As we knock on doors to mobilize voters, we must be prepared to address
widespread distrust in government, whether it manifests in anger or apathy. If people give up on government—which we formed to solve problems together that we cannot tackle alone—they retreat or turn to strongmen for answers. How do we debunk the “deep state” conspiracy and shine a light on the essential role of government in delivering on our needs?
There is a bleak logic to gutting public protections and public services: When government is unable to deliver, people become resentful and receptive to authoritarian fixes.
This summer I worked on
a new toolkit, recently released by Race Forward, to help shift the narrative and block the far-right’s assault on public administration. It offers ideas for talking about what public administration is, and what it can be. While we know that the federal government produced or maintained many of the inequities and injustices we see today, it can also be part of the solution. Throughout history, movements for civil rights, workers’ rights, women’s rights, and many others taught us how to bend government towards justice.
We must begin by taking people’s affective responses to government seriously. Working class and poor people feel disaffected and disempowered because government hasn’t delivered for them. The class divide is real, the power and wealth gap between the rich and the rest of us is growing, racial injustice remains entrenched, misogyny is on the rise. Decades of neoliberal policies, pushing the commercialization of everything, have produced a full-blown crisis for working class people, disproportionately people of color. Privatization, disinvestment, and corporate capture have hollowed out public institutions and dismantled public goods. Our human rights are violated on a daily basis by unaffordable, commoditized housing and healthcare, food deserts, grocery price gauging, and hazardous workplaces, thereby
shortening the lifespans of people pushed to the economic margins. Public administrative agencies are seen as bureaucratic barriers at best, and as controlling, coercing, and policing Black, brown, and poor people at worst.
This crisis has produced a fertile ground for a far-right plan,
laid out by Project 2025, to capture the institutions of public administration. By delegitimizing government and setting it up to fail, authoritarians make it easier for themselves to take it over and turn government against communities.
Lying about federal disaster response fits neatly into this strategy. Rumors about the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) seizing people’s property and spending aid dollars on migrants
sow distrust, division, and hate and undercut the agency’s ability to deliver. This sets the stage for the far-right’s goal to end any government action to address the climate crisis. Project 2025 plans to drastically shrink federal disaster aid, shift costs to localities, privatize federal flood insurance, and terminate grants for community preparedness. Because climate research and planning are seen as harmful to what Project 2025 calls “prosperity,” the plan is to break up the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), including the National Weather Service that sends out hurricane warnings, and commercialize weather forecasting, likely putting warnings behind paywalls.
There is a bleak logic to gutting public protections and public services: When government is unable to deliver, people become resentful and receptive to authoritarian fixes.
This is particularly painful because it comes at a time when the Biden-Harris administration has taken some steps toward making federal agencies more responsive to people’s needs. This includes not only
climate-related investments and jobs, but also new regulations that advance environmental justice, protect workers from heat exposure, increase overtime eligibility, ban non-compete clauses, and limit credit card penalty fees. But such agency actions often remain invisible, obscured by bureaucratic procedures, buried in the tax code, or held up in courts. We can surface these tangible efforts when we talk to potential voters and point to the purpose and possibilities of public administration.
A Trump presidency would reverse both recent progress and systemic protections embedded in the work of federal agencies. Project 2025 is not shy about terminating the enforcement of hard-won civil rights laws and privileging the narrow interests of corporations that price gauge, pollute, and exploit our communities. It would staff agencies with white Christian nationalists who seek to divide and dominate us.
These threats cannot be averted through a merely defensive stance. By calling on people to defend “democracy,” establishment politicians ignore popular anger, rooted in persistent experiences of inequity and injustice. Promoting an “opportunity economy” that relinquishes the goal of equitable outcomes simply doesn’t cut it. We can only block a far-right power grab if we tackle the injustices that fuel resentment. To mobilize people, we must have a compelling vision for turning government into a force for equity and justice. The job of public agencies is to protect our rights and deliver on our needs, and we can make them do just that—as long as we stand together, united.
In this election and beyond, we must contest the far-right narrative that undermines government and public administration. When people are reluctant to engage because the system is not working for them, let’s raise their expectations of government as a protector of rights, a provider of public goods and services, and a site for exercising our collective power.
