Where to find hope if Trump wins

Yes, it will be bad, but a lot of interesting governance and policy work is going to happen under the radar, laying the groundwork for the future.

Image by DALL-E 3

In every dark period of history there have been people who nurtured the seeds of a better future until the ground was fertile for them to sprout again. This is what Futurepolis is about: the conviction that, even if democracy backslides for a while, there will continue to be a lot of interesting and important work on defending, rebuilding, and improving it for when society is more receptive.

This bears emphasizing right now. In the last couple of weeks I’ve sensed a shift in mood. Many (not all!) progressives who were cautiously optimistic that Kamala Harris would win the US election have begun to steel themselves for a Donald Trump victory, though they’re still essentially tied in the polls. Even if Harris does win, it will almost certainly be close enough for Republicans to sow chaos in the aftermath and possibly subvert the result.

This newsletter is generally non-partisan, but whatever your policy views on immigration, abortions, tariffs, and the like, a Trump presidency would unequivocally be disastrous for democratic institutions and norms. Even assuming some of the more apocalyptic scenarios are overwrought, it will take time to get things moving back in the right direction—four years if we’re lucky, a generation if we’re not.

So what are the seeds of hope that will survive? A couple of weeks ago I outlined a framework with six main pillars of the future-of-governance movement. Today I’ll use that framework to try to make some predictions.

By the way: Obviously, I’ll be talking about the US here. But remember that much of the most interesting work in reimagining governance is happening in other countries. I plan to continue covering that in Futurepolis, and indeed, one of my goals is to make this newsletter less US-focused than it has been up to now.

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The TL;DR: It’s mostly bad, of course. The main silver lining is that as the federal arena becomes more toxic, the local level will become more vibrant. States and cities are already where the most interesting policy and governance innovations are happening, and they will likely become more so.

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1. Autocracy prevention

Shoring up or tweaking existing democratic institutions by reforming campaign finance, countering gerrymandering, introducing ranked-choice voting, changing the Electoral College, and so on.

Needless to say, autocracy prevention isn’t going to happen when there’s an autocrat in charge. But in any case, many of the above-mentioned reforms have been touted for a long time and made little or no headway because they threaten the vested interests of lawmakers on both sides.

Instead, the main battlefield for autocracy prevention under a Trump presidency will be in the courts. Philanthropic foundations are preparing to move the resources in their democracy programs into supporting legal challenges by civil-rights groups, labor unions, and others that can slow down his policy agenda. Their money will also be needed to help these groups defend against attacks such as politicized criminal investigations and tax audits.

Additionally, some bureaucrats will try to gum up the works by slow-walking the implementation of new rules, giving misleading information to their political masters, and other forms of internal resistance as they did during the first Trump presidency. Opposition to executive orders will also come at the state and local levels, especially from state attorneys-general. However, the White House will be better prepared to bulldoze them this time around.

2. Democracy reinvention

Experiments in deliberative democracy, crowdsourced lawmaking, and other forms of civic participation outside of elections.

If all politics is local, it’s going to become even more so when the federal government is being dismantled. In part this is because of some of the changes proposed, like closing the Department of Education and transferring its responsibilities to the states, will explicitly localize decision-making. But all of the most interesting experiments in rethinking democracy are also local, and in the absence of progress at the federal level, more of them are likely to flourish.

Small-scale deliberative democracy initiatives of the kind I’ve written about or linked to, like the citizen’s assembly on youth homelessness in Oregon or the gun safety dialogue in Tennessee, are already becoming more common. There’ll be opportunities for more of them as states and municipalities struggle to figure out their own policies in a growing federal policy vacuum. Grassroots organizations working on things like housing fairness, racial equality, labor rights, and environmental protection will become the front line of activism in these fields as the opportunities for change at the national level wither.

The National Civic League recently published the first installment of a map of organizations promoting healthy democracy, in categories such as civic tech, peacebuilding, participatory democracy, and voter engagement. It covers only 10 states so far and already has more than 1,300 groups in it. Another new resource is the US Democracy Hub, from Impala and the Democracy Funders’ Network, which lists more than 4,000 nonprofits, making it easier for them to find like-minded collaborators and easier for funders to find new grantees. (Though I worry that it also makes it easier for anti-democratic forces to find new targets to attack.)

In short, there’s already a vibrant ecosystem of local democracy efforts and it will have incentives to grow under a Trump presidency.

3. Government effectiveness

Faster, more iterative policymaking, better digital public service delivery, improved technology procurement processes, and so on.

The first Trump administration’s policy agenda did include some interesting proposals on tech and bureaucracy, including making agencies go paperless; creating a better “customer experience” for digital government services; and creating a Government Effectiveness Advanced Research (GEAR) Center, a public-private partnership for improving service delivery.

However, it’s not clear how much progress there was on any of these fronts (though maybe some readers of Futurepolis can tell me?) Certainly there’s no sign the GEAR center ever became real. And confusingly, in its final weeks the Trump administration eliminated some of its commitments to improving service delivery, which the Biden administration promptly reinstated.

The one cause for optimism is that government service delivery is unsexy and not (yet, at least) very politicized. A bipartisan bill on improving it seems to be making good progress through Congress.

Trump has also promised to appoint Elon Musk as his government efficiency czar, to cut costs and eliminate pesky regulation. But while that might speed up some technology procurement, it’s unlikely to make it work better (see Jen Pahlka’s excellent Recoding America on how broken this process is and why it regularly leads to massive delays, cost overruns, and products that don’t do what they were supposed to). And let’s not even talk about the massive conflict of interest in giving that job to man whose companies get billions of dollars in government contracts.

4. Policy

Tech regulation, antitrust law, labor law, tax reform, and other ways to make an digitally powered economy fairer and more sustainable.

Trump’s first term was rather aggressive on antitrust. The Justice Department went after Google in the biggest antitrust case since Microsoft in 1998, while the FTC set its sights on Facebook. Lina Khan, Biden’s FTC chair, has since launched several big cases of her own, and JD Vance, Trump’s would-be veep, has said encouraging things about her.

But the word is that Trump will probably fire Khan. Several tech billionaires are now backing Trump in the hopes of gaining influence over policy—Musk, of course, chief among them. Meanwhile, Trump has already promised to kill Biden’s executive order imposing guardrails on the AI industry on the grounds that it will limit innovation; he’s obsessed with the US staying ahead of China. That, of course, means less scrutiny of how giants like OpenAI suck up data, surveil their users, and build energy-hungry and water-thirsty data centers.

Trump once talked of repealing Section 230, but the calculus has shifted.

An interesting unknown is what will happen to Section 230, the bit of law that protects tech platforms from liability for what their users publish. Lots of politicians on both sides hate it. Republicans think it gives platforms free rein to censor conservative viewpoints (true, but there’s no evidence they’ve done so). Democrats think it absolves platforms of responsibility for most hate speech and misinformation (also true, but the First Amendment is a bigger cause of the problem).

The reality is that weakening or repealing Section 230 would probably backfire on Republicans. Trump once talked of doing it, but the calculus has shifted since he launched Truth Social and since Musk bought Twitter, both of which benefit from the law just as much as any other platform. Project 2025 (the hard-right policy agenda Trump implausibly claims he has nothing to do with) talks about getting the FCC to apply the law differently to limit platforms’ scope for so-called “censorship,” but it’s not clear how much impact that will have. So this law could well stay intact, and for all its haters, there are plenty of good reasons for keeping it.

When it comes to labor rights, Trump is of course notoriously opposed to them. Project 2025 promises to outlaw unions for all public-sector workers, as well as to scrap the federal minimum wage and various other protections. But attempts to give a fairer shake to gig workers might still happen at a city and state level.

There are lots of other tech-related policy questions, and Tech Policy Press has an excellent guide to how they may play out under Trump or Harris.

5. Peacebuilding

Conflict prevention and transformation, community conciliation and mediation, deradicalization, depolarization, and other efforts to heal community rifts.

Many of the organizations listed on the aforementioned US Democracy Hub fall into this bucket. My admittedly highly anecdotal sense from my recent motorcycle trip across the US is that many, perhaps most, Americans are tired of the extreme partisanship of national politics and would welcome efforts at reconciliation in their local communities.

It’s from efforts like these that any realistic movement against partisanship and polarization is going to grow.

Of course, that will work better in some places than others, and the frenzied national news cycle constantly undermines any work being done to draw people closer together. Still, it’s from efforts like these, however small and localized, that any realistic movement against partisanship and polarization is going to grow.

6. The information environment

Anti-disinformation work, media business models, digital public infrastructure, copyright law, and other things to make public discourse more truth-centered and less polarizing.

It’s a mixed picture here. We can obviously expect many more attacks on the pro-democracy media (a term I now prefer to “mainstream” or “liberal” media). Those might include jailing journalists and withholding broadcast licenses. On the flipside, from 2016 to 2020 the media enjoyed the “Trump bump,” a sugar high of outrage-fueled traffic. They may do so again.

But I think outrage journalism is bad for society. Everyone I know is sick of it; it’s depressing and breeds a sense of hopelessness. I want to see fewer dire warnings about authoritarianism and more stories about what people are doing to fight it (which, again, is why I started Futurepolis).

At any rate, I think generative AI poses a bigger threat to the media than Trump does. First, it’s accelerating the production of both disinformation and “slop,” the mot du jour for high-volume, low-quality content drowning out reliable information online. Second, as search engines like Google prioritize AI-written answers over links to websites, traffic to news outlets could fall sharply (though the jury is still out.)

So if Trump and generative AI are both flooding the world with garbage, what’s to stem the flow? I think it will get a lot worse before it gets better, but one near-term sliver of hope is that generative AI can play good cop as well as bad cop.

It’s already somewhat effective at content moderation and fact-checking or flagging falsehoods, as well as at detecting AI-generated images and videos. In principle, this could take much of the burden off human content moderators and allow for larger-scale moderation. There will be an arms race between AI content generators and detectors, but in the best case this problem ends up like email spam—a scourge that is kept largely under control.

That, however, depends on whether tech companies implement those tools, or standards for labeling AI-generated content. Email providers had an incentive to install spam filters; their product was useless otherwise. I’m not sure what the incentive would be in this case.

Finally, there are lots interesting attempts to develop less toxic public spaces online: see for instance the work of MIT’s Center for Constructive Communication, UMass Amherst’s Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure, New_ Public, and some of the newer social media platforms in the “fediverse” like Mastodon and Bluesky. Their main weakness: they’re all tiny compared to the big platforms, and it’s not clear what could make them grow.

In conclusion

These may not seem like many hooks on which to hang hope for the future. But even in the worst scenarios there’s plenty of work to do that will lay the groundwork for when the dark times end—which they assuredly will.

Links

The keys to ending an autocracy. Autocracies and democracies alike rely on “pillars of support”—unions, businesses, faith leaders, media outlets, the judiciary, security forces, etc—that lend them legitimacy and, by switching loyalties, can bring about a regime change. Examples of these pillars pushing regimes towards democracy abound, from Brazil, Poland, South Africa, Chile, Ukraine, Hungary, South Korea, and others. (Just Security)

We don’t need hope, we need heroism. Written about the climate crisis, this essay could equally apply to the democracy crisis. Hope says that if we try hard enough, we can avert disaster—but that just breeds apathy in anyone who thinks it’s already too late. Heroism says disaster may be inevitable, but that fighting to delay or temper it is nonetheless worthy in its own right. (Noema)

Behold! An AI-enabled agora. Some scientists have built what they call a “Habermas Machine,” an AI system for moderating discussions on contentious issues. They say it helps create more common ground and can work with far larger groups of people than a human mediator can manage. (Science)

Ukrainians still have time for deliberative democracy. In the city of Zviahel, they’re holding Ukraine’s first ever citizens’ assembly, on the use of public space. Admittedly, Zviahel is a long way from the front, but it’s heartening to see democratic experiments going on even in wartime. (Bürgerrat)

How to democratize AI companies. Even within some of these companies there’s discomfort at how much power they have. A group of researchers offers a playbook on how to increase access, give users more of a voice in developing AI, spread the risks and benefits more fairly, and govern the use of AI models. (Collective Intelligence Project)