It’s obvious by now that Trump, Musk, and their gaggle of gleeful technofascists are attempting to tear apart the federal government as we know it. Indeed, they are attempting to remake the constitutional order in a more tyrannical image, hoping that their allies in Congress, the federal judiciary, the legal academy, and perhaps state governments will join them. Even if they do not achieve their most ambitious goals, Beth Popp Berman is surely right that we can no longer assume “relatively stable legal and political institutions” will persist. That means (as Beth further argues) that many scholarly projects that focus on using or modestly reforming these institutions — projects that once appeared to be the most realistic or perhaps only practical way forward — now look borderline fantastical. What use is it to put forward a proposal to reform the Treasury’s process for imposing sanctions when the Treasury’s payment system is in the process of being replaced by drug-addled vengeance, incompetence, and AI?
Beth suggests that one possible response to the disruption of the conventional ideas-to-policy pipelines is for progressive policy-focused intellectuals to retreat from the weeds to the higher ground of the longue durée.
That’s well and good — there’s always something to learn from zooming out. But if you’re a progressive researcher focused on medium-range theory and its practical upshots, this is a bad moment for retreat and a good moment for zooming in. We need more people — and especially more ambitious thinkers — in the weeds. The weeds are where we will need to be to think about how to build new and better institutions out of the wreckage. Trump, Musk, and their allies have their own designs for how that should go, but we should not assume that they will have the final word. Rather, we leftist policy nerds should develop our own plans in conversation with our friends and compatriots who are building a coalition to oust the authoritarians. It’s precisely because it will not be business-as-usual for the foreseeable future that even those of us who are more accustomed to critique should be readying ourselves for technocratic struggle.
Of course, I am not suggesting that we should expect to have a role in building new institutions now. Nor am I suggesting that we should in any way support the pillaging and violence of the MAGA raiders. Part of our task is figuring out how to stop and slow it (which will itself require specialist knowledge — as Beth herself has demonstrated).
But we can be certain that not everything will be stopped, and even those things that eventually are stopped will have torn down much in the meantime. So rebuilding will be necessary. And there is at least a reasonable possibility that some form of liberal-left coalition will overcome efforts to thwart electoral accountability and take power in the near future, maybe even with commanding majorities. That coalition will surely seek to rebuild, and we should be prepared to contest for the proper approach to doing so. We may find ourselves in a situation where previously off-the-wall ideas become possible to implement. But if we don’t have relatively detailed proposals, we will lose to the default option of attempting to reproduce what came before.
Let me illustrate what I have in mind with an example from my areas of focus. In Project 2025 and leaked trial balloons, the Trump Administration has announced its intention to remake the federal higher education finance system. Exactly what this will look like remains hazy, but the most ambitious form would involve eliminating the Department of Education, transferring its authority over student aid to the Department of Labor and (for veterans benefits) the Department of Defense, making it more difficult to access aid and to repay student debt, making it easier for any institution that says it is doing “education” (including, say, Trump University) to fund its operations via such aid, and selling student debt off to private financial institutions with one or more federal agency operating as guarantor. Most of this plan would be unlawful to enact without new legislation, but the Trump Administration may well attempt to do so anyway while Republicans in Congress attempt to cover the rest.
This plan would be a disaster. It would make tens of millions of peoples’ financial situations worse (likely causing a spike in defaults) while enabling fraud, waste, abuse, and corruption. It would likely further depress demand for higher education. And, combined with the cutoff of NIH and NSF research funds and the reactionary crackdowns on academic freedom and inclusivity, it would shut down many departments and/or colleges, depriving people of not just educations but also the medical, legal, and other services they provide.
Yet, in a way, a slash-and-burn strategy from the right would create a fertile field for mobilizing support for a much more progressive system of higher education finance. It would, for one thing, disrupt the familiar processes by which political struggles over higher education finance have been waged, such as DOE regulatory proceedings and amendments to the Higher Education Act. Unlike in the current system, where it is (much) easier to enact reforms that make student debt easier to pay than it is to pursue a more transformational rethinking of how to allocate the costs of education, in the new world either effort at reform would require bringing together a new coalition to mobilize legislative majorities. In effect, Trump and his cronies will have removed one of the most powerful reasons against a deeper reconsideration of higher education, making it relatively easier to contest for free college.
At the same time, Trump reforms would likely be broadly unpopular and could serve as a catalyst to productive mobilization among currently complacent faculty, students, debtors, and maybe even college administrators who find their position newly threatened. With any luck, it could tip political momentum around higher education in a more progressive direction. Put these changes together, and it is an environment in which legislation for something like a national public college system (or other models of free public college) could stand a real chance as passage.
Such a possibility will never come to be realized if sympathetic experts aren’t mapping out the details of what it would take to do so, long before the political moment arises. And those maps are currently sketchy at best. So (to mix metaphors) we need more people in the weeds, doing more cartography, to prepare us for the day after tomorrow. And quickly.
If it is done well, this detailed work will require zooming out and thinking about the longer trajectory of higher education and the labor market and comparing our system with others and reexamining basic assumptions about federalism and the like. The sort of work that Beth suggests will be useful to the cause, in other words. But it’s one thing to step back to think big thoughts as an alternative to plotting for the future. It’s another to use it as a tool for doing so.
Similar dynamics, I suspect, are likely to arise in several other domains. For example, it seems likely that destruction of existing platform and crypto regulation will make it easier to start from scratch while backlash against technofascists will make more ambitious regulation more popular, even urgent. If I’m being hopeful, revulsion at the much more avowedly ethnonationalist cruelty of immigration/refugee enforcement and foreign aid withdrawal will also produce an opportunity for reconstruction combined with a political swing in favor of humanity.
Not that we can be confident about any of these political dynamics. We are only at the beginning of what is sure to be an escalating constitutional crisis. But that is precisely the point. Making policy proposals in a time of predictable politics usually means putting together reformist reforms with the hope of sneaking something in there that will tip politics toward something more interesting. A time of unpredictable politics is a time for non-reformist reforms, if we can find a foothold.
