The Trump administration’s first week in office has provided no shortage of reasons to despair about the harm and suffering the next four years will bring. But for many policy-adjacent academics—those of us whose work is aimed at scholars, but motivated by relevance for those engaged in policy and politics—recent political events have also given rise to a deeper feeling of unsettlement. Many of us have implicitly assumed that understanding how things worked in the recent past is a useful guide to seeking change in the present. But what if that’s no longer true? And if it’s not, what do we do as scholars in a moment of phase shift?
My own focus has been the rise of economics in policymaking, and how economic reasoning came to underpin a center-left, technocratic worldview that long limited the space of possibility in Democratic politics. It assumes that understanding how this happened is a useful step toward finding ways to challenge that dominance with alternatives. It basically rests on the Elizabeth Warren theory of politics: that we can change the rules, through policy, to make capitalism-as-it-exists work better for more people.
But “policy” is only a useful lever if we assume a functioning democracy with relatively stable legal and political institutions. It’s more or less irrelevant in the face of larger political shifts: democratic erosion, corrupt and reactionary courts, personalistic enforcement of law, the rising influence of oligarchs. And this isn’t only an issue for those who study policymaking—it’s relevant for anyone who has assumed that the path to social change, even if it starts with movements, at some point goes through Washington. (I recognize that the leftists among you are surely now saying, “Welcome to the revolution.”)
At a practical level, there are many alternatives to national politics. Organize, work in your community, try to create impact in the private sector, target state and local government. Do your bit in whatever corner of the world you find yourself. But perhaps you, like me, are primarily an academic. With tectonic shifts happening, what do you do when the pursuit of middle-range theory feels no more useful than trying to determine how many angels can fit on the head of a pin?
My own response has been to zoom out, to shift my research toward the big political economy questions: How does capitalism work? Where does power lie? Under what institutions has it worked better and worse (and for whom), and how were those institutions put into place? Specifically, I’ve been focused on the late-19th-century U.S.—on how the modern corporate order came to be, and the struggles over how it would be governed.
I’m drawn by the echoes between then and now—a rising oligarchy, struggles over democracy and corruption, the politics of nationalism, imperialism, and white identity, a reactionary judiciary, tariffs, even battles over academic freedom. But I also ask myself whether this comparison is truly generative, or if the world is so different today—technologically, financially, in scale, in its political and media institutions, in the nature of its problems—that the past can’t usefully inform the present.
My intuition is that the decades that set us down this path still matter—that the legal and institutional building blocks of corporate capitalism are the DNA of the present. But it’s clearly a bigger gamble than betting that the events of the 1970s and 80s were still relevant to 2022. Bigger gambles, though, may be exactly what we need right now.
I hope I’m not the only LPE-adjacent scholar stepping back to think about macro-level change. Could we be going through a shift in mode of production, in which one set of people are released from wage labor through asset ownership, while others are released from it through technological displacement? Do global problems require us to look beyond the nation-state by recognizing it as the historically specific and contingent institution that it is? Is understanding law as a global system for coding capital a starting point for imagining more radical ways of upending it? I don’t have the answers. But questions on this scale seem critical to ask.
None of this is to suggest that going macro is the only useful intellectual response to the present. There are surely many productive strategies for rethinking what impactful academic work looks like right now—not to mention whole fields, like comparative politics, that seem more relevant than ever. But if you, like me, are struggling to see a path to influence without another Democratic administration, a functioning administrative state, and judges who follow the legal norms of the past? It’s time to reckon with the vanishingly small likelihood that we’ll get that trifecta anytime soon, and to think seriously about what meaningful scholarship looks like without it.
