“Ungoverning: The Attack on the Administrative State and the Politics of Chaos” is a deep dive into how a concentrated attack on political institutions threatens to disable the essential workings of government.
Co-written by Nancy Rosenblum and Russell Muirhead, political theorists at Harvard and Dartmouth respectively, the book traces what “ungoverning” – this deliberate effort to dismantle government – does to democracy and government. With real-life examples from the past few years, they detail the threats and challenges of undermining systems and processes that have been in place for decades. Their book, “Ungoverning,” comes out Oct. 1, and they speak at The Charles Hotel on Sept. 17 in honor of National Voter Registration Day. The event will include a Q&A and a book signing, with the Charles Hotel’s Garden Bar open for cocktails and Mexican cuisine from Taqueria El Barrio. We interviewed Rosenblum Friday; her words have been edited for length and clarity.
How did you come up with this theory of “ungoverning,” and how do you define it?
Russ and I were struck early on in Donald Trump’s campaign by all the conspiracism, and it only continued. Right after Trump’s inauguration, he said he had the largest inaugural crowd ever, even bigger than Barack Obama’s, but when the National Park Service published photos of the event, the crowd was a modest size. His reaction? To say that the photographs were doctored in what was the first instance of conspiracism in the presidency. Russ and I wrote a book together in 2019 called “A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy,” which was an early explanation of what this did and how destructive it was. Then we got the idea that something else was going on that was startling and unfamiliar in American political culture: the incapacitation of the machinery of government. That’s what ungoverning means. There’s been a malignant degradation and vandalization of the departments of government and public administration at the federal and state levels.
Did this really start with Donald Trump?
I do think it really started with his presidency, but you can see how the Republican party got to this point. We can look back and see the signs. The real history begins with Ronald Reagan and his antigovernment rhetoric. He didn’t really attack the administrative agencies so much as their regulations, but that was the beginning. The Republican party, a conservative party, ultimately became a party of deregulation: There was Newt Gingrich, there was the Tea Party and then there was Trump. His movement took another giant and very different step by tearing down all the things that make immigration legitimate, the professionalism and expertise of civil servants, regular procedures that allow for deliberation and correction and so on. This movement for tearing the whole thing is where we are now, and Project 2025 is where Trump wants us to go.
How did you select your examples?
There are innumerable examples. There’s the emasculation of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention during the pandemic and his attack on the Justice Department and firings of attorney generals. Another big example is Trump’s zero-tolerance policy on immigration. He made that policy without consulting any of the agencies or departments that deal with immigration – he just invented it and tried to apply it. We used this to show that if you deconstruct the administrative state, you still can’t do what you want to do willfully, because you need people with experience and data processes and everything else to make things work. That’s why this policy didn’t work, except in its cruelty and disastrous results for families, and had to be withdrawn very quickly. He actually might have succeeded if he had consulted Interior and other departments to go along with it. There’s a necessity to administration, and its legitimacy being undone is a problem. Plus, the reason for it is terrifyingly simple: Trump and the Republican party, which is now at every level frankly an ungoverning party, want to be able to govern with personal will. It’s plain and simple authoritarianism, and you cannot operate a modern state on will alone.
What concerns you going into the upcoming election?
I’m concerned that the Democrats will lose and I’m concerned that we’ve got a 50-50 election. I’m concerned about Trump overturning the democracy, and I’m concerned about having a president who intends to die in office and cannot work with any established or knowledgeable people. There’s also this concern about what happens to a country where the governing apparatus is vandalized.
How would this continued ungoverning affect people individually?
It’s an important question, because to bring this home to people we have to say what it means for them personally. Even apart from the programs that are abandoned and mishandled, when you get away from a government that uses knowledgeable people and respects processes, you create a situation of constant chaos and insecurity of expectation. And what happens when you have this kind of chaos, with fear and insecurity about what’s going to happen next – Am I going to receive my Social Security check, is it going to be cut in half, am I going to get it at all? – is that people become fearful and they lose their sense of agency. In a democracy when people lose their sense of agency, they lose their capacity as citizens.
Nancy Rosenblum and Russell Muirhead present “Ungoverning: The Attack on the Administrative State and the Politics of Chaos” in conversation with James Carroll at 7 p.m. Sept. 17 at The Charles Hotel, 1 Bennett St., Harvard Square, Cambridge, in partnership with the Harvard Book Store. Free, or $32 with a copy of the book. Information is here.
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