Democrats Can Be Defiant Now And Hopeful For The Future
The party should start imagining what the government will look like if they ever re-inherit it, and commit now to rebuilding right.
Democrats have become adept over many years at re-helming government agencies that have been gutted or degraded by Republican sabotage and neglect.
More than two decades ago, they established the Center for American Progress to house a Democratic government in exile, such that when George W. Bush gave way to Barack Obama, scores of liberal-minded wonks and administrators could stroll back into the agencies and rehabilitate them. (Obviously it was more complicated than this, but you get the idea…)
When Obama became president, though, and then when Joe Biden took over from Donald Trump, they had the benefit of a seasoned civil service, which hadn’t turned over that much. The government holds a lot of institutional memory. It doesn’t take magical executive powers to transform EPA from an agency that enforces environmental rules to one that ignores pollution and back again when you’re talking about essentially the same set of people. Under Republican presidents, DOJ’s civil rights division stops trying to advance civil equality and retrains its efforts on protecting the country from the scourge of reverse racism; when a Democratic president takes over, those same lawyers can go right back to doing the work the division was established to do. This pattern repeats across much of the bureaucracy.
But that’s not necessarily going to be the case after four more years of Trump.
He seems intent on restaffing the entire government, including the civil service, with loyalists. Some federal employees will pledge loyalty; he’ll fire others; yet more will quit when asked to carry out depraved orders.
And once the government’s been dismantled in that way, it’ll be much harder for a new administration to pick up the pieces. If we have fair elections in the future, and Democrats win, they may not be able to waltz in and instruct civil servants to dust off old playbooks.
Which means today’s Democrats should start thinking now about recruiting and elevating candidates and leaders with big ideas about how to rebuild, and the willingness to take the tough votes that will be required to do so.
IF YOU STRIKE ME DOWN…
Establishing right at the outset that Democrats will restore a better federal government, no matter how much damage Trump and the GOP do to it, serves two purposes.