Experts reveal the dangers behind Trump and Project 2025’s radical agenda and how the deliberate dismantling of government agencies threatens democracy.
Imagine this week in the United States without FEMA and the National Weather Service. Imagine our water and air with no EPA, or investing with no SEC. Picture a government where all agencies are disbanded or rendered powerless.
This isn’t a nightmare scenario from some dystopian novel — it’s the alarming vision behind Project 2025 and the agenda of Donald Trump and JD Vance.
In this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, we explore the concept of “ungoverning” — a strategy far more radical than simply reducing taxes and regulation.
Our guests, Nancy Rosenblum and Russell Muirhead, in their new book, Ungoverning: The Attack on the Administrative State and the Politics of Chaos, argue how and why this deliberate dismantling of governmental capacity poses an existential threat to American democracy.
Rosenblum is a professor of ethics in politics and government emerita at Harvard University. Muirhead is a professor of democracy and politics at Dartmouth College. Together, they bring decades of expertise in political theory to bear on this crucial issue.
Rosenblum and Muirhead trace the Reaganesque roots of “ungoverning,” examine its current manifestations, and warn of its dire potential — even in a post-Trump era.
They discuss the practical implications of “ungoverning,” from the erosion of civil service protections for nonpartisan government experts to the weaponization of executive power. They also offer insights on how to combat this threat and ways to rekindle appreciation for effective governance.
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(As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to a constraint of resources, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like and hope that you will excuse any errors that slipped through.)
Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Schechtman. We talk a great deal about the dysfunction in Washington, the gridlock, the partisan bickering. But what if there’s something far more sinister at play? What if there’s a concerted effort to actually dismantle the very machinery of government itself? That’s the concept of ungoverned. A term that could be reshaping American democracy as we speak. It’s a phenomenon that goes beyond typical political opposition, striking at the heart of our institutions, already distrusted, and at the very ability of government to function.
My guests today, Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum, are two of America’s most respected political theorists. Their new book on governing is another stark warning about the state of our republic. What they examine is nothing short of the deliberate dismantling of government capacity, an act that threatens the very foundation of our democratic system. Who’s behind this movement? What are its roots in American political thought? And perhaps most crucially, what are the potential consequences if this trend continues unchecked?
We’ve heard figures like Steve Bannon openly call to burn it all down and tear down the administrative state. But this isn’t just inflammatory rhetoric. It’s part of a cynical strategy. If you take apart government, it’s not able to function, then you can criticize the failure of government and argue that we must trust those in charge. The very people who’ve actually destroyed the mechanism to get things done, as the Constitution intended. As we face unprecedented challenges from climate and global pandemics, the stakes couldn’t be higher.
Can a deliberately weakened government rise to meet these crises? And what, if anything, can or should be done to counter this trend of ungoverning? To examine all of this, I’m joined by Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum. Russell is a professor of democracy and politics at Dartmouth. Nancy is a professor of ethics and politics and government emerita at Harvard. Together, they’ve previously tackled the rise in conspiracy theories in politics, and now they’re sounding the alarm on what they see as an even graver threat.
It is my pleasure to welcome Nancy Rosenblum and Russell Muirhead to talk about ungoverning, the attack on the administrative state, and the politics of chaos. Russell, Nancy, thanks so much for joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy Podcast.
Nancy Rosenblum: A pleasure, Jeff.
Russell Muirhead: It really is. It is a pleasure. It’s an honor to be with you. Thank you.
Jeff: Well, it is great to have you both here. Thank you. When one looks at where we are today in terms of this nasty attitude towards government, one looks back to Ronald Reagan and saying things like, government was not the solution. Government is the problem. It seems that’s a place where a lot of this contemporary attitude started. Nancy, start with you.
Nancy: Well, I think that you can trace this back to Reagan and through other Republican administrations, but I would say that there’s a difference that we’ve got something new here. So long as the Republican Party was a conservative party, what they mainly wanted to do was to get rid of all kinds of regulations. They had in their own tax philosophy of limiting taxes to the very rich. They would disapprove of some of the agencies and what they did like Reagan and the EPA, but there was not a wholesale attack on what you’ve aptly called the machinery of government.
There was no attack on the administrative state altogether, and this is so unprecedented and so unfamiliar that we’ve given this an unfamiliar name on governing. And it really is a wholesale whiplash, unspecific attack on the government agencies and departments that shape and implement and enforce and adjudicate public policies of every kind, every law and regulation, every benefit, every burden, the day-to-day, and the emergencies. It’s an anti-governmentalism that’s wholesale and never before encountered.
Jeff: Russell, talk a little bit about what’s behind this anti-governmentalism, as Nancy calls it, if it goes beyond just reducing taxes, reducing regulations, those things that were very Reaganesque in that sense. For example, Grover Norquist was talking about shrinking the size of government so that it could drown in a bathtub. Talk a little bit about what lies behind this from a policy perspective.
Russell: I think really, in a sense, put your finger on it when you mention that quote from Reagan’s inaugural. Reagan, of course, very nuanced, actually very nuanced in the way he presents his thought. He says he was a Democrat, that he was for the New Deal, that he really just opposed the Great Society, the more extreme what he thought, more extreme version that liberalism took in the 1960s. He says, “I never left the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party left me.” And he says, “In the present crisis,” he says on inauguration, “government is not the solution to our problems, it’s the problem.”
So he has a qualifier on it, but his followers remove all the qualifiers. They remove the nuances little by little by little. And I think what happens is they fail to persuade a durable majority of Americans that we should in fact have a small government that takes very little responsibility for the wellbeing of the country. They can’t persuade people of that, they fight against– They make the entire definition of the Republican Party opposition to the Affordable Care Act after Obama passes it and the Democrats pass it in 2010. That’s all they talk about, “On day one I’m going to dismantle the Affordable Care Act.”
And they can’t do it when they have control of the House Senate and the executive in 2016, they can’t do it. Why? Because people in America don’t want them to do it. [laughs] They can’t convince the people. So I think their failure to persuade has caused a large number of them to become extreme burn-it-down types that are bent on destruction. They’ve given up on small government conservatism, on any kind of nuanced form of conservatism. Now because they can’t persuade people to go for that, they just want to destroy everything.
Jeff: And Nancy, what do they hope to accomplish by destroying everything? What’s the practical political benefit for them in doing that?
Nancy: Well, the practical political benefit for the man behind this, Donald Trump, who could never be doing this deconstruction of the administrative state if he didn’t have behind him a reactionary movement and a very compliant party that has given up his conservatism. What’s behind it for him is that if you do away, and I’d like to say a little bit more later about what it is that he actually does in destroying the administrative state, what he’s getting for it is an unconstrained personal rule.
Where his will and his commands unconstrained by the limits of office, unconstrained by a huge administrative state with expertise and due process, and so on, unconstrained, he can just command. I like to use a phrase to explain what Trump wants and what he’s getting. When he uses the phrase “my generals”, it’s not a shorthand way of saying what we know in the United States, which is that the military is subservient to civilian authority. He means it literally that these are my generals and if they are going to take my commands, whether or not it’s within law or international law.
Whether or not it’s ever been done historically, I’m going to take these generals with me into the street to attack, for example, a political protest. So what this is, is removing the expertise and the procedures that constrain the office, even the very powerful office of the president to liberate the personal will of someone who wants to be an unconstrained autocrat.
Jeff: One of the things that we seem to have here is almost a kind of perfect storm of forces coming together. Russell, you were talking about the inability of the right to really dismantle much of the administrative state in this post-Reagan period and how they’ve been unsuccessful in trying to convince the public of that. What we seem to have now is Trump trying to do this for his own personal power, as Nancy talks about, and at the same time, the party latching onto that as a way to accomplish what they’ve been trying to do for 40 years.
Russell: It’s amazing, isn’t it? It’s really amazing. And I think you’re right, there is a constituency beyond Trump for ungoverning. One part of the constituency I think consists of Christian nationalists, I think probably correctly, who believe that the only way they can really make the country into the kind of thing they want it to be is through the autocratic power of an executive like Trump. There’s a racial element to their ideal of the country. Immigrants from Norway are welcome, immigrants from Haiti, they eat pets. So there’s just a gross and brutal kind of racism to their ideal of the United States.
And they can’t take a diverse country like ours and make it into the white nationalist republic they want without a lot of concentrated personal power and an executive probably without a lot of violence. So there’s a constituency for ungoverned and then there is the even larger group that’s compliant. It doesn’t want Donald Trump. He’s not their first choice. It necessarily doesn’t have racist ideas about what the country should be, but they want power. And so what you see, senators, members of Congress go along with this because they’re desperately afraid of losing office.
They aren’t willing to pay the price, which I don’t think is a very high price that Liz Cheney paid. Stand up for what you believe, stand up for the ideals that really ought to define this country, even if it means you no longer get to be a member of Congress. And she was willing to pay that price but boy, she stands almost alone in that.
Jeff: But it also gives the right an opportunity to gut the federal government with respect to agencies and regulation and taxes, the things they wanted to do for years. But as you say, they’ve been unable to do because they’ve not been persuasive in trying to do it.
Nancy: Yes. So maybe I could say something that makes perhaps this a little more concrete for your listeners. If we think about the administrative state, it’s an ugly phrase, but it’s really about the work in a very large and complex society and democracy. It’s carried on by thousands of men and women, by people who collect taxes and take photographs for the National Park Service and collect intelligence for the State Department and register voters and who call themselves public servants. And what this attack on the capacity of democratic government that we call on governing is, is really a doing away with all of these things.
And here’s how it works. You get rid of experienced, knowledgeable personnel. Either you fire them or you quiet them. You shrug off the constraints of all the regular processes by which the EPA or the Food and Drug Administration goes about making its decisions. And here’s key, you point incessantly to a conspiracy, to a cabal of enemies of the people in every corner of the machinery of government. When Trump declared, “I will totally obliterate the deep state,” that’s what he meant. I think Russ and I agree on this that there’s a foundational untruth.
The deep state is the foundational lie that gives birth to all the rest, including “Stop the Steal”. And if I could say one more thing, what’s happening here is not just these attacks on procedure and expertise, but a real and successful attempt to delegitimate expertise and due process. If you think about it, it’s out with science. Science doesn’t matter. It’s out with procedures and checkpoints and balancing out with all of that. And when you say these things are delegitimated, as we do, it means not only that you dislike them or you distrust the scientists at the EPA.
It means that you no longer have to be obedient to their rulings. That is, it’s a warrant for noncompliance. And that’s the connection we think between ungoverning and the threats and the intimidation and the violence that we’ve seen around COVID and around all kinds of political action.
Jeff: Talk, Nancy, about the role of the judiciary so far in this effort.
Nancy: The role of the judiciary is a complicated thing. They’ve made some recent decisions that are absolutely in line with parallel to, and perhaps deliberately in the service of the deconstruction in the administrative state of ungoverning. One decision was the decision in 2022 to change one of the basic doctrines of American law, what was called the Chevron decision, which said that when the legislature makes legislation that’s open-ended and the administrative state makes decisions about exactly how it is that you go about limiting greenhouse gases, that the court should be deferential to this.
The court doesn’t have the capacity to judge whether the legislature could have made more specific legislation and whether the administrative state is somehow trespassing across its bounds. This was a doctrine for 40 or 50 years, and modern democratic machinery of government requires it. Well, in 2022, the Supreme Court said no more deference. We’re going to take a look at every ruling that comes out of the EPA or the FDA or some tax agency and we are going to judge whether it’s amassing of too much power in the administrative agencies and departments.
And Elena Kagan in her dissent of this said something really quite dramatic. She said she can’t imagine anything more dangerous than the Supreme Court taking upon itself to say what the law is or what the law should be. They have no expertise and they have no authority in this realm, and they’ve seized it. So in that sense, the Supreme Court has been completely an accessory of the deconstruction of the administrative state. And in other more recent opinions, they’ve backed off and been more moderate. And Russ, maybe you want to say something about how we’ve struggled to answer Jeff’s question about the role of the court here.
Russell: We really did wrestle with trying to figure out what the court is trying to do. There are different ways of interpreting. One is to say, well, they’re really just doing their job. They’re policing the boundaries of authority that administrators have, reconciling those boundaries with the Constitution in ways that are careful and responsible. Maybe we would disagree with some of their decisions, maybe we would agree, but the ultimate purpose isn’t to destroy or deconstruct. That was one possible frame for understanding. And I think that we were drawn to that.
We thought that might be the right hypothesis. At the same time, there’s a kind of extreme rhetoric coming from justices like Roberts in decisions about the administrative state, where he makes very clear that he thinks the entire enterprise is actually unconstitutional. And that’s I think when we see their cards clearly in those moments, even when the decision isn’t one that says the entire administrative state is unconstitutional, there’ll be this throwaway comment about how the administrative state doesn’t fit into any of the three branches isn’t part of the constitution.
And that’s when I think we glimpse that they’re certainly tempted by a much, much more aggressive purpose, which is to reshape the entire federal government and put it back in the form that it had in the 1920s or maybe ideally in the 1820s and really dismantle all of the institutions that were built up by Franklin Roosevelt during the New Deal in order to create a government that could govern and could solve the kinds of problems that citizens experience in the modern world. And so I think that much more aggressive and comprehensive purpose is at least one that some justices, five or six of them, entertain and are sympathetic to.
Nancy: Of course, the most important decision that the court made in regard to our subject is the immunity decision, that the president appears to be immune to prosecution for any action he takes that falls within the realm of the oath of office of the presidency and Trump seized on this. He says, “I have an Article 1,” this is a quote, “I can do anything I want.”
Russell: Article 2, I have an Article 2.
Nancy: I’m sorry, in Article 2, “I can do anything I want.” And one of the things he wants to do, he tried in the past and it didn’t work out for him, is to use the Insurrection Act to use the military against riots and all kinds of other imagined attacks on himself in the nation.
Jeff: I want to come back to the courts and the way this seems to be consistent with another idea that the courts have continued to put forth, which is this notion of the unitary executive basically controlling these federal agencies. Nancy?
Nancy: Yes. So far, the court has not moved in that direction, although that’s always been a fear. But the unitary executive says that he has complete authority over this enormous set of institutions that we call the administrative state. I think that the court has not gone there. There are ideologues who wanted, but at this point, I think the Immunity decision and the Chevron decision, and the general tendency of a majority of life-tenured justices on the court to give expanded authority to an already imperial president is a problem.
Jeff: And we see evidence of this in some of the things in Project 2025.
Russell: Yes, that’s right. So Project 2025 codifies this general purpose of destruction. It goes through the agencies one by one and lays out in a plainness with an honesty that Trump can’t stand. That’s why I think he’s tried to disavow it. It lays out what the plan is, to eliminate, for instance, the protections of the civil service that protect experts in the civil service from being fired by partisans in the political branch every time there’s a change of government. Look, the expert civil services, this creation of the 19th century, it goes back to just the most elemental legislation of the late 19th century that tried to replace the spoils system and patronage with a civil service of competent people.
And Project 2025 wants to remove those protections so that an ascendant Trump can appoint MAGA loyalists throughout the bureaucracy, throughout the administration. And I think there is this idea that the president, of course, should control everything in the executive branch. It’s almost like a school-child civics idea. You elect a president, they get to do what they want. And so from that perspective, it can seem maybe surprising that there are employees in the Bureau of Labor Statistics or something who can’t be fired by the President.
But that’s essential, again, to creating a government that can govern. You need, for instance, accurate statistics about unemployment or economic growth, even if those statistics constitute facts that are unwelcome or bad for the president’s popularity. And so a government that governs requires giving these people, these expert civil servants, some level of protection from punishment by self-seeking politicians.
Nancy: I think that Trump’s distancing from this monumental project construction 2025. It’s not really about disagreement with it. I think that we both think– It’s simply that Trump is not in fact, programmatic. He’s not about remaking government. He’s not an institutionalist. He has no governing philosophy. He simply wants to command. And there’s a way in which the programmatic nature of 2025 may actually give him some jitters. That is, it’s putting the administrative state in the hands of all kinds of heritage and other very policy ideologically-oriented organizations.
And he doesn’t want to be constrained even by them, not even by a plan that would presumably increase his power, because his assault on the administrative state can’t be rationalized. That’s part of why we call it “Ungoverning.” And Ezra Klein in a recent column put it beautifully. He said, “Very few plans survive contact with Donald Trump.” I think that that may turn out to be, at least in part, true of 2025.
Jeff: How much of the damage, how much of the groundwork for this though, has already been laid just by the Chevron decision in and of itself?
Russell: I do think that there’s a way in which the court makes this chaotic, destructive, often racist, and reactionary movement. It makes it respectable by clothing it in constitutional garb. And so I think there’s actually a rhetorical purpose or a rhetorical effect to the Supreme Court decisions that have disempowered the administrative state and have also in these sidebar comments delegitimated it. And they’ve also– Not to mention that just practically speaking, the presidential Immunity decision and the erasure of Chevron have cleared the way for a new administration to dismantle agencies and departments without being checked.
Nancy: Right. And I think that’s an important point because the court has to move case by case, argument by argument. Trump, if he’s reelected, can simply go in there and obliterate these departments, fire these people, have a Schedule F that removes civil service protection from them, put in not just loyalists to him, which he did last time, but really some of his crazy people to run these agencies and in effect, to dismantle the administrative state. So of course, your emphasis on the court is very important and constitutionally important.
But as a matter of practical politics in the moment, if he’s reelected, I think he’s going to do all kinds of damage that the courts couldn’t have anticipated and before they could even rule on them.
Jeff: Nancy, talk about Schedule F. Explain to our listeners what that means and how it does protect civil service at this point.
Nancy: There are tens of thousands of people who work in these bureaus and agencies all across the federal government not including the postal workers. And they have a protection. Civil servants have a protection that they can’t be fired at will. You can’t just go in and say, “You are out.” There have to be reasons. There have to be reasons for resignation. There have to be reasons for moving them from one place to another. There are all kinds of procedures and protections that govern civil service. Now, there are–
Russell: [crosstalk]
Nancy: I’m sorry.
Russell: I’m sorry to talk over you there for a second, Nancy, but I just wanted to interject. The idea here is of a nonpartisan expert, professional civil service. There are limitations. The law limits what civil servants can do with respect to partisan activity. They’re really not meant to be public partisans. They’re meant to be public servants in a nonpartisan capacity. And the basic intuitive idea is, look, if after a hurricane, after a storm, we want to get clean water to Asheville, North Carolina, we need people who are competent at logistics and who can make that happen.
And so we need these nonpartisan civil servants ready to serve the political branches, whether they’re run by Republicans, Democrats, or both.
Nancy: And we saw Trump doing just the opposite during COVID. You may remember that he was very reluctant and dragged his feet about sending medical supplies to blue states whose governors had criticized him about something. So that’s what it means to undo the regularity of administrative work and for the president to intervene at will.
Jeff: What is your sense, and both of you, Nancy, start with you, of how far along we are in this at this point, even if Trump is not reelected here? How far along are we in this damage and what can be done to reverse it?
Nancy: How far along we are in this damage is something that we struggle to understand. I think that we can say this, that ungoverning now has a history. We’ve seen how it can work and why it works, and that we have a political party and a leader of that party, and God knows, Vance, if he had to take over, would fill that role for ungoverning. We also know that it has a constituency. And we think that it has a future even without Trump because it can be carried on by a rogue political party, this illegitimate descendant of the conservative Republican Party.
And there’s a reactionary movement that wants to bring it all crashing down. And there’s a majority of life-tenured justices of the Supreme Court who seem to be clearing the way. So I think that if there’s a Republican administration, whether or not it’s Trump, it will have a future. And we should also add that this business of ungoverning has extended to the states and to the governors of many states. So I think it will have a future, but I also think that if we have a series of successful administrations like the Biden administration, and it lets one house of Congress that’s democratic, it will eventually fade away.
Because, in the end, we need state capacity to do what a modern state has to do.
Russell: In terms of how far along it’s gone, I think the future is open. But look, it’s tempting to identify this with one person, the person of Donald Trump who really is a singular person in American politics. No one in my lifetime has approximated the demagogic power of Donald Trump. There are many who would like to have that power. I think Ted Cruz would love to have it. Tom Cotton would love to have it. JD Vance would love to have it. None of them do. And so it’s tempting to think that when Donald Trump passes from the scene as any mortal person must, that this will go away.
But as Nancy said, it’s in a certain sense, come to define today’s Republican Party. Ungoverning has displaced conservatism as the purpose, as the philosophy of the Republican Party. When we look at the Republican majority, for instance, in the House of Representatives, we do not see a group that has any interest in governing. They can’t pass bills that their own leadership wants to pass. They have no interest, for instance, in keeping the government running. They can’t fund the government. The only way the Republican leadership can pass bills that fund the government is to get Democrats to vote for those bills.
And they can’t even abide by having a leadership. They eat their own leaders alive over and over and over. And one leader after another walks away from Washington half-eaten and despondent. People like Boehner, people like Ryan and say, this is an ungovernable party. It’s an ungovernable party of ungoverning. So that’s why I think Nancy and I do worry that ungoverning could well carry on long after Trump leaves the scene. That’s why we wrote the book. I mean, yes, in the immediate moment, we think there’s a great threat posed by Donald Trump.
But after the election’s over, regardless of whether Trump wins or loses, we’re still going to have to train our eyes on this phenomenon, on this threat, understand that what we’re up against is not your, whatever, mothers or father’s conservatism. It’s something really different and much more destructive. And so I think how far along it’s gone, it’s gone really far, much farther than we might have ever thought it could. And you left it, yes, and you popped another question in there, which is what can we do about it? And I think that’s a great question. And we do want to speak to that too.
In the first instance, Nancy and I are just trying to name it, we really want to just bring that lens into focus so that everybody can see what we’re up against and understand it. And in the second moment, we want to cultivate an appreciation for a government that governs and for the institutions that make that possible. I just mentioned Asheville, North Carolina, we’re all hearing from friends there. We read about the fact that there is no clean water in Asheville. And everyone I think says, “What’s the government going to do? How’s the government going to fix this?”
In moments like this, everybody, Republican and Democrat, conservative and liberal, everybody looks to the government to respond. And in order to respond to that, in order to solve all problems, in order to make any law real and effective, the government has to have an administrative capacity. But this capacity is just absent from the civics education that children receive, that adults receive. We learn about the legislature, we learn about the court. We learn about the constitution, but we don’t learn about the institutions that actually allow the government to do its work.
And we don’t learn much about the kinds of people who work in those institutions. We don’t hear their stories. We don’t hear the stories about often heroic efforts that they go to to solve public problems and serve public needs. And so part of it is we need to open our eyes to what our government is, to who works in it, and to what it does. And I know that, look, we’re teachers, so we believe in teaching. But if people are completely ignorant about what their government is, then they can give themselves over to cowboy fantasies that we don’t need a government at all.
We can just ride around on our horses corralling cows. We don’t need a government. And that’s not true. As again, just this latest natural disaster reminds us.
Jeff: And finally, Nancy, really to Russell’s point about what we don’t, what we need, is there an intellectual underpinning somewhere, some individual or group, is it a heritage or– that justifies on some intellectual level, this notion of ungoverning?
Nancy: I don’t think so. The United States does have a tradition, a political philosophy of what’s called libertarianism, which wants maximum freedom for individuals from any kind of constraint. But that’s never been connected to the notion of actually destroying the capacity to govern. It’s been a philosophical position about freedom. I want to just emphasize something that Russ said that we’re trying to make people understand that there is this thing called the administrative state and what it means that it’s in peril.
And I think the best way for people to focus on it is with elections, because “Stop the Steal” is an attempt to alter the outcome of an election, but “Stop the Steal” works through the administration of elections, right? By intimidating and threatening poll workers, by making people frightened to participate, by attacking polling places and so on and so forth. So what we’re seeing is how an attack on the administration of election is actually an attack on elections. And you can use that, I think, formula in all kinds of areas of government.
Russell: On the question of the philosophy underpinning, it’s such an interesting question. And my God, I agree with Nancy that it’s astonishing that this isn’t the fruit or the expression of a philosophic tradition. And just to underline what Nancy just said, take small government libertarianism, it believes in a state. You’ve got to have a state enforcing basic laws that prevent people from harming people and punish them when they do, even if you’re an ultra-small state libertarian. By contrast, look at ungoverning, it goes after institutions like the IRS.
And it doesn’t say, “We’re going to reform the tax code and change it. We’re going to put in a flat tax, or 999,” or whatever the plan is. It says, “We’re going to destroy the capacity of the state to collect taxes. We’re going to make the state into one where it cannot collect a penny from businesses, from importers, from citizens.” And that’s not conservatism, that’s chaos, that’s anarchy. That’s what unleashes and empowers mob violence. There will be no states. So that’s why as political theorists we’re looking at this, and as citizens, we’re like, “What? This has no precedent in the annals of political history. It has no philosophy underneath it, except for this maybe aspiration to raw personal power.”
Jeff: Russell Muirhead, Nancy Rosenblum, their book is Ungoverning: The Attack on the Administrative State and the Politics of Chaos. Russell, Nancy, I thank you both so much for spending time with us today.
Nancy: Thank you for having us, Jeff.
Russell: Thank you for your excellent questions and thank you for having us.
Jeff: Thank you both. And thank you for listening and joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I hope you join us next week for another radio WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman. If you like this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to whowhatwhy.org/donate.
