart, dedicated, and well-intentioned Democratic appointees are, they cannot consistently overcome the laws of physics through superior execution alone. They have to change the rules of the game by actually wielding political power and changing the law.

The disappearance of Democratic reformism

For much of American history, managing the executive branch was a joint effort between Congress and the President. When government systems broke down or proved inadequate, the response wasn’t just to try harder, it was to troubleshoot the system.

Take, for instance, the federal government’s personnel system, which is the result of a long-running debate dating to the very first Congress. For the first 150 years of the republic, Congress and the president tinkered with a variety of systems to balance political, pay equity, practical, and market concerns. In 1789, Congress rigidly defined the salaries of each role. In 1795, legislators started granting Cabinet secretaries flexibility. In 1818, they took that flexibility back before ultimately re-granting it in 1830. In 1853, they created the first government-wide salary system, and in 1923, they began differentiating by type of work. Along the way, both the executive and the legislative branches wrote a dizzying number of reports with various diagnoses, recommendations, and arguments about what the government ought to do: in 1836, 1838, 1842, 1871, 1887, 1902, 1907, and 1931, to name just a few. The familiar 15-grade General Schedule and accompanying rules have only been with us since 1949, when Harry Truman (a Democrat) signed them into law.

The tinkering habit continued well into the 20th century. When the personnel system started to show its post-war inadequacy, especially at senior levels, both Kennedy and Johnson (and, in fact, Eisenhower and Nixon, too) spent time trying to come up with proposals for a new system that would work for the type of executive management that many senior civil servants were now charged with. In late 1978, Jimmy Carter finally persuaded Congress to actually act on these proposals by making civil service reform a centerpiece of his domestic agenda, declaring to Congress in the 1978 State of the Union that “even the best organized Government will only be as effective as the people who carry out its policies. For this reason, I consider civil service reform to be absolutely vital.” This effort created the Senior Executive Service and the modern Office of Personnel Management and totally transformed the process for employee removal.

Carter had good reason to believe in the power of government reform, having come fresh off a similar effort in Georgia, where he dramatically reorganized and reformed the bureaucracy as governor from 1971-1975. In his second State of the State speech in 1972, he foreshadowed his 1978 State of the Union when he argued that large-scale government reform could enable reform to Georgia’s schools, prisons, colleges, tax code, etc.: “The truth is that we cannot solve these long existing problems either effectively or within our present tax laws without a well organized Executive Department.”

Bill Clinton, several years later, cut a very similar profile as the last Democrat to seriously prioritize this kind of structural reform. Like Carter, his immediate prior experience had been as a governor; in Arkansas, he had spent 11 years effectively leading one of the poorest states in the country. When he got to Washington, he set about attempting to “reinvent” the federal government and to make it “work better and cost less” through systematic changes to federal operations. While the effort had mixed results and some unintended consequences that weakened long-term state capacity, Clinton at least recognized that institutional change was required and tried working with Congress to that end.

But something shifted after Clinton. Barack Obama came to office fresh out of the Senate and with perhaps the most talented technocratic policy team in modern Democratic history. Yet, unlike his predecessors, he made virtually no effort to work with Congress on government reform, preferring to stress executive action. Despite facing implementation challenges on everything from the stimulus to healthcare, the Obama administration’s instinct was always to manage harder and create ever-more czarships, but not to change the underlying constraints. The same pattern repeated under Joe Biden: a former senator, surrounded by smart people, pushed through well-designed policies, yet paired those efforts with (at best) deprioritization and (at worst) disinterest in the structural reforms that would make implementation of those policies easier.

Some will argue that this is due not to disinterest but congressional dysfunction that would make changes to the law impossible. Surely, some of this is Congress’ (and self-admittedly Mitch McConnell’s) fault. But as former legislators, both Obama and Biden were able to tame congressional coalitional politics enough to pass large, complicated, and high-impact laws like the ACA or the infrastructure law by making them a central part of their agendas. However, neither president seemed to see reform as the necessary precondition of effective government that it turned out to be. To be sure, both administrations continued the tradition of releasing President’s Management Agendas that started under the George W. Bush Administration, but those focused primarily on marginal management strategies rather than structural reform. In 2010, the Obama team did pass a bill on management reform. But the Government Performance and Results Act Modernization Act’s title was revealing: It primarily updated the complicated, familiar-to-consultants system of performance measurement and goal-setting procedures established under the Bush administration rather than making material changes to how agencies did their work.

The Obama-Biden years thus represent a fundamental break with Democratic tradition. Where previous Democratic presidents saw institutional reform as essential to their policy success, recent administrations have treated it as either an afterthought or an impossibility, as something that could or needed to be handled through superior execution rather than legislative change.

The rise of liberal managerialism

This shift didn’t happen in a vacuum. Educational polarization is now perhaps one of the most well-documented and argued-over trends in politics. According to Pew, in 1994, Republicans had a 10-point advantage among registered voters with a college degree and by 2023, that group had flipped to favor the Democrats by 13 points.

This shift changed how the Democratic Party approached its work. As Jia Lynn Yang recently argued in the New York Times:

Soon the need for moral integrity and technical mastery to run a complex government became not just a mode for governing but also ends in themselves. Beginning in the 1970s, a new generation of Democratic leaders arrived to tout these values to voters, more so than their Republican rivals. Experience in gnarly hand-to-hand political combat was fading out. Expertise, ideally honed at an elite university, was in.

However, while most of the ink spilled on this shift has been about its impact on Democratic electoral outcomes, comparatively little has been said about its impact on the party’s approach to governing outcomes.

The technocrats that increasingly serve as the primary labor pool for Democratic political operations (i.e., highly-educated lawyers, management consultants, and non-profit professionals) have specific worldviews honed by their training and prior experience. In particular, they exhibit what Megan Stevenson succinctly describes as the engineer’s view, which “presumes [that the world adheres to] a mechanistic structure that can be predictably manipulated to achieve social goals.” In this view, deft operation of the levers of power is all that is required to bring about social change, rather than large-scale overhauls of systems. One sees it reflected in the public policy master’s programs that produce many of these people: core curricula are dominated by statistics and microeconomics classes to support elegant policy design. Legislators, too, are attracted to this type of thinking because it follows that incrementally better legislative language will allow them to deliver on their promises.

It’s no surprise, then, that the party dominated by technocrats embraced Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler’s work on “nudges” in 2008, with President Obama eventually appointing Sunstein as head of the powerful Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, which oversees regulations and form design for the federal government under the promise to bring a keen behavioral scientist’s approach to governing. Similarly, in 2014, after the catastrophic implosion of Healthcare.gov, this same impulse led the White House to create the U.S. Digital Service under the assumption that rotating deployments of highly-capable management professionals (this time, technologists) would also address these problems – something of a “nudge” for the bureaucracy to guard against future blow-ups.

The Biden team took this approach and put its own spin on it. In their political and staffing strategy, they attempted to make progress on as many discrete, individually-highly-polling priorities as possible to deliver for various parts of the coalition. This ‘deliverism,’ plausible in the manager’s mechanical worldview, rested on a “presumption of a linear and direct relationship between economic policy and people’s political allegiances.” This approach created awkward tradeoffs – for example, the tension between both wanting to usher in a new era of clean infrastructure investment while also rigidly enforcing domestic sourcing requirements – and left management to clean up the mess on its own. Rather than acknowledging that there are tradeoffs in governing, the president insisted that superior execution could overcome them, arguing that “[t]hey’re all important ... We oughta be able to walk and chew gum at the same time.” But actually, it turns out that walking and chewing gum at the same time is really, really hard and sometimes you faceplant. This, in turn, sank the entire agenda at the ballot box both because it meant many agencies failed to implement their big goals and because voters didn’t connect with this status-report approach to government of “ticking down the issues as opposed to having a theory.”

Twenty years into this turn, it is time to start thinking more critically about whether re-running the same play will work again after Democrats failed to outrun gravity again and again. Both USDS’ founders and behavioral economists eventually came to find that the problems they were addressing in the 2010s were more fundamental than managerial. Democrats would do well to learn from their reflections.

The closing of the conservative mind

Democrats are mulling their failures at the same time as they watch a president ignore countless rules to impose his will. While the mainstream of the party still believes that core liberal norms are both a moral imperative and a differentiating advantage with the public, some voices are calling on Democrats to similarly test the limits next time they take power – to mimic the MAGA and tech-right model and “just do things.” Constitutional and philosophical concerns aside, this strategy would be unlikely to succeed as a matter of governance; early indications are that it isn’t working well for the Trump administration, either.

Increasingly, the MAGA right has decided it prefers illiberal domination to the hard work of institutional reform. When they have dipped their toes into reforming the operating model of government, they’ve chosen largely to waste their time on performative culture-war gestures like banning paper straws or implementing partisan loyalty tests. And as the GOP has moved away from traditional conservative policy expertise toward populist performance, many of the wonks and policy professionals who might have provided alternatives to Democratic approaches have either left politics entirely or switched sides. This exodus accelerated during the Trump era, when certain factions discovered they could gain more from attacking expertise itself than from demonstrating mastery of complex issues.

The “brain drain” from the Republican Party is well-attested to and increasingly obvious to outside observers, and in some ways, it has made conservatives as path-dependent as Democrats. In a recent interview with Ross Douthat, anti-DEI crusader Chris Rufo admitted that conservatives’ human capital problem had gotten so bad that they “cannot fully staff the Department of Education” and therefore had to dismantle it to accomplish any of their policy goals. This incapacity – the Department of Education is by far the smallest cabinet-level agency with only about 4,200 total staff – has led the MAGA movement to eschew the pursuit of structural changes to make government work better in favor of turning the “move fast and break things” Silicon Valley mantra into a governing strategy, aiming to bypass legal and democratic constraints entirely rather than reform them.

To be sure, the MAGA movement can combine the conservative preference for domination with bureaucratic efficacy on its top priorities. This combination is most visible in figures like Russ Vought, the OMB director mythologized for his bureaucratic acumen. But normative concerns aside, even Vought’s signature issue concedes a fundamental limit of the “just do things” strategy: His exotic ideas about impoundment merely expand the president’s ability to decline to do things. The conservative strategy is inherently destructive—it can tear down existing systems but struggles to build anything lasting in their place. Even the signature project for which the administration did get congressional approval, the construction of a $170 billion deportation machine, is off to a shaky start, given the trouble the administration has run into with the courts and public opinion.

Rather than following Republicans through the looking glass, Democrats should embrace the only alternative: working with Congress to actually change the system.

You can just do (effective) things (with Congress)

For all the retrospectives on the Biden administration that focus on the negatives, there was (in fact) a huge policy bill that avoided falling into the cartoon canyon.

When legislators crafted the Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics (PACT) Act of 2022 to provide healthcare and benefits to veterans exposed to burn pits and other toxins, they recognized that the Department of Veterans Affairs would need fundamentally different capabilities to handle a massive influx of new claims and provide expanded healthcare services. So, they gave the VA new authorities: streamlining hiring procedures for medical professionals, investing in IT and HR staff to handle the crush of onboarding, expanding contracting flexibility for healthcare services, and simplifying the benefit determination processes for toxic exposure claims. This came also on the heels of Congress moving in 2011 to a two-year advanced appropriations cycle for large portions of VA activities, freeing the agency from the tyranny of constant shutdowns caused by Congress’ own inability to legislate. In other words, they made the structural reforms necessary to enable effective implementation.

The results speak for themselves. While other major federal initiatives have struggled with implementation, the PACT Act has been rolling out with remarkable success. Between September 2022 and the end of 2024, VA hired over 45,000 new staff on net, growing its workforce by about 10 percent in just two years. While no major implementation is free from challenges, in general veterans are getting care, claims are being processed, and the system is scaling up to meet demand. This didn’t happen just because the VA suddenly got better at managing within existing constraints (although the dizzying speed with which the quality of management at VA has improved over the last decade under both Republican and Democratic leadership is notable); it happened because Congress changed the constraints.

This is just an example of what is possible when policymakers think systemically about implementation challenges rather than just hoping that good intentions and hard work will overcome structural obstacles. It shows that the choice isn’t between ambitious policy goals and practical implementation, but rather that it’s between doing the political work of institutional reform and accepting repeated failure. In VA’s case, it was particularly fortunate to have had an uncommonly-seasoned leader in Denis McDonough who had personally learned hard lessons about implementation failure with Healthcare.gov and deftly anticipated issues with enough time to influence the bill this time around.

But one successful example doesn’t mean that Washington has cracked the code. Part of the reason that the PACT Act worked was because it had a discrete, well-defined problem where the implementation challenges were obvious, leadership was exceptionally experienced, and the bipartisan constituency demanding results was powerful. Most Democratic policy priorities don’t have these advantages. Climate action, healthcare reform, infrastructure investment—these require sustained implementation across multiple agencies over many years, exactly the kind of complex execution that the current system handles poorly. There are too many forces that act on any one program for management to outrun them all.

The bill is coming due

Consider this highly plausible scenario: It’s 2028, and there’s a new Democratic candidate shaping an agenda. Political strategists are mapping out the first 100 days, and someone raises the question of government reform legislation. “Well,” comes the inevitable response, “the candidate has lots of other priorities, and voters don’t really care about federal operations. They want action on healthcare, climate, and the economy. Can we manage for a couple years without burning political capital on bureaucratic reform?”

The answer has to be no. If they neglect government reform again, Democrats will fail and it will be their fault. This kind of thinking is exactly what has trapped Democrats in the Wile E. Coyote pattern. Every Democratic administration tells itself it can manage around broken systems long enough to achieve its policy goals, and every Democratic administration discovers too late that the systems shape the outcomes more than the managers do – that “there’s no such thing as shovel-ready projects.”

If your after-action report on BIL implementation or IRA deployment doesn’t include recommendations for structural, government-wide changes to federal hiring, procurement, or budgeting systems that go beyond executive action, you’re missing the real lesson. Any serious, forward-looking policy agenda must insist on government reform as an unavoidable and non-negotiable first step, including:

• Reforming the civil service so that it is simpler to administer, faster to deploy, and more competitive in the labor market. The entire system is an outgrowth of an industrial-age approach to management and needs to be replaced wholesale, not just tinkered with at the edges;

• Reducing administrative procedure that binds government more excessively than industry and puts publicly-sponsored enterprise at a structural disadvantage. Helping people is hard enough without having to comply with increasingly onerous rules on things like public comment and procurement that add lots of time and little value;

• Taking back control from contractors and vendors, that is, investing in internal capacity first before turning to a services and technology industrial base that is too often incentivized to keep the government broken. The government doesn’t need to do everything itself, but it needs to close the sophistication gap with industry to ensure it can actually manage vendors; and

• Fixing the broken appropriations process that denies both Congress and presidents the ability to make deliberate choices, instead favoring arbitrary adjustments to continuing resolutions. Complicated budget scoring and procedural arcana haven’t stopped yawning deficits, but they have made the process so cumbersome and unintuitive that agencies and Congress have given up.

If this seems hard, that’s because it is. But, the good news is that it’s been done before. Throughout American history there are windows that open and allow for transformative legislative session progress. The last two were in the postwar 1940s and throughout the 1970s, a decade of remarkable productivity both before and after Watergate. Americans are still living today in the world built by Congress in those years. However, just as companies build up “technical debt” by putting off upgrades to their systems for years, the government has built up significant “policy debt” by refusing to make these updates to its operating model while the system decayed.

Now the bill is coming due.

Fixing things, though, requires engaging with the political process that Democrats have increasingly tried to avoid. Congressional politics are indeed awful. They’re slow, frustrating, often irrational, and almost always unsatisfying. But they’re also the only way to change the underlying rules that govern how the federal government operates. You can’t avoid Congress forever and Democrats who think they can are deluding themselves. While it’s true that conservative legal theorists and the Supreme Court continue to grant new powers to the President, Democrats must understand that these are asymmetric tools not fit for their purposes: they can break but they cannot build. Prioritizing government reform may be politically or personally painful for committed partisans, but it’s the only way to prevent greater pain later.

If Democrats don’t internalize and act on this lesson now, the next Democratic president, whoever and whenever that is, will find themselves in the exact same situation as their predecessors and as Wile E. Coyote: running fast in midair off the side of the cliff, feeling like they’re making progress right up until they look down and realize they’re in free fall.

Wile E. Coyote never learns his lesson, but that doesn’t mean Democrats can’t now. The cartoon physics of American politics may be absurd, but unlike actual physics, Congress has the power to change them. The question is whether anyone has the guts to try.

Gabe Menchaca is a Senior Policy Analyst at the Niskanen Center and, among many other things, is a former management staffer at the Office of Management and Budget and former management consultant. At Niskanen, he writes about civil service reform, the state capacity crisis, and other government management issues.

Share