Dan Nexon, a Georgetown Political Scientist, wrote the following post at Lawyer, Guns and Money, The State of the Republic is Grim, which inspires a lot of thoughts from me. I am going to highlight the following two bullet points, but I might suggest a full read of his piece before the reader sallies forth below.
I will spoil things are follows: I basically agree, and this touches on things I have been thinking about for months (or, in some cases, for decades).
I will simply take his first two bullet points as the basic focus.
- The Republic as we knew it is over. The fight now is whether the new one will be a fascistic, competitive authoritarian regime or a pluralist democracy that, we can hope, is better than what came before.
- Even if you think restoration is possible, it’s a bad idea. The Constitution has failed. Or, more accurately, the Constitutional order built out of the New Deal, the Second Reconstruction, and the repudiation of the Nixon presidency has failed. This is not a prediction. It’s not a “if we continue on our current course.” The Constitution as designed by the founders, was supposed to prevent the current regime. Its original guardrails did not work. The ones added after the Civil War did not work. The de facto amendments created by the accretion of judicial decisions did not work. The post-Watergate reforms did not work.
I agree with these basic assessments, even if my academic temperament wants to wait and see how things play out. Clear analysis is hard to do in the middle of a crisis, but it is clear that we are experiencing something new in the White House, alongside the complicity of Republicans in Congress and the active helping hand of the Supreme Court.
It is difficult to summarize how bad this administration is (it’s part of why I have the In Front of Our Nose series, because it is just so much). I suspect that if, for some reason, you are reading this but think Trump is a normal president, nothing I can say will disuade you, and if you agree with me that he is a clear threat to the constitutional order, I don’t need to make a list.
I will just note the following. He is usurping congressional authority on spending and staffing, and therefore literally ignoring the law. He has empowered ICE to violate due process. He has ordered the military to commit murder in the Caribbean (and they have complied). He has publicly directed the Attorney General to go after his enemies because he, Trump, declares them to be guilty. He has pardoned/commuted the sentences of ~1500 people who tried to disrupt a constitutional process. All the while, he and his family have been enriching themselves because he is president.
Oh, and the Supreme Court has said he is immune from prosecution for anything linked to his “official duties.”
The fact that the above is my short version of the situation is more than a bit disturbing.
The first bullet point raises the key question of what comes next after Trump, and was the thing I had already been thinking about writing about since the early weeks of the administration, when it became clear pretty quickly what we were dealing with (as exemplified by DOGE, although not exclusively). I will likely amplify this in another post.
I think Nexon is correct. We get one of the following. Note that I have broken one of his categories into two by separating “fascistic, competitive authoritarian regime” into “deeper fascism” or “competitive authoritarianism.”
- Deeper fascism. Trump (more likely Miller, Vance, Vought, Homan, etc.) finds a way to truly move the country into a clearer dictatorial structure. This is the nightmare scenario, which I think is unlikely, but is real enough that I can’t discount it.
- Competitive Authoritarianism. There are two versions of this in my head,
- One-Party. Here, the GOP is able to manipulate the system in 2026 and 2028 in a way that looks like we are having competitive elections, but the playing field is tilted towards the GOP sufficiently that they win regardless of the actual popular preference. This is the US version of Hungary, at least in broad brushstrokes.
- Two-Party. In this version, the Democrats are able to win back power, but the system is sufficiently broken that they will govern like Trump has: by fiat and with the Congress being basically a vestigial organ. This is a broken democracy at best.
- Pluralist Democracy. This is going to require reforms and could only come about under current conditions if the Democrats win back power and do what they failed to do in 2021: use their majority to institute change. My post from August of 2020 provides a starting spot: Reforms: the Possible, the Improbable, and the Unpossible. I might change some of those recommendations if I rewrote the post, but the basic gist remains, I think, on point.
Quite frankly, since the early days of this term, most specifically because of what DOGE did (and as amplified by a string of shadow docket decisions by SCOTUS), I think that the most likely outcome of all of this is 2b: Two-party competitive authoritarianism, with every four to eight years one of the two parties comes to power and governing largely through executive action in a version of what Guillermo O’Donnell once called “delegative democracy” (which was a critique of the poor quality of Latin American democracy in the post-authoritarian period–something I have been meaning to write about). This would continue until one side was able to move us to 2a (or worse). It would look like the constitutional order was still functioning, but that would be an illusion.
The one thing that I do not think is going to happen is that we are “going back to normal” (Nexon’s “restoration” category). The notion that we are going to collectively realize that Trump was a mistake or an aberration and we can just “get back to politics as usual” (whatever that even means) is a fantasy.
I get it. At any moment in time, I can maybe, sort of convince myself of this. It was certainly my impulse in late 2015. As long-time readers know, I did not think that Trump would be nominated, and yet he was.
And it is clear that Democrats in 2021 thought our long national nightmare was over, and so couldn’t even muster the strength to engage in incredibly modest and inadequate reform (such as the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act). The best they did was change the rules about counting Electoral Votes. This was, to put it mildly, putting one of those very small round band-aids used for tiny cuts as a palliative for a sucking chest wound.
Democrats in 2021 had regained power, and they didn’t want to risk it being, you know, provocative or anything. Surely the Trump thing was an aberration!
And then came November 2024.
Worse, then came January 2025 and an unconstrained Trump.
So, to Nexon’s second bullet point above, yes, the Constitutional order, as amended, has failed to provide the guardrails and even the kind of governance that it purports to provide.
I would note that, for the numerous obvious flaws that one can assign to the Founders, they thought that the Constitution was going to at least protect against a demagogic tyrant (see Federalist 68) and that the branches would jealously guard their own powers (that’s the whole point of Federalist 51).
To which I can only say, in the most technical of ways, oops!
The notion that the impeachment power would serve as a check on the executive also qualifies as an oops.
I would note that there are several major mistakes they made.
- Not understanding political parties and how they would distort the separation of powers notion is chief among them. Madison’s theory of factional balancing, as outlined in Federalist 10, was simply incorrect.
- The way that westward expansion would create substantial distortions to the Senate and Electoral College–not to mention a number of inherent flaws in those institutions from the get-go, but such is the nature of political compromise.
- The way in which lifetime appointments to the bench would create any number of perverse distortions to the relationship between democratic legitimacy and the Court’s power.
All of this is linked, I would argue, to the set of problematic interlocking incentive structures created by the constitutional order. Or, as is the case with parties and primaries, not anticipated by that order.
A core fact about politicians is that they are power-seeking actors. I don’t know how many times I stood in front of a classroom and pointed out that if a politician wants to effect policy change, steal from the government, or chase after sex with the interns, they all have one preeminent goal: getting and retaining power by being elected and re-elected.
Dating back to my dissertation, a core notion in my academic work is that the public gets what the general incentive structure of the institutional order provides.
For example, one of the reasons that I became a critic of primary elections as a nominating mechanism over the course of my career (I did not start with that position, by the way) was that it distorts the incentives for the behavior of politicians. Primaries, especially when combined with uncompetitive districts or states, mean that the incentive for a politician who is seeking power is to please the primary electorate. That means that pleasing a majority of the district is not the main political motivator. Nor is it necessarily pleasing party leadership.*
If the main incentive in national legislative politics is getting re-nominated (since re-election is the easy part in most states and districts), then the goal is simply to be able to appeal to that slice of the electorate that shows up for the nomination process and fend off a significant challenger. Pleasing a majority of your voters, let alone the common good, is a secondary concern, at best.
If anyone needs a practical example of this, I will provide two. Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA) voted for Pete Hegseth to be Secretary of Defense, not because she thought he was qualified.** She did it to protect herself from a primary challenge. Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA) knew that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. shouldn’t be the Secretary of Health and Human Services, and yet he voted for him. The consequences of Senators who are more concerned with their re-nomination fights than they are the public good are made quite clear in these examples.
The reason I have long argued for proportional representation is not simply because more parties are better for the sake of having more parties. Proportional representation elections make politics more competitive and responsive. Therefore, in such systems, parties/candidates have an incentive to try and please as many constituents as they can to achieve power.
I think that proportional representation election does a better job of aligning the public’s need for representation and responsive politicians with the needs of politicians to get elected and then re-elected.
Many people over the years here at OTB, I think, have misunderstood me to be arguing that the PR automatically means better policy. Nothing guarantees specific policy outcomes, save for dictatorship to some degree. But PR provides a far better pathway to better aligning various hoped-for outcomes and proper incentives.
I could go on and on with examples, but one of the reasons I don’t like the Electoral College is that it incentivizes swing-state-oriented campaigns and not truly national ones.
Incentives matter, and incentives are shaped in large measure by institutional design.
To move away from the specific institutional features I frequently criticize, I would turn the question this way: where in our process of selecting people to govern us, that the system actually incentivize power-seeking politicians to align their personal goals for continued power with serving the public good in some general sense?
I say this knowing that there is no particularly perfect way to accomplish this for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that “the public good” is, itself, a contested notion.
Part of the reason I don’t like “messaging” arguments is that they are typically predicated on the notion that, deep down, our elections are about swaying the majority, and if we (whoever “we” might be) can get most people to see our point, we could win.
But where in this system is that true?
A minority of citizens controls the Senate. And Senators are selected, in the main, by primaries, and therefore by a minority of that state’s voters.
A minority of citizens can elect the President, and even when a majority does, it is predicated on a campaign and election process that focuses attention on a minority of the electorate.
The House ostensibly reflects a national majority, but it doesn’t always. And even when it technically does, less than 10% of the seats are elected in truly competitive districts (and that is lumping toss-ups with leaners–the true toss-ups are less than 5%). And, like the Senate, primaries mean that most U.S. representatives really owe their careers to a mere slice of their district’s population.
I would further note that a combination of the Senate and the President, alongside the random exigencies of death and voluntary retirements, gives us the whole of the federal judiciary and the Supreme Court in particular. I cannot stress enough how the current Court is the direct result of two presidents who came to power first after losing the Electoral College, and in particular, Trump massively lost the popular vote and managed to get three appointees to the Court, all confirmed by a Senate majority that did not represent the majority of US citizens.***
There is a lot to unpack from the above, but I will point to one clear theme: minority power over the majority.
Moreover, even if we take the notion of “We the People” to be about propertied white men, which is not an entirely unfair interpretation, the Framers would have assumed that, in terms of things like elections and legislative procedure that the majority of those propertied white men would prevail in most instances.
I point this out to acknowledge the democratic deficiencies of the early Republic, but to point out that even in that context, it wasn’t supposed to be minority rule, even if there were institutional features to protect against majority tyranny.
Really, there are two pathways to go down after 1789. One is the one that we seemed to be one: that of an aspirational liberal, pluralistic democracy that expanded the franchise over time and respected the diverse interests within a democratic polity. Or, one could just say that since in 1789 the system privileged white, wealthy, and almost certainly Christian men, well then that is what it still means.
As such, the competition is between liberal, pluralist democracy and fascist, reactionary, white nationalism.
At any rate, the Trump administration is quite definitively confirming something that was already obvious: partisanship is far more important than the separation of powers.**** And that partisanship will allow the constitutional guardrails to be utterly ignored.
The fact that removal via impeachment is basically dead letter speaks to this point. Under what circumstances can any of us imagine either party actually ousting their president? It would have to be something so egregious and obvious that resignation would come first. And in today’s polarized environment, I’m not seeing it.
Let me note that a system that rewards numeric minorities in elections helps exacerbate the natural flow of power into the hands of the wealthy. It is hard to ignore the growing power of the billionaire class in American politics. If anything, it is worth noting that part of what motivated Ernst to vote to confirm Hegseth was the real potential that Elon Musk would spend some of his spare change to fund a primary challenger. I could say much more on this, but this post is already crazy-long.
To bring this all back to the choices Nexon lays out as I elucidated above, we need reform that will better align incentives with majority sentiment. You can’t have an effective pluralistic democracy if the minority rules.
If we want better politics and better politicians, we need better incentive structures. That’s really the core of pretty much every post on this topic I have written.
By the way, anyone who reads this and says that all that minority power is because we have a republic, not a democracy, I would counter that what you are saying, really, is that you are using the term “republic” to cover for a preference for authoritarianism because you think that you are part of the governing minority.
*Unless leadership can heavily influence the primary, as we have seen Trump try to do.
**Not that Ernst has covered herself with glory after that vote, to wit: Joni Ernst and the Ongoing Devolution of the GOP.
***Bush did not get any appointees in his first term, but got two in his second (Roberts and Alito). I would argue that if he had not won the first term, he would not have bounced back and beat Gore in 2004. As such, his gateway to two Justices was a popular vote loss, even if he won the popular vote in 2004. Given the damage that Roberts has done, this is no small thing, nor is Alito’s obviously ideological hackery. But the unambiguous case is Trump. Trump lost the popular vote by millions and yet was able, with Mitch McConnell’s help, to get three Justices (Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Coney-Barrett) and to therefore shape the Court for a generation, unless a Democratic President and Senate decides to add seats.
****See my various posts on this:
