We’re back after a brief hiatus.
Since the last episode, I had my second child, and changed jobs. After three years running the editorial team of the Institute for Progress (IFP), I’ve joined the editorial team at Anthropic, the frontier AI lab. Not to worry: I’m staying on at IFP as a non-resident senior fellow, and Statecraft will continue as an IFP project.
On today’s episode, we’re continuing a conversation about presidential power that we broached a couple of weeks ago on Statecraft, in an essay titled, “What Trump Can Learn From Nixon.” It was about the attempts, in Richard Nixon‘s 1.5 presidential terms, to build what observers called the “administrative presidency” — a presidency that actually, fully controlled the administrative state.
My guests today have thought very deeply about presidential attempts to control the administrative state. William Howell and Terry Moe are co-authors of a book called, Trajectory of Power: The Rise of the Strongman Presidency. They’re both political scientists. Terry is a professor of political science at Stanford, and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. Will is the Dean of the School of Government and Policy at Johns Hopkins University. There’s a fair amount of disagreement in this conversation, and I hope the result is pretty entertaining, and hopefully enlightening.
I should give two disclaimers. I’m currently affiliated as a journalist in residence with the School of Government and Policy at Johns Hopkins, of which Will is the Dean. Before I was under Will’s thumb in that way, I was an undergraduate student in his class, called “The American Presidency,” at The University of Chicago. You could say the shadow of Will Howell has loomed over my career.
Thanks to Harry Fletcher-Wood, Shadrach Strehle, and Jasper Placio for their support in producing this episode.
For a printable PDF of this interview, click here:
Terry, Will, what’s this book about?
Terry Moe: The United States faces a dire threat to its democracy. The tip of the spear is Donald Trump, and his strongman presidency. He governs aggressively, unilaterally, and with little respect for the traditions and norms of democracy, or the rule of law. How could this have happened, in the United States of all places? A place that has long been the beacon of democracy for the world, and which has a constitution filled with checks and balances — specifically designed to prevent exactly this kind of thing. Our book is an effort to explain the trajectory of presidential power throughout American history, with special attention to modern history, and to explain how that power has expanded recently to the point that, in the wrong hands, it’s capable of bringing democracy down.
Will Howell: In trying to make sense of how we got to this moment, the book looks back a fair way. Where the book picks up steam is in the Progressive period, when we’re looking at the rise of the administrative state. If you want to make sense of why we have the presidency today, you need to make sense of the extraordinary transformations in state-building that relate to the rise of the administrative state. It’s a locus of all kinds of activity, power, personnel, and authority. But it also sets in motion a set of politics — an organization and strategizing — that runs concurrent with what’s going on within the administrative state.
This is not a book that is simply offering a readout of all the things that Trump has done, and then reading insight into his psyche or ambition from the origin of those offenses. This is a story about state-building — the transformations of parties and the federal landscape — that plays out over many decades. The book is trying to stitch together a comprehensive story about how we ended up here, which long precedes Trump’s decision to run for the presidency.
Some readers will violently agree with your perspective on the danger Trump poses to democracy. Some will not. Will you briefly articulate how you are defining democracy in the context of this book, and the threat you think Trump poses?
Howell: In some ways, our definition is quite conventional. It recognizes the importance of free and fair elections, and checks and balances. There are two dimensions we also want to bring into view, that offer a thicker understanding about what democracy requires. One is the rule of law. It’s hard to imagine a flourishing democracy without it — so violations of the rule of law are violations of democracy. Another important piece is that you have institutions that can effectively govern — translating the broad ambitions and intent written into legislation into action. Democracies are not just debating societies. They also attend to wishes expressed by a polity. That depends upon well-functioning governing institutions. When you lay siege to such institutions, you imperil democracy itself.
We’ve been very interested on Statecraft in well-functioning institutions that deliver on their commitments. But I’ve never combined that in my view of democracy. Is a democracy that has lower state capacity less of a democracy?
Howell: If you have a government that is routinely incapable of solving problems the public wants to see solved, you are vulnerable to the entreaties of a demagogue who will step in and say, “The state, the parties, these small-d democratic institutions have failed you. I will be the one that delivers for you.” Persistent failure opens up space for a populist strongman to step in. This was the dominant theme of the second book Terry and I wrote, Presidents, Populism, and the Crisis of Democracy, wherein we talk about how ineffective government is vulnerable to the entreaties of a populist strongman that will not just challenge democracy, but transgress it.
Moe: If a democracy is going to be meaningful, it has to have a democratic policymaking process, and an administrative state that can carry out those policies. If you have a government that is tearing down the administrative state and undermining its capacity for effectiveness, you are undermining the meaning and effectiveness of democracy.
How should we picture the powers of the president before the Progressive Era?
Moe: To a large extent, we had congressional government. The parties were extremely strong from Andrew Jackson on, at all levels of government. Politicians were captives — products of those machines. Presidents weren’t above all that. It was a system that had almost no executive branch. The idea that the president would ride herd over all these agencies — that had programs, experts, and authority presidents could use to gain power — those things weren’t there.
What was not in existence in this period?
Moe: The government wasn’t doing all that much. Most of the employees of the federal government were mailmen. All the agencies you associate with the administrative state weren’t there, except for the Post Office, and a few things like that. The massive social upheaval at the end of the 1800s — industrialization, urbanization, immigration — transformed and disrupted American society, and led to demands for a government that worked and would do something — because all sorts of problems were being generated by an industrialized society.
People wanted solutions. How could you get that? You needed to have, “good government.” How could you get that? That’s where the Progressive movement came from. It was an effort to create a positive government that would address these pressing social problems. That’s how we got a presidency that was much more powerful. Teddy Roosevelt is the classic progressive president, then Woodrow Wilson.
Congress had been a cesspool of interest group influence and corruption. What they wanted was a bureaucracy that could carry out policies, be staffed with experts, and behave in a nonpartisan way — to do the scientifically objective thing and administer policy. Some of this was idealized, but that’s what modern government is about — having an administrative state filled with experts, hired on the basis of merit, who are capable of carrying out public policies, led by a president who has actual power. Not all power, but more power than in the past.
Howell: There’s a direct way in which this proliferation of agencies with all kinds of capacity, expertise, and personnel expands presidential power, because suddenly the presidency has access to capacity. When you look at the ambition behind a law — now we might be able to do something. From the word go, this administrative state is sitting within the second branch, and the president sits atop it.
Additionally, presidents can’t count on bureaucrats to do their bidding. Just because you have this expertise within these administrative agencies — how do you know they’re going to do the things that the president wants? From Franklin D. Roosevelt, even to Ronald Reagan, you see efforts by presidents from both parties to build out instruments of control, and strategies that will increase the odds that actions within all those far-flung agencies are aligned with the interests of the president.
One thing that was striking to me about The Plot that Failed, which I wrote about a couple of weeks ago — he’s a former Nixon appointee who talks a lot about the history of presidential frustration with the bureaucracy. You spend a lot of time on Reagan in your book, but the thread is the same. “The political executives preside over agencies which they never own and only rarely command,” is one report that’s given to Lyndon Johnson.
What are the tools that presidents in this period build to try and get control?
Howell: The two big categories are centralization and politicization. Centralization involves the effort to bring decision-making into closer proximity to the White House. You see the rise of the Executive Office of the President (EOP), and things like policy czars — so that the president can keep an eye on what’s being decided, and ensure it aligns with his policy preferences.
The other move is to appoint people whose policy preferences align with your own to oversee those agencies. You could see a tension between politicization and the expertise that justifies the rise of the modern administrative state. But the politicization is in the service of expanding presidential control.
Moe: The first thing that was created was the Executive Office of the President, under Roosevelt. That became the house to hold agencies created for the president to control the bureaucracy.
Before the Executive Office of the President — which is now 1,700 staff in the Eisenhower Building and the West Wing — who is making sure that what the president wants is happening?
Moe: This was all new. The progressives didn’t build much of an administrative state. It was the New Deal that exploded it. The EOP was created in 1939, right in the middle of this thing. It’s chaos. They’re creating this gigantic thing, filled with all these new agencies. How do you even think about controlling it? That was what they were up against.
What they eventually arrived at was: “We’re going to construct an Executive Office of the President, and we’re going to put stuff in there that allows the president to use little units to control the bureaucracy.” The first one they moved in was the Bureau of the Budget, which is now called the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). It used to be in the Treasury Department, created in 1921. It became a purely presidential agency. In addition, there’s now:
All these units are mechanisms of presidential control. You have the administrative state, but then you have the president with his own bureaucracy that works for him to control everything else.
One of the themes you articulate — matching closely what Richard P. Nathan observed in the Nixon administration — is that there are two different modes you can try and use to control a bureaucracy. One is centralization, bringing more things inside the White House apparatus and “riding herd,” on the agencies. Another is to staff the agencies with political appointees aligned in your way of thinking. Nathan spends a lot of time talking about how they can be at odds with each other.
I’m curious if you think there’s a tension between those two models of controlling a given cabinet agency.
Moe: I don’t think there is. They’ve been doing both for many decades. All the units I talked about — the Domestic Policy Council, the National Security Council — are set up with representatives from the bureaucracy, and with other presidential advisors on the council. They’re bringing in information, ideas, and expertise from the bureaucracy, so that decisions can be made in the EOP and not out there in the bureaucracy, where they don’t trust how they are going to get made. That’s how centralization worked — they’re sucking decision-making power into the Executive Office. Politicization is hiring loyalists, or people who think like you do, and putting them in the agencies. You get a lot of compliance just from that. There’s no reason why the two need to be in conflict.
Howell: They’re not foolproof though — they come with trade-offs. If you do too much centralization, you can import all the bureaucracy that sits elsewhere. You could imagine an Executive Office of the President with 500,000 people. What have you solved? You’ll need an EOP within the EOP. Politicization can come with some cost. When you appoint loyalists to a position, what you gain in control you may lose in expertise. The people who work within the agency may be less willing to make costly investments in expertise, which may degrade its performance. That’s a trade-off that presidents routinely confront.
For decades, presidents of both parties were trying to build out this institutional presidency — to leverage these mechanisms of control so they could direct the administrative state towards purposes that align with their own policy preferences. That’s a story that is well understood. Where we break ground with this book is in recognizing some other features of the administrative state, namely its liberal character, which sets in motion some important political dynamics.
I want to stay on this tension between different ways of managing the bureaucracy. I had an interview with Russ Vought, the head of the OMB in the fall of 2024, after his stint in Trump 1 — he’s now back in that role. He presented two different ways the conservative movement has thought about managing the executive branch. He mentioned Don Devine, who once ran the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), as one who wanted to lean on political appointees out at the agencies, and the management of those agencies would happen between the president and his circle, and his people at the agencies.
Vought disagrees with that view. He says, “OMB career staff have to make sure that you’re moving in the right direction, because cabinet officials are often on the road, and the deputies who manage the shop don’t have the ability to ride herd.” There’s an example of somebody who thinks there’s only so much you can trust a secretary to do for you to control the administrative state.
I’m curious what you think of that view.
Moe: That’s the whole reason for having loyalists, the people who will do whatever you want. Russ Vought is all about having bureaucrats do exactly what he wants.
But he doesn’t think you can get it purely by political appointees at the agencies.
Howell: His push right now is to massively increase the number of political appointees. We didn’t hear your interview with him, but one way to understand what he’s saying is that the level of politicization that we have observed is insufficient to the task at hand. The big push under Project 2025 is to massively increase the number of appointees, so that you have watchful eyes by a loyalist over every subordinate.
Presidents have a problem. They want to direct agencies in ways that will align with their preferences. Those agencies have missions and obligations that are written into law. Another move that Russ Vought makes is to say, “Those missions don’t matter a lick. The only thing that matters is whatever the president’s desires are.” All of the capacity that sits in the administrative state is meant to be deployed as the president sees fit. That’s problematic when you think about the health of a well-functioning administrative state that is not just attending to generic purposes. It’s meant to attend to things that Congress has written down.
Maybe that’s a good chance for us to talk about those other two branches. From your perspective, Congress was once the keeper of the keys. Probably the most uncontroversial thing you could say here is that Congress does not play an especially powerful decisional role today, relative to almost any other time in its history.
What happened to the checks and the “ambition against ambition” there for Congress?
Moe: Two things happened. One is that polarization essentially made Congress irrelevant most of the time, because it is dead in the water. There are so many veto points and factions that you can’t get Congress to make important decisions, or stand up for its own interests and rights as an institution.
The second thing is presidential power. There’s this hugely important development in American history, where conservatives pivot, and embrace a presidency of extraordinary power as their key to retrenching the administrative state. They had always been in favor of a weak government. During the 1970s, when conservatism was gaining much more power, conservatives came to see, “We can’t get anything through Congress, and it’s mainly controlled by Democrats. We can’t rely on the courts to cut back on the administrative state. We need to rely on a president who has so much control over the executive branch that he can wield unilateral power in sabotaging and retrenching these agencies from above.” That was the beginning of what became the unitary executive theory under Ronald Reagan, providing a legal rationale for exactly that brand of expansive, dangerous presidential power. It’s that, along with some other social developments, that has led to the strongman presidency of Donald Trump.
Howell: The strongman presidency of Donald Trump that Congress struggles mightily to do much of anything about. That unitary executive theory is not one that invites congressional participation in the oversight of the administrative state. It decidedly excludes Congress. The thing that the Founders got wrong was an enduring belief that those who sit within a branch of government will be faithful stewards of that branch. That they will act as members of Congress and stand up against any assaults on their independent authority. They do not. When you see the rise of strongman power, you see it also displacing the first branch.
Let’s talk about the judicial system then, and in particular the Supreme Court. I’m curious how you read it. I’ll put my cards on the table and say I roughly share the view that Sarah Isgur voiced on the Ross Douthat Podcast — that the Supreme Court has retained a lot of its power, and been a firewall against many of Trump’s most aggressive moves.
You can name the tariff case recently, or the Lisa Cook Federal Reserve firing case, or even some cases that were not brought to the Supreme Court, perhaps because the administration had a sense that things would not fare well. Last summer, everybody I talked to in DC had this expectation that there would be an impoundment case brought to the court — that the president would try and exert more authority over how he could spend or not spend money. That did not happen. One suspects that was because of the realization that things would not go well in front of this court.
Howell: We have a president who is slashing congressionally-appropriated funds left and right. The question is, will you see the third branch of government stepping in and saying, “I’m going to put an end to that”? The answer is no. They’re silent on that particular matter, which is a matter of incredible import when you think about the exercise of power and the doings of government. It’s not exactly a point in favor of a third branch of government that is standing coequal with the second and checking it.
I might push back on that. The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is probably the most salient example of the executive branch trying to slash congressionally-appropriated funding. In March of last year, the Supreme Court refused to block a lower-court order that required the administration to release funds. You can take issue with the way those funds have been appropriated, and the new dispensation. But after that illegal pause in slashing funding, the courts — not an especially visible action, but they forced that disbursement. There was a pause in National Science Foundation (NSF) funding early in the administration. The courts did a similar move, and now you see funding more or less back on schedule.
You can argue about the magnitudes, but my impression is that the courts have not been silent on the funding question.
Moe: We need to go back to square one. This is a very conservative, unitary executive Supreme Court. They believe the Constitution requires and justifies a vast expansion of unilateral presidential power. There have been exceptions in some of their decisions. The tariff case is the one that stands out. But look at the immunity case. That is the most dangerous decision the Supreme Court has made vis-à-vis democracy in its entire history. It is an open door for presidents to commit as many crimes as they want in office, and be held completely unaccountable forever. That’s what Donald Trump is doing now. He’s making a fortune off crypto and everything else. He’s a criminal in office, and what can happen to him? Nothing. He knows that. Furthermore, everybody that’s involved with him can be pardoned. They know that.
The Supreme Court — they’re not dumb. They believe that expansive presidential power is justified by the Constitution. In many of these cases where it comes to the Supreme Court: “Does this lower-court case need to be reversed?” The Supreme Court has allowed the Trump administration to continue doing what it’s doing, however destructive it is, and let the issue play out in the lower courts.
What does that mean? If the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has been destroyed, the Education Department has been completely taken apart, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been disemboweled, but these things are allowed to play out in the courts — it means they’re being destroyed, and you can’t put Humpty Dumpty back together again. Once something is destroyed, it’s going to stay destroyed for a long time. The Supreme Court knows that.
What you would expect they would do, by tradition, with these emergency orders is maintain the status quo. If the Trump administration is destroying an agency, you’d think the Supreme Court would say, “You can’t destroy an agency. Let’s play this out in court,” and wait for a decision on the merits. But they don’t do that. They say, “The destruction can continue, then a year or two later, we’ll make a decision.” That’s too late. They know that. What they’re doing is letting Trump exercise presidential power at the extreme, and it’s only in a few marginal cases where they’ve said no.
The birthright citizenship case has not come down yet, but I expect the president to lose badly there. Many of these do not seem marginal to me: the tariff case, some of the decisions forcing the disbursement of funding that the administration insisted it would not fund, or the Abrego Garcia return — they seem like real constraints.
Howell: But there are also such fantastic claims about presidential power. Take birthright citizenship. It’s unbelievable that you have somebody arguing, “I’m going to unilaterally do away with what is broadly understood as established policy and is entirely consistent with the Constitution” — the belief that if you’re born in the States, you’re a citizen, full stop. The fact that he would say that, and then the court would say, “Too far, you can’t do that,” isn’t evidence of a bold Supreme Court that’s keeping pace with the president and ensuring that he’s operating well within democratic boundaries.
There’s probably some zone of agreement here. The president will justifiably lose on the birthright citizenship question.
Howell: We need to underscore the driving force behind the conservative arguments on behalf of a vastly more powerful presidency. We talked earlier about the expansion of the administrative state, and how that set in motion a more powerful presidency. But it’s taken to altogether new heights when you bring into view that significant portions of that administrative state were built by big-D Democrats in order to serve Democratic purposes. They are progressive in their orientation.
You have a nice line in the book, where you say, aside from the defense and foreign policy sector, broadly the administrative state is, “Almost wholly an embodiment of progressive values.”
Howell: Those progressive values are embedded in administration and attend to the work, regardless of who the president is. If you sit on the left of the political spectrum and you look out at that administrative state, you say, “Maybe not as efficiently as I would like, maybe not getting exactly the policy I would like, I would like to increase my control — but I’m basically okay with how things are going.” If you sit on the right of the political spectrum, you look upon administrative structures with a deep abhorrence.
As a consequence, they had a political problem on the right that they didn’t have on the left. On the left, it was, “How do we increase control?” Significant portions of the conservative right would like to wholly extricate these progressive components of the administrative state from the constitutional order. They would like to do away with them. The problem is that it’s very hard to unwind those activities and those administrative gains through the legislative process. Having created an agency legislatively, if you want to make it go away, you pass a new law. It’s very hard to do. You lack the votes.
What conservatives settled on in the ‘70s is that, rather than looking to Congress or the courts, they said, “We’re going to build a presidency of extraordinary power.” That’s the origin of the unitary executive theory. This is not about folks on the right saying, “Let’s reread Article II over pizza and talk about what it means.” They had a problem in the ‘80s, which they needed to solve, which is how to retrench the progressive components of the administrative state. A vastly more powerful presidency is the way to do so.
Can I ask you for a little more on the genealogy there? I’ve always had this instinct, and some of the interlocutors you guys have had since publication, folks like Adam White, would also flag that there was a parallel instinct to look to the courts to do what Congress couldn’t. You could see these recent rulings, like Loper Bright, that at long last, for the conservative movement, have restrained the power of the agencies.
The conservative movement in the ‘70s says, “Congress can’t do what we want it to do, and we’ll look to both of the other branches.” Would you agree with that?
Moe: That’s what the Supreme Court is doing, and they did it in the Loper Bright decision to overturn Chevron. The point of that was to say, “We’re not going to defer to agencies anymore. We’re going to judge what they’re doing.” They think the agencies are doing too much: that they’re engaging in overreach, and going beyond their legislative mandates. For instance, when the EPA pursues climate change, that’s an overreach.
What the Supreme Court wants to do is step in and say, “You can’t do that.” This is a way that the court system, through the Supreme Court, can retrench the administrative state. The Supreme Court is supporting the conservative presidential agenda in its approach to bureaucracy and taking down Chevron. They’re doing what presidents would do if they could. Also in adopting the major questions doctrine — they’re going to say, “You’re engaging in overreach.”
The courts are very much part of this, and they weren’t in the past, because there weren’t very many conservative judges, and because this whole conservative jurisprudence didn’t exist. It began during the 1980s, mainly because of the efforts of Ed Meese, who was Reagan’s second attorney general. He took it upon himself to go out and popularize among conservatives — among the new Federalist Society and these other organizations that were trying to build networks; Steve Teles has written all about this. Meese was the one who went out and started talking about originalism. Originalism was nothing at that point. Robert Bork had introduced it in 1971. This thing was not going anywhere, and there weren’t very many judges who adhered to it. Meese went out and talked about it, got it in the newspapers, started fights, and got conservatives thinking, “This is our thing.”
At about the same time, the unitary executive theory was developed by Meese’s people in the Justice Department. This was the beginning of a conservative jurisprudence that would provide the legal justification for a presidency of extraordinary power. Nixon didn’t have any conservative jurisprudence. All he said was, “I want to do these things,” and he did them. It was chaotic. It was like, “We don’t want activist judges. We want law and order.” That was about the sum total of it. It was during the Reagan years that you really got a conservative jurisprudence, and with the appointment of all these conservative judges. Populating Republican administrations with Federalist Society people, you get people who think the same about originalism and unitary executive theory. That’s why it’s now really dominant among conservative thinkers and Republican administrations.
Where was the administrative state in 2015? Was it healthy?
Howell: To say that it was filled with expertise, capacity, and resources, isn’t to say that it’s fulfilling a set of ends as well as it might. There’s clear reason for deep critique. This asymmetry that defines Democratic and Republican presidents is worth underscoring here though. President Clinton and Vice President Gore undertake a concerted effort to modernize the administrative state. That effort yielded mixed results [Statecraft discussed the National Partnership for Reinventing Government with John Kamensky]. That’s not the posture on the right, which is not, “How do I improve the effectiveness of these dominant progressive agencies?” It’s a story about retrenchment and sabotage: “How do I keep them from being able to perform anything especially well?” To recognize that fact is not to say that the administrative state is performing especially well, or that there aren’t pathologies within it that need correcting. But it is to say that they sit in a very different relationship to those dominant progressive components of the administrative state, which lead them to engage in very different activities as they try to, on one hand, improve as best one can; on the other, sabotage and undermine it.
Moe: Do Republicans want the EPA to be more effective at carrying out its legal mandate? Absolutely not. They hate the EPA. They wish there wasn’t an EPA. Do they want the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to be more effective at regulating banks? No, they hate that agency. They wanted it to go away. All this business about, “We want to make government more effective” — that’s not what they want at all. They’re opposed to these agencies.
I do agree with William 100% that these agencies have not performed as well as we would like. You can point to problems with Medicare, Medicaid, and most of these agencies. They’re inefficient, they spend too much money, there’s fraud. But take those agencies away and millions of people will be hurt. The people want those agencies. They love what those agencies are trying to do. The solution is to try to make them better, and that’s not what Republicans are up to.
The second thing is that these agencies were created by the rule of law. If you want to make the EPA more effective, good for you. But it has a legal mandate to address the nation’s pollution problems, and you can’t transform that agency, sabotage it so that it doesn’t do that — that should be a violation of the law. What Republicans see is that the law is an obstacle. They cannot adhere to the rule of law because if they do, the EPA is going to go out there and address pollution problems. You can see it all over the place, in the way Republicans approach policy decisions and the administrative state. They are constantly violating the rule of law, in order to get where they want to go.
I think we could spend a long time arguing about the intentions of Republicans, so I’m going to save that for maybe a later date. I do have a question for you on the history. There has been a lot of destruction of the civil service in the Trump era, which I’ve written about. But I would argue that many of the constraints — the maybe unintended sabotage — on the administrative state has been the result of a lot of grassroots movements that have been either nonpartisan or impositions from the left. You can see this in Marc Dunkelman‘s book, Why Nothing Works, or the work of Nick Bagley (who has been on Statecraft three times, most recently to discuss judicial review), about the constraints placed on agencies and bureaucrats, and in books like Public Citizens. Surely there’s a tradition, at least in the last 50 years, of finding new legal tools citizens can use to slow down the work of administrative agencies.
Howell: Ground zero for the abundance movement is to recognize all the ways that administrative agencies are tied up in knots, especially in left-leaning states and cities — that they just can’t get anything done.
And in ways that root back to the late ‘60s and early ‘70s.
Howell: Agreed. To say that attack comes from the right, in an effort to use the powers of the presidency to sabotage these agencies, isn’t to say that every pathology and every abject failure of the administrative state sits exclusively by conservative design. The excesses of proceduralism are a real thing. What we’re trying to do here is think about the rise of a strongman presidency and its threat to the rule of law and democracy. There’s a decided partisan asymmetry that we have to grapple with.
Will and Terry, you are both teachers of the youth. What would you have us do?
Howell: We don’t end with, “Take these three steps and we’ll be free and clear.” The book tries to take stock of the long history, the powerful forces at work, the strategizing, and the partisan shifts — we didn’t talk much about the rise of populism — in order to get clarity about what we’re up against. It is not something that’s going to be fixed with a single election, or the replacement of one president. If what you want to do is get into the business of democratic renewal, you had better have your sights set on the intermediate and long term. There’s not a single move to be made that’s going to be a correction. The forces that led us to this moment — many of them remain in place. The unitary executive theory is continuing to do work. The appetite for strongman power that sits predominantly on the right isn’t going away. What are the exact actions that need to be taken? There’s a long list, and Terry’s going to walk us through…
Will, I need more from you there. Put us on the ladder. Give me one or two things.
Howell: This is entirely self-serving, and it’s something that I believe. I’m standing up this brand-new School of Government and Policy at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, DC. I think that universities play a role in trying to cultivate people who will be faithful stewards of public interest, and will work with governing institutions in order to think anew about how they might be designed, so that they might more effectively solve public problems. We, on our own at this school, aren’t going to counter all of the threats to democracy, and all of the damage done to our institutions. But we play a role in it. I would say that that’s true of higher education more broadly. The civic sector and the abundance movement need to come in, and are trying to do important work in this space. You, Santi, with this podcast, are trying to get clarity about where we see dysfunction and what might be done about it, so that we have a government that can more effectively solve public problems.
The clearest analog that we have historically here is to go back to the Progressive movement, which, in trying to solve public problems, enjoined the efforts of businessmen, journalists, higher education, and community activists — a whole assembly of folks who were trying out a bunch of reforms. That’s what needs to happen this go-around. In a small but critical way, the school that we’re trying to stand up at Johns Hopkins is trying to be a productive force in building more effective institutions that can solve public problems.
Take us home, Terry.
Moe: My job to solve the whole thing?
The two of us have talked and we’ve decided you’re solving it.
Moe: Usually I’m the Grim Reaper on things like this, but I’m going to try to characterize the path forward in a way that’s not completely grim. The first thing to recognize is that the deep hole that we’re in right now has come about because of these social and political developments that have occurred over many decades. We have many millions of people who are very anti-system, are filled with grievances, and feel like they’re the losers from modernization. They feel like a progressive government has let them down while it focuses on minority rights and all the rest. They’re fed up.
When Trump leaves center stage in a couple of years, those grievances are still going to be there. The people who want to be president with the Republican nomination, are going to have the same incentives. We’re going to have the same democracy problems after Trump leaves office. This is going to stay the same, just as it did when Biden was president, even if the next president is a Democrat, because those forces are still there underneath it all.
Having said that, if the Democrats ever get a trifecta — the presidency, the House, and the Senate — maybe they can do some things. Maybe they can take action to change the structure of the courts.
How so?
They could add members to the [Supreme] Court, for example. They can change the jurisdiction of the court. It’s within Congress’s power to do that. Congress has done that historically. That’s a possibility. Other things — they can:
Redo the Voting Rights Act;
Try to do away with the Electoral College through a constitutional amendment;
Try to do away with partisan gerrymandering through a constitutional amendment;
Try to do away with Citizens United under a constitutional amendment.
These are reforms that are potentially out there. Are they likely? No. That’s why a person can easily become grim on this, because the kinds of reforms that might actually work are very unlikely to happen.
Are there reforms that would not get my partisan hackles up? If you could put together a unilateral ban on partisan gerrymandering — the devil’s in the details, but you could probably get vast majorities of American voters. But the rest of them certainly wouldn’t land with the public as boring good governance reforms. It would read as very partisan.
Historically, the Voting Rights Act has been very popular and passed by big bipartisan majorities. Citizens United is not popular. People are very convinced that billionaires have way too much power in American politics.
Many people don’t like the Electoral College. I think that would go down if the alternative were majority rule. Doing something about the court system — I think you could formulate proposals that most people would go along with. Anyway, I’m not saying these things are going to happen, because almost surely they’re not. But what we know is going to happen is that these forces from the past are going to continue. All these people who feel aggrieved are going to still be there, voting. Republicans are going to be responsive to them. We’re going to continue to have these strongman incentives on the Republican side. It’s not going to just go away.
We haven’t always agreed, but I’ve enjoyed talking to the two of you. Thank you for coming on Statecraft.
