I broadly agree, but one issue where I feel a tension is I think the next Democratic president will have to purge the bureaucracy of all the Trump lackeys appointed who will sabotage any Democrat. But it would also look very hypocritical to Republicans and many disengaged voters as well.
The other issue is the courts. What do you think about court packing? This court seems intent on empowering any Republican and sabotaging anything Democrats do, and I worry they’d sabotage this process-democracy agenda, even if Congress attempts to strip the court of its jurisdiction on these matters
Respectfully I don’t think that reading of the courts is correct. The below link has a defense of the Robert’s court from a right leaning perspective. I am not saying I buy all of its premises but I think some of them are fair. I wish I was sharper in this because the response wasn’t all that good. I wish they could have gotten Steve Vladeck to write it.
The court has been instrumental in enabling these expansion of presidential authoritarian powers. To leave the court as it is is to doom any chance of the reform proposed in this article.
Unfortunately, these are exactly the sorts of countermeasures which are necessary, now that MAGA has erased our government's former power-balancing structure. Anti-MAGA governments of the future shouldn't hesitate to do what is needed, for fear of "optics". The rules have changed.
I think there are two things we can do. Court packing is essential, the current SC is a political organization, not a justice institution, and will do whatever possible to stop progress.
Instead of trying to comb through what needs to be purged, we could look at building parallel institutions with the problems that led us to this moment as a guiding light for how to build them better. Recreate the administrative state, but for the current era and with a lot of protections to truly insulate it from the politicians whims. Once those new organizations are ready, move things over. We can recruit from the current organizations people that are deserving, and intentionally leave out the hacks being installed.
1. This piece hints at it, but I think it's important to acknowledge that anything substantial that Dems would like to pass would require eliminating the filibuster. Let's get comfortable with it now.
2. I do not want a Democratic Trump, but some well placed showmanship and ability to communicate in a modern way would be nice. Picture this: the new president pretends to declare an absurd national emergecy as a stunt to show how he has way too much power and get Congress to pass a law. Brags about how he's the first president willing to reduce his own legal power.
The communication to me is key. Part of why Trump is so popular is that he communicates directly with constituents in plain language, and is on Fox News and conservative podcasts all the time. Biden did not do that. So much of voting is about vibes and we need someone with vibes.
I'm extremely inclined to agree with this and also I'm very on board with the abundance agenda. To the extent that the abundance agenda is about untying the government's hands, though, there is some tension if not a deep and irresolvable tension. I'd like to read a synthesis of the two though.
I've gotten this question before. It's reasonable. But I actually don't think they're in that much tension.
1) There's a difference between the government as a whole being able to act and the president being able to act unilaterally and capriciously. That's what the entire regulatory process is supposed to be about.
2) A lot of the abundance agenda involves removing regulatory roadblocks that prevent government-funded projects from moving ahead. Again, limits on the presidency don't hurt there.
3) It's really hard to have an active government that supports science and industry if the president can unilaterally cancel all sorts of grants for purely political reasons the second an administration changes over. Stability is important for that sort of thing.
Thanks. Rereading my comment (I was walking the dog so) I realize I sounded like I thought it was a deep and irresolvable tension. I meant there is some tension, but it's not deep and irresolvable. Nevertheless I've become more attentive to the law of unintended consequences and I think exploring what an abundance government would look like in the hands of a bad faith government might be worthwhile.
All good and reasonable ideas, but you left out the fact that unless there are big changes in SCOTUS, all those best efforts could, or would be canceled without that court having to even share what actual legal standing they are using as the basis for their decisions. We already have lots of laws and then there is The Constitution, that could be applied to either stop the current mania or at least slow it down, so what would be different in your plan?
Extra/better guardrails would be great. It would also be great if
2) the ability to enforce those guardrails would be stronger (depoliticize SCOTUS, ban gerrymandering to get more independent/moderate Congresspersons)
3) the electoral system didn't reward extremism (replace FPTP primaries)
Ideally you'd also have a Constitution you can actually change but I guess that's too much to ask for
Best way to kill gerrymandering is to mandate that legislative bodies elect members from multi-member districts, with a min of four members per district. Let jurisdictions choose from STV-PR (the proportional version of instant runoff, with ranked ballots), or Sequential Proprtional Approval (with basic Approval Voting for their local single winner elections), or Reweighted Range (with STAR for single-winner races). You can have the option to just not bother paying for the process of drawing maps at all, by doing away with districts entirely, and just do a single proportional election for the whole set of members.
Once you're using any reasonable proportional system, a large minority that's motivated to band together will always be able to get some representation.
I really agree with this agenda, and if and when we get there I think it's crucial that Democrats have the wisdom and discipline to prioritize shoring up institutions and tyrant-proofing the government over enacting a progressive policy agenda. One footnote: the jurisdiction-stripping provision of the No Kings Act is a clever trick, but it's hard to see how the Supreme Court won't just disregard it, which they will have the legal and practical leverage to do. I guess one can assume that part of the agenda will be to get a better Court, which is probably the better long-term solution but also fraught with difficulties.
Any plan to end MAGA tyranny with a strictly defensive strategy is a latent failure of a plan, derived from a delusional assumption that MAGA opposition is still an institution able to assert a functional power balance throughout the various branches and levels of our government.
The *very reason* why MAGA has been able to dictate policy and action, past the checks of both legislators and jurists, is precisely because there is no longer a functional power balance — and anti-MAGA politicians won't be able to magically re-conjure it, even if they are somehow re-elected to office…
Republicans changed the rules of the game, first by seizing an opportunity to install themselves as content programmers on right wing-friendly cable "news" agencies, during the 1990s and 2000s; and then by way of their unflinching support for the Queens mob boss who seized their party's presidential nomination in 2016 with only a plurality of support. The rules of our government, which once permitted a functional power balance, are now a distant memory.
Anti-MAGA politicians are *obliged* to play by the rules, yes — but not by the now-fantastical rules which last applied to reality back in the 1980s — they are obliged to play by the rules as they are defined now. This absolutely means fighting back with an *offensive* strategy, designed to undermine and annihilate MAGA sources of power, beginning with mass media propaganda — and by "mass media" these days, I include the massive audiences of podcasts, YouTube, and all other social media platforms, along with the legacy print, radio, and televised sources, whose influence has diminished but which are nonetheless still relevant to an extent.
I'd hoped for such an offensive strategy in 2008, which might have been our last real chance to end the rise of American fascism before it really began. Prior to 1987, the FCC enforced something called the Fairness Doctrine, which prohibited mass media outlets from broadcasting one-sided editorials without providing an opportunity for a rebuttal from "a responsible person of the opposing point-of-view". I wanted the federal government to re-enforce this policy in 2008, and to expand its scope beyond broadcast media into all of the relevant media of the time.
This — this is how the right-wing propaganda machine, which has inculcated and aligned the hordes of MAGA support which are so essential for the potency of MAGA influence, could have been uprooted and annihilated at a point while Donald Trump was still portraying a "powerful man" on a fictional TV-show, and not empowered by the office of the presidency, and by appendages of conspiratorial henchmen, insinuated intractably throughout our government, law enforcement agencies, our media, and our military like tapeworm cysts, settled into our national flesh…
You're right. The doctrine would need a major revision for relevance in 2025. Its original purpose was to ensure public access to a broadcast spectrum which was limited by physics. Its design guaranteed access to the expression of all ideas through mass broadcasting, and not only the ideas of those who owned broadcast rights.
Broadcasting is no longer limited by physics, but continues being limited by publicity. Those with higher production and publicity budgets can negotiate more visibility, and since expenses like these are justified by profit, and not by the expression of all ideas, it has promoted the amplification of only the sort of content which makes the most money — and this sort of content happens to be mostly right-wing dissent at the moment, into which Republicans and MAGAs have inserted right-wing propaganda.
So, I think we need a new Fairness Doctrine which will again assure access to mass media for the expression of all ideas everywhere, and not only lucrative ideas and fascist ideology on the most visible outlets.
I admit that writing such a doctrine for 2025 would take a lot of effort.
But I think it needed to be done in 2008, and I think it needs to be done now even more urgently.
So, I largely agree with all this. I do think we should get rid of the filibuster for starters and enact most of what’s mentioned here.
But I do see another somewhat problem. While I don’t necessarily think Democrats, assuming they are even back in power, should follow a Trump handbook for retribution.
However, I do see a problematic asymmetry where Republicans will do anything in their power (testing and even breaking legal bounds) to exact power and revenge on their political opponents but Democrats are the party of the turning the other cheek.
This imbalance seems unsustainable. For example, the trend of businesses bowing to Trump preemptively seems downstream of this. They know republicans will punish them for not bending the knee and Democrats, the party of respectability, will not punish them for having done so. Which is a logic way to approach things!
This happens within the battle for the government too. The normally prescribed “punishment” would be to lose votes. But voters don’t seem to care about this dynamic much.
I often think about the following analogy: imagine a boxing match between two roughly equal fighters. The ref is, at best, half paying attention. One fighter decides he’s going to break the rules and kick his opponent in the groin as a tactic. The other fighters would never even consider trying to break the rules even in retaliation. Guess which fighter is going to win?
Again, I’m not totally sure what specifically can be done about this. You’re never going to find and abolish all the loopholes.
This seems to me to be a pretty correct read, but it is missing one thing. That is the fact that while Republicans seem to experience 0 consequences for acting in bad faith, for open corruption, or for blatant authoritarianism, Democrats do. I'm not in any party meetings or anything, but it seems to me that they're the party of "turning the other cheek" not out of any sense of morality but because they're held to an insurmountable double standard. Until there are any consequences at all for Republicans' egregious abuses, which are unlikely to come any time soon, it doesn't really seem like there's a winning strategy.
I don't think we want a liberal strongman, but I think a big part of Trump's appeal is that he "gets things done." There is a widespread dissatisfaction with how sclerotic, slow, and ineffective government has become. I fear that because of Trump, the instinct will be to put up even MORE guardrails, to hem in any authority. Which won't work because they only serve to clip the wings of normie bureaucrats. Trump clearly hasn't been bothered by silly things like laws. Hopefully the Abundant movement picks up and inspires Democrats to make government work again.
I do think Trump should cause Dems to look long and hard at why we have attached so many levers of power to the federal government, specifically the executive branch. Why does the FCC need to license broadcasters at all anymore?
Go big or go home. Presidentialism is doomed to fail -> extend house terms to 4 years, and give the speaker of the house the powers held by the president.
This. Getting rid of decades of Ermachtigungsgesetzen is good and necessary but it treats the symptoms. The underlying disease is the presidency itself. We don't need it and it's too dangerous to let it persist. https://futuremoreperfect.substack.com/p/abolish-the-presidency
I think we need a Dem president willing to push boundaries in the service of forcing Congress to do its job. Every Monday morning there should be a new “challenge” executive order. Week 1: “We are deporting Ted Cruz unless Congress passes X bill - acknowledging that all US residents regardless of birthplace to have due process - by the end of the day on Friday.” And so on. Also, to state the obvious, said bill should have teeth in terms of enforcement.
I do think Dems have become the party of the status quo, while the Republicans are the party of new ideas - many of them wacky, and really awful! But people feel there is a need fo new ideas. Dems need to be bold in presenting new ideas for a new age, particularly, as you say, in our governance structure.
The appeal to me of a President Newsom is that he seems like he is the only one who will hold people accountable. I agree, like many others in the comments here, that your suggestions are all good but the officials and government agents who have perpetrated Trump's agenda need to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. I don't want the next D president to executive order a progressive agenda, but I DO want them to aggressively prosecute the treason dripping from the Republican party.
The Democrats need new leadership. But moving left, look at the electoral map,and throw in the two leaders in Congress are from NY and exactly what is the plan on the budget vote. Schumer has to go. But in 28 the Democrats need a charismatic nominee, sorry not you Harris, to win.
I guess my question is do you see this as this big package that takes up most of a year in Congress or like something that gets done piecemeal over like a decade?
I broadly agree, but one issue where I feel a tension is I think the next Democratic president will have to purge the bureaucracy of all the Trump lackeys appointed who will sabotage any Democrat. But it would also look very hypocritical to Republicans and many disengaged voters as well.
The other issue is the courts. What do you think about court packing? This court seems intent on empowering any Republican and sabotaging anything Democrats do, and I worry they’d sabotage this process-democracy agenda, even if Congress attempts to strip the court of its jurisdiction on these matters
Respectfully I don’t think that reading of the courts is correct. The below link has a defense of the Robert’s court from a right leaning perspective. I am not saying I buy all of its premises but I think some of them are fair. I wish I was sharper in this because the response wasn’t all that good. I wish they could have gotten Steve Vladeck to write it.
https://thedispatch.com/debates/judicial-overreach-supreme-court-trump/?utm_source=M1N2o-3P4q5-R6s7T-8u9V0&utm_campaign=4183639&utm_medium=copy_link
I think court packing is a grave mistake in particular - this would take things to new heights.
The court has been instrumental in enabling these expansion of presidential authoritarian powers. To leave the court as it is is to doom any chance of the reform proposed in this article.
Unfortunately, these are exactly the sorts of countermeasures which are necessary, now that MAGA has erased our government's former power-balancing structure. Anti-MAGA governments of the future shouldn't hesitate to do what is needed, for fear of "optics". The rules have changed.
MAGA has changed the rules.
I think there are two things we can do. Court packing is essential, the current SC is a political organization, not a justice institution, and will do whatever possible to stop progress.
Instead of trying to comb through what needs to be purged, we could look at building parallel institutions with the problems that led us to this moment as a guiding light for how to build them better. Recreate the administrative state, but for the current era and with a lot of protections to truly insulate it from the politicians whims. Once those new organizations are ready, move things over. We can recruit from the current organizations people that are deserving, and intentionally leave out the hacks being installed.
1. This piece hints at it, but I think it's important to acknowledge that anything substantial that Dems would like to pass would require eliminating the filibuster. Let's get comfortable with it now.
2. I do not want a Democratic Trump, but some well placed showmanship and ability to communicate in a modern way would be nice. Picture this: the new president pretends to declare an absurd national emergecy as a stunt to show how he has way too much power and get Congress to pass a law. Brags about how he's the first president willing to reduce his own legal power.
The communication to me is key. Part of why Trump is so popular is that he communicates directly with constituents in plain language, and is on Fox News and conservative podcasts all the time. Biden did not do that. So much of voting is about vibes and we need someone with vibes.
I'm extremely inclined to agree with this and also I'm very on board with the abundance agenda. To the extent that the abundance agenda is about untying the government's hands, though, there is some tension if not a deep and irresolvable tension. I'd like to read a synthesis of the two though.
I've gotten this question before. It's reasonable. But I actually don't think they're in that much tension.
1) There's a difference between the government as a whole being able to act and the president being able to act unilaterally and capriciously. That's what the entire regulatory process is supposed to be about.
2) A lot of the abundance agenda involves removing regulatory roadblocks that prevent government-funded projects from moving ahead. Again, limits on the presidency don't hurt there.
3) It's really hard to have an active government that supports science and industry if the president can unilaterally cancel all sorts of grants for purely political reasons the second an administration changes over. Stability is important for that sort of thing.
Thanks. Rereading my comment (I was walking the dog so) I realize I sounded like I thought it was a deep and irresolvable tension. I meant there is some tension, but it's not deep and irresolvable. Nevertheless I've become more attentive to the law of unintended consequences and I think exploring what an abundance government would look like in the hands of a bad faith government might be worthwhile.
All good and reasonable ideas, but you left out the fact that unless there are big changes in SCOTUS, all those best efforts could, or would be canceled without that court having to even share what actual legal standing they are using as the basis for their decisions. We already have lots of laws and then there is The Constitution, that could be applied to either stop the current mania or at least slow it down, so what would be different in your plan?
Extra/better guardrails would be great. It would also be great if
2) the ability to enforce those guardrails would be stronger (depoliticize SCOTUS, ban gerrymandering to get more independent/moderate Congresspersons)
3) the electoral system didn't reward extremism (replace FPTP primaries)
Ideally you'd also have a Constitution you can actually change but I guess that's too much to ask for
Best way to kill gerrymandering is to mandate that legislative bodies elect members from multi-member districts, with a min of four members per district. Let jurisdictions choose from STV-PR (the proportional version of instant runoff, with ranked ballots), or Sequential Proprtional Approval (with basic Approval Voting for their local single winner elections), or Reweighted Range (with STAR for single-winner races). You can have the option to just not bother paying for the process of drawing maps at all, by doing away with districts entirely, and just do a single proportional election for the whole set of members.
Once you're using any reasonable proportional system, a large minority that's motivated to band together will always be able to get some representation.
I really agree with this agenda, and if and when we get there I think it's crucial that Democrats have the wisdom and discipline to prioritize shoring up institutions and tyrant-proofing the government over enacting a progressive policy agenda. One footnote: the jurisdiction-stripping provision of the No Kings Act is a clever trick, but it's hard to see how the Supreme Court won't just disregard it, which they will have the legal and practical leverage to do. I guess one can assume that part of the agenda will be to get a better Court, which is probably the better long-term solution but also fraught with difficulties.
Any plan to end MAGA tyranny with a strictly defensive strategy is a latent failure of a plan, derived from a delusional assumption that MAGA opposition is still an institution able to assert a functional power balance throughout the various branches and levels of our government.
The *very reason* why MAGA has been able to dictate policy and action, past the checks of both legislators and jurists, is precisely because there is no longer a functional power balance — and anti-MAGA politicians won't be able to magically re-conjure it, even if they are somehow re-elected to office…
Republicans changed the rules of the game, first by seizing an opportunity to install themselves as content programmers on right wing-friendly cable "news" agencies, during the 1990s and 2000s; and then by way of their unflinching support for the Queens mob boss who seized their party's presidential nomination in 2016 with only a plurality of support. The rules of our government, which once permitted a functional power balance, are now a distant memory.
Anti-MAGA politicians are *obliged* to play by the rules, yes — but not by the now-fantastical rules which last applied to reality back in the 1980s — they are obliged to play by the rules as they are defined now. This absolutely means fighting back with an *offensive* strategy, designed to undermine and annihilate MAGA sources of power, beginning with mass media propaganda — and by "mass media" these days, I include the massive audiences of podcasts, YouTube, and all other social media platforms, along with the legacy print, radio, and televised sources, whose influence has diminished but which are nonetheless still relevant to an extent.
I'd hoped for such an offensive strategy in 2008, which might have been our last real chance to end the rise of American fascism before it really began. Prior to 1987, the FCC enforced something called the Fairness Doctrine, which prohibited mass media outlets from broadcasting one-sided editorials without providing an opportunity for a rebuttal from "a responsible person of the opposing point-of-view". I wanted the federal government to re-enforce this policy in 2008, and to expand its scope beyond broadcast media into all of the relevant media of the time.
This — this is how the right-wing propaganda machine, which has inculcated and aligned the hordes of MAGA support which are so essential for the potency of MAGA influence, could have been uprooted and annihilated at a point while Donald Trump was still portraying a "powerful man" on a fictional TV-show, and not empowered by the office of the presidency, and by appendages of conspiratorial henchmen, insinuated intractably throughout our government, law enforcement agencies, our media, and our military like tapeworm cysts, settled into our national flesh…
I don't even know how you'd enforce the Fairness Doctrine in the age of social media. I'm not sure it would be desirable.
You're right. The doctrine would need a major revision for relevance in 2025. Its original purpose was to ensure public access to a broadcast spectrum which was limited by physics. Its design guaranteed access to the expression of all ideas through mass broadcasting, and not only the ideas of those who owned broadcast rights.
Broadcasting is no longer limited by physics, but continues being limited by publicity. Those with higher production and publicity budgets can negotiate more visibility, and since expenses like these are justified by profit, and not by the expression of all ideas, it has promoted the amplification of only the sort of content which makes the most money — and this sort of content happens to be mostly right-wing dissent at the moment, into which Republicans and MAGAs have inserted right-wing propaganda.
So, I think we need a new Fairness Doctrine which will again assure access to mass media for the expression of all ideas everywhere, and not only lucrative ideas and fascist ideology on the most visible outlets.
I admit that writing such a doctrine for 2025 would take a lot of effort.
But I think it needed to be done in 2008, and I think it needs to be done now even more urgently.
So, I largely agree with all this. I do think we should get rid of the filibuster for starters and enact most of what’s mentioned here.
But I do see another somewhat problem. While I don’t necessarily think Democrats, assuming they are even back in power, should follow a Trump handbook for retribution.
However, I do see a problematic asymmetry where Republicans will do anything in their power (testing and even breaking legal bounds) to exact power and revenge on their political opponents but Democrats are the party of the turning the other cheek.
This imbalance seems unsustainable. For example, the trend of businesses bowing to Trump preemptively seems downstream of this. They know republicans will punish them for not bending the knee and Democrats, the party of respectability, will not punish them for having done so. Which is a logic way to approach things!
This happens within the battle for the government too. The normally prescribed “punishment” would be to lose votes. But voters don’t seem to care about this dynamic much.
I often think about the following analogy: imagine a boxing match between two roughly equal fighters. The ref is, at best, half paying attention. One fighter decides he’s going to break the rules and kick his opponent in the groin as a tactic. The other fighters would never even consider trying to break the rules even in retaliation. Guess which fighter is going to win?
Again, I’m not totally sure what specifically can be done about this. You’re never going to find and abolish all the loopholes.
This seems to me to be a pretty correct read, but it is missing one thing. That is the fact that while Republicans seem to experience 0 consequences for acting in bad faith, for open corruption, or for blatant authoritarianism, Democrats do. I'm not in any party meetings or anything, but it seems to me that they're the party of "turning the other cheek" not out of any sense of morality but because they're held to an insurmountable double standard. Until there are any consequences at all for Republicans' egregious abuses, which are unlikely to come any time soon, it doesn't really seem like there's a winning strategy.
I don't think we want a liberal strongman, but I think a big part of Trump's appeal is that he "gets things done." There is a widespread dissatisfaction with how sclerotic, slow, and ineffective government has become. I fear that because of Trump, the instinct will be to put up even MORE guardrails, to hem in any authority. Which won't work because they only serve to clip the wings of normie bureaucrats. Trump clearly hasn't been bothered by silly things like laws. Hopefully the Abundant movement picks up and inspires Democrats to make government work again.
I do think Trump should cause Dems to look long and hard at why we have attached so many levers of power to the federal government, specifically the executive branch. Why does the FCC need to license broadcasters at all anymore?
Go big or go home. Presidentialism is doomed to fail -> extend house terms to 4 years, and give the speaker of the house the powers held by the president.
This. Getting rid of decades of Ermachtigungsgesetzen is good and necessary but it treats the symptoms. The underlying disease is the presidency itself. We don't need it and it's too dangerous to let it persist. https://futuremoreperfect.substack.com/p/abolish-the-presidency
I think we need a Dem president willing to push boundaries in the service of forcing Congress to do its job. Every Monday morning there should be a new “challenge” executive order. Week 1: “We are deporting Ted Cruz unless Congress passes X bill - acknowledging that all US residents regardless of birthplace to have due process - by the end of the day on Friday.” And so on. Also, to state the obvious, said bill should have teeth in terms of enforcement.
I do think Dems have become the party of the status quo, while the Republicans are the party of new ideas - many of them wacky, and really awful! But people feel there is a need fo new ideas. Dems need to be bold in presenting new ideas for a new age, particularly, as you say, in our governance structure.
Thanks Jordan, I think this sort of messaging could have some very broad appeal.
The appeal to me of a President Newsom is that he seems like he is the only one who will hold people accountable. I agree, like many others in the comments here, that your suggestions are all good but the officials and government agents who have perpetrated Trump's agenda need to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. I don't want the next D president to executive order a progressive agenda, but I DO want them to aggressively prosecute the treason dripping from the Republican party.
The Democrats need new leadership. But moving left, look at the electoral map,and throw in the two leaders in Congress are from NY and exactly what is the plan on the budget vote. Schumer has to go. But in 28 the Democrats need a charismatic nominee, sorry not you Harris, to win.
I guess my question is do you see this as this big package that takes up most of a year in Congress or like something that gets done piecemeal over like a decade?