Wanted: "blank spaces"
When things fall apart, some things must also come together.
Note: this was supposed to go out yesterday, but I messed up the scheduling. Sorry!
I’m back, and I have a question for you.
The dust has now largely settled from Trump’s election victory as well as his first cabinet appointments. Timothy Snyder, the noted historian of authoritarianism, calls those appointments a “decapitation strike”—a deliberate effort to dismantle the state’s most important institutions and capabilities by putting people hostile to them in charge.
My question for you is: what opportunities might this dismantling create?
This might seem downright perverse—an absurdist contortion to find a silver lining. But bear with me.
I posted before the election about where to look for hope if Trump won. This week I was discussing that question with Suzette Brooks Masters, who works for the Democracy Funders Network (a cross-ideological alliance of democracy-supporting donors), and who in 2022 published a report, “Imagining Better Futures for American Democracy.”
In our conversation, Suzette argued that dismantling government capabilities, as Trump and his minions intend to do, creates “blank spaces.” Agencies do things; suddenly they stop doing them. Some of those things may indeed have been unnecessary or excessive—there’s definitely too much bureaucracy. But some are still needed. Eliminating the bodies responsible may just mean those things stop being done; but in some cases it may create an opportunity for someone else to step in and do them instead—perhaps differently and better.
What’s an example? Well, there’s the rub. Neither Suzette nor I could think of one off the tops of our heads. That’s why I’m asking you, to tap into your own knowledge in sectors you work in. Where might be good places to look for such “blank spaces”? To take some examples from Project 2025, what if Trump shuts down the Department of Education, devolving its functions to the states? Or if the Bureau of Economic Analysis, Census Bureau, and Bureau of Labor Statistics are consolidated? Or if the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission stops collecting employment data based on race and ethnicity?
These questions matter because it’s essential to see the coming years as not merely a period of undoing but also of remaking. American institutions aren’t going to simply be a Jenga tower with bricks being taken out one by one until it collapses. Some vacuums at least will get filled—either by state and local bureaucracies taking over functions from federal ones, or by the private or social sectors filling in, or even by federal bureaucracies rerouting around damage. In some cases, stripping away an old, ossified process may make way for something nimbler or more modern.
I’m not trying to be Pollyanna-ish here. But we have to look for the opportunities that all the coming problems will create, else we just resign ourselves to an endless drumbeat of despair.
So if you have any ideas of things to look at, please post them in the comments or write to me at futurepolis@substack.com. Thank you!
This week’s links
What AI can’t do for democracy. I’ve been pretty interested in some of the experiments in using AI to enable mass-scale civic participation and deliberative processes. Here, pol sci prof Daniel Berliner throws some cold—or at least tepid—water on those ideas. A good, quick introduction to the various approaches as well as their shortcomings. (Boston Review)
All the reasons Kamala Harris lost. I wasted so much time right after the election reading hot takes. So did you, I’ll bet. I wish I’d seen this monumental round-up of the 10 types of takes—a veritable encyclopedia of left-wing hand-wringing. h/t Micah Sifry for pointing it out. (Waleed’s Substack)
The dangers of the DOGE. Civil service reform is not a bad idea; even a lot of civil servants want it, says Jen Pahlka. But if Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy aren’t careful, they could end up firing the people most open to change and “leav[ing] intact the part of the current workforce they least want to work with.” (Eating Policy)
Justice AI’d is justice not delayed. Prosecutors in Buenos Aires used a custom-built AI system for several years to draft rulings. By automating simple cases and leaving people more time for complex ones, it increased productivity by 300%. Now they’re trying out chatGPT. (Rest of World)