In early February, I wrote a blog post that laid out some lessons for today’s USA’s from South Africa’s efforts to protect the guardrails of democracy. Here is a link to the piece. A hundred days into the Trump administration, how well does the piece stand the test of time? While the four lessons it highlighted (see the end of this post for a summary…..) remain reasonably on target, for at least three reasons South Africa’s experience turns out to be a more imperfect lens for understanding how to meet the challenges of sustaining democracy in the face of hostile actors than I realized at the time of writing.
First is a fundamental difference between South Africa’s early 1990s struggles to stay on a democratic path and those of the contemporary USA. In South Africa, those in control of the state (FW de Klerk’s National Party), while hesitant, wanted to go down the path of democratic constitutional reform. By contrast, in early 2025 USA, the levers of government seem unequivocally in the hands of those who have demonstrated no commitment to a constitutional democratic order.
Second, while top-down cronyism aptly describes at least part of Jacob Zuma’s South Africa, and Donald Trump’s USA, its consequences depend in important part on the character and commitment of the leaders. I won’t try to parse which of the two is more corrupt. But what does seem clear is that Jacob Zuma – whose life had been shaped by the African National Congress and its struggle against apartheid (including ten years’ imprisonment with Nelson Mandela on Robben Island) – was committed in at least some part of his identity to the ANC’s aspirations and values. These values included longstanding, deeply-rooted commitments to democracy, to non-racialism, and to the rule of law. These commitments required Zuma to at least think twice before acting in ways that were directly contrary to these values. Donald Trump shows no evidence of any similar commitment and associated restraint.
Third is the relentless ideological zeal of at least parts of the Trump administration. An anti-government discourse has long been part of the Republican Party’s DNA. Even so, I have been startled by the (Musk-ian) recklessness with which agencies have been dismantled, heedless of consequences in the real world. Delving further into the ideological pedigree of the ideas held by another part of Trump’s unwieldy (but unfailingly loyal) coalition has left me feeling even more shaken and (a little) vulnerable.
Beneath the sometimes genteel language of political philosophy is the stuff of nightmares. To illustrate, here is a quote from Patrick Deneen (whose intellectual pedigree passes through Princeton, Georgetown, and currently the University of Notre Dame, and who both JD Vance and Pete Hegseth have found inspirational):
“What is needed, in short, is regime change – the peaceful but vigorous overthrow of a corrupt and corrupting liberal ruling class and the creation of a postliberal order…..Where necessary, those who currently occupy positions of economic, cultural and political power must be constrained and disciplined by the assertion of popular power…… The power sought is not merely to balance the current elite, but to replace it…..The aim should not be a form of ‘democratic pluralism’ that imagines a successful regime comprised of checks and balances, but rather the creation of a new elite that is aligned with the values and needs of ordinary working people”.
For those of us who know history’s catastrophes deep in our bones, these words are chilling. Perhaps the one silver lining is that, as of this time of writing, the agenda has been laid bare, its execution has been chaotic, and it is (perhaps) being stopped in its tracks by increasingly mobilized resistance. So, as with so much of my work these days, I’ll end by taking inspiration from Albert Hirschman’s bias for hope – in this instance the hope that, as per the first lesson of the February post, American democracy can indeed make it intact to the November 2026 mid-term elections.
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Here are the four “lessons from South Africa” laid out in the February piece:
Lesson #1: For the next 21 months, the unwavering navigational north star is to get to the November, 2026 midterms with the machinery of electoral democracy still fully functional – avoid being knocked off course by even the most venal provocations.
Lesson #2: Leveraging checks and balances lays important, necessary ground for victory in the struggle against tyranny – but its victories are not in themselves decisive.
Lesson #3: Keeping democratic space open requires a coalition that is broader than the usual fault lines of political partisanship – a sense of urgency and willingness to act not only from ‘natural’ opponents but from elite actors for whom it is more expedient to stay silent.
Lesson #4: A vision of democratic renewal is key to a decisive victory against encroaching tyranny – more than short- and medium-term band aids are needed.
Even as time becomes shorter and the mood darker, I find it helpful to look beyond the immediacy of crisis and probe the possibilities of renewal. In so doing, I continue to take inspiration from Albert Hirschman’s ‘possibilism’ – the endeavor to “….try to widen the limits of what is perceived to be possible…. and figure out avenues of escape…. in which the inventiveness of history and a ‘passion for the possible’ are admitted as vital actors”. In recent years, I have sought to bring the spirit of possibilism to an exploration of governance at the interface between citizens and the public sector.
A combination of rule-boundedness and insulation of public bureaucracies from day-to-day pressures have long been central tenets of conventional efforts to improve public governance. But conventional efforts have not helped stem a dramatic collapse in recent decades of trust in government and of civic perceptions regarding the legitimacy of the public domains. , As I explored in some earlier work, multiple drivers account for this collapse in trust. Even so, the question of whether the narrowness of mainstream approaches to public sector reform has contributed to the loss of civic trust has continued to nag at me.
Complementing mainstream approaches to public sector reform, might there perhaps be another way forward – one that can both help improve public-sector performance and, of particular import in these times of polarization and demonization of government, do so in a way that helps to renew the legitimacy of the public domain? Might a more ‘socially-embedded’ bureaucracy (SEB) help achieve gains on both the effectiveness and legitimacy fronts? This blog post provides (as a substantial update to an earlier piece) an overview of some of my recently published and ongoing work that addresses these questions.
Exploration of SEB’s possibilities often is met with skepticism. In part, this is because SEB is radically at variance with the mainstream logic of how public bureaucracies should be organized; indeed, as I explore further below, embrace of SEB is not without hazard. But another reason for this skepticism is that SEB is one facet of a broader agenda of research and experimentation that aims to help ‘redemocratize’ the public sector – and enthusiasm among champions of redemocratization has all-too-often outrun both conceptual clarity and empirical evidence. In a generally sympathetic review, Laura Cataldi concludes that much of the discourse proceeds as:
“….an umbrella concept under which a large variety of governance innovations are assigned that may have very little in common……Most of the proposed solutions are situated at the level of principles such as participation, deliberation and co-creation of public value, rather than being concrete tools……[Protagonists] seem to propose models of management, governance and reform that are too abstract, and ultimately lacking in terms of concrete administrative tools…..”
In the work introduced below, I have sought to distil from both the academic literature and the experience of practitioners a set of insights that can help strengthen SEB’s analytical foundation.
I define a ‘socially embedded bureaucracy’ (SEB) as one that incorporates “problem-focused relationships of co-operation between staff within public bureaucracies and stakeholders outside of government, including governance arrangements that support such co-operation.” Questions concerning the value of SEB arise at both the micro and more systemic levels:
At the micro level: what is the potential for improving public-sector effectiveness by fostering problem-focused relationships of cooperation between staff within public bureaucracies and stakeholders outside government?
At the systemic level: To what extent do gains in addressing micro-level problems – and associated gains in trust among the stakeholders involved – cascade beyond their immediate context and transform perceptions more broadly, thereby contributing to a broader renewal of the perceived legitimacy of the public domain?
The research papers introduced in this post explore the above questions. Two of the papers are largely conceptual (see here and here), and two are more empirically-oriented – a case study of the governance of affordable housing and homelessness in Los Angeles, and an interpretive exploration (co-authored with long-time civil society activist Mark Heywood and anchored in two sectoral case studies) of the evolving interface between civil society and the public sector in South Africa.
Figure 1 contrasts SEB with conventional notions of how public bureaucracies should be governed. In the conventional view, governance is organized hierarchically, with a focus on ‘getting the systems right’ Citizens engage upstream via their selection of political representatives who oversee both policymaking and implementation. The tasks of public officials are defined by legalistic, rule-bound processes, which also insulate public bureaucracy from political interference. Civil society’s governance role is to bring pressure from the demand-side to help ‘hold government to account’. By contrast, SEB is problem- rather than systems-oriented; it incorporates horizontal as well as hierarchical governance arrangements; interactions (both within the bureaucracy and at the interface with civil society) are less legalistic and more adaptive, oriented towards deliberation and fostering initiative.
Figure 1: Autonomous and socially-embedded bureaucracies
SEB’s distinctive characteristics create opportunities for improving public sector performance via three channels that are unavailable to insulated bureaucratic hierarchies:
Fostering synergies – (problem-level) gains from co-operation between public bureaucracies and non-governmental actors;
Clarifying goals – alliance-building among reform-oriented public officials and civil society actors as a way of bringing greater clarity to the (problem-level) goals to be pursued by public agencies.
Streamlining monitoring – transforming the governance arrangements for (problem-level) monitoring and enforcement from a morass of red tape to trust-building interactions between public officials and service recipients.
Taken together, the above three channels have the potential to unleash human agency by opening up (problem-level) space for public/civic entrepreneurs to champion change. (See my ‘microfoundations’ paper, published by the Thinking and Working Politically Community of Practice for detailed exploration of each of the channels. And see the Los Angeles case study for an exploration of how these channels are at the center of efforts to more effectively address the twin crises of affordable housing and homelessness.)
Alongside recognizing its potential, a variety of concerns vis-à-vis SEB also need to be taken seriously. The first two are evident at the micro-level:
The implications for public sector performance of a seeming inconsistency between SEB’s horizontal logic and the hierarchical logic of bureaucracies.
The hazards of capture or vetocracy that might follow from opening up the public bureaucracy to participation by non-governmental stakeholders.
The third is a systemic level concern, namely that:
Championing SEB as a way to renew the legitimacy of the public domain mis-specifies what are the underpinnings of social trust.
The paragraphs that follow consider each in turn.
To begin with the seeming tension between horizontal and hierarchical logics, the organizational literature on private organizations suggests that there is perhaps less inconsistency than it might seem on the surface. Viewed from the perspective of that literature, the challenge is the familiar one of reconciling innovation and mainstream organizational processes, and it has a clear answer: ‘shelter’ innovation from an organization’s mainstream business processes. As Clayton Christensen put it in The Innovator’s Dilemma:
Disruptive projects can thrive only within organizationally distinct units…When autonomous team members can work together in a dedicated way, they are free from organizational rhythms, habits
Consistent with Christensen’s dictum, the problem-specific building blocks of SEB potentially provide space for protagonists to work together flexibly, at arms-length from broader organizational rigidities.
The second set of concerns follows from SEB’s opening up of the public domain to participation by non-governmental stakeholders. At one extreme, an inadvertent consequence of opening up might be a ‘vetocracy’, with enhanced participation providing new mechanisms through which status-quo-oriented stakeholders can stymie any efforts at public action. At the other extreme, openness might inadvertently facilitate capture by influential non-governmental insiders. As the microfoundations paper explores, these hazards potentially can be mitigated via a combination of vigorous efforts to foster a commitment among stakeholders to clear, unambiguous and measurable shared goals – plus a complementary commitment to open and transparent processes. These commitments can build confidence in what is being done, while also reducing the pressure for control via heavy-handed, top-down systems of process compliance.
The third (systemic-level) concern interrogates the presumption that SEB can help to transform more broadly civic perceptions as to the legitimacy of the public domain. As my second TWP paper explores, a variety of eminent scholars (including Sam Bowles and Margaret Levi) have argued that initiatives that seek to renew the public domain by building working-level relationships between civil society and public bureaucracy mis-specify what it takes to improve social trust. Social trust, they argue, rests more on the quality of institutional arrangements and commitment to universal norms than on the relational quality of the government-society interface. This argument is eminently plausible in contexts where background political institutions are strong and stable. But, as the TWP papers explore, in contexts where disillusion and institutional decay have taken hold, renewal of the public domain – and thus confidence in the possibility of achieving collective gains through social cooperation – requires more than yet another round of institutional engineering.
Especially striking in Los Angeles has been the repeated willingness of voters to support ballot initiatives in which they tax themselves to finance homelessness services and the construction of affordable housing. However, as declining majorities for these initiatives signal, patience is wearing thin. The SEB-like governance reforms on which the LA case study focuses are intended to help renew civic commitment via transparent and participatory processes of goal-setting and accountability; how this is playing out in practice is my current research focus.
Turning to South Africa, my recent paper with long-time civil society activist Mark Heywood explored some interactions between civil society strategies and state capacity over the quarter century since the country made its extraordinary transition to constitutional democracy. Civil society’s principal strategy of engagement has been adversarial. This adversarial approach yielded major victories, including the reversal of AIDS-denialism in government, and momentum for a successful push-back against state capture. Over time, however, a series of political drivers (explored here and here) resulted in a weakening of state capacity. In parallel, civil society’s wins through adversarialism became fewer, and the effect on citizen disillusion became correspondingly corrosive. The Heywood-Levy paper thus makes a case for civil society to complement confrontational strategies with approaches centered around building problem-level coalitions with those public officials who remain committed to a vision of service. (The paper is slated to be part of a forthcoming edited volume by MISTRA; in the interim, interested readers can feel free to email me to request a PDF.)
Finally, opening the aperture even further, Robert Putnam’s 2020 book, The Upswing, raises the possibility that SEB might usefully be part of a strategy for renewing civic perceptions of the legitimacy of the public domain, a way for forward-looking leaders to champion an electoral and governance platform centred around a vision of partnership between the public sector and non-governmental actors. Political and social mobilization centered around deliberative problem-solving would be a radical departure from contemporary pressure-cooker discourses which thrive on raising rather than reducing the temperature. But, as Putnam explored, it happened in the USA between the 1880s and the 1920s, and it might happen again:
A distinct feature of the Progressive Era was the translation of outrage and moral awakening into active citizenship… to reclaim individuals’ agency and reinvigorate democratic citizenship as the only reliable antidotes to overwhelming anxiety……[Similarly], our current problems are mutually reinforcing. Rather than siloed reform efforts, an upswing will require ‘immense collaboration’, [leveraging] the latent power of collective action not just to protest, but to rebuild.”
Now what? Four weeks into the Trump administration, a wrecking ball threatens to wreak havoc with millions of peoples’ lives. A sense of urgency is in the air. Indeed, we urgently need to bear witness to the emerging scale of disaster. But holding open the door to a hopeful future needs more than urgency. It needs clarity of goals, tactics and strategy – plus a longer-term vision that looks beyond the immediate crisis. To help bring clarity, it can be helpful to make comparisons.
In seeking to understand America’s challenges, I have long looked to South Africa’s decades-long struggle to establish and sustain its own democracy. A recent effort contrasted how polarization and inequality interacted. My task here is the more immediate one of seeking fresh insight into how a democracy can respond to a wrecking ball taking aim at its institutions. The search yielded four lessons of relevance to America’s current moment. First:
For the next 21 months, the unwavering navigational north star is to get to the November, 2026 midterms with the machinery of electoral democracy still fully functional – avoid being knocked off course by even the most venal provocations.
In April 1993, a team of far-right assassins that included a former member of the white apartheid parliament murdered Chris Hani, a popular, senior leader of the ANC’s left-wing. At the time, South Africa’s recently unbanned African National Congress was in the midst of fraught, on-and-off negotiations to end apartheid – but until a new constitution could be agreed on, power remained in the hands of the apartheid-era National Party. When news of the assassination broke, the country erupted in rage; the stage was set for crackdown. Instead, in a masterful display of statesmanship, Nelson Mandela went on national television and successfully redirected attention to the journey ahead. The country’s first democratic elections, held in April 1994, resulted in a massive ANC victory, with Mandela sworn in as national president.
Decades after its inspiring transition from apartheid to democracy, South Africa confronted a new challenge to its constitutional order – and again demonstrated the centrality of the electoral process to its defense. Jacob Zuma, the ANC leader who acceded to the presidency in 2009, was increasingly using state power in personalized and often corrupt ways, under the guise of a populist anti-elite agenda. Given the ANC’s continuing electoral dominance, defeating Zuma’s successor in a national election (Zuma himself was term-limited….) was not a plausible strategy. In selecting a successor, the ANC itself had to decide whether to re-embrace the democratic constitutional order. This it did. Cyril Ramaphosa, a central protagonist in the crafting of the constitution in the 1990s, won the November 2017 (intra-party) electoral contest to become Zuma’s successor by a hairs-breadth – and then decisively won the 2019 national elections. Ramaphosa’s victory not only underscores the centrality of elections in pushing back against tyranny, how he won underscores the relevance of the second and third lessons.
The second lesson is largely familiar:
Leveraging checks and balances lays important, necessary ground for victory in the struggle against tyranny – but its victories are not in themselves decisive.
In the 2010s, South Africa’s defenders of democracy brilliantly used checks and balances institutions to push back against state capture. The pushback included brave, determined inquiry from the ‘Public Protector’, an official, but arms-length agency with a mandate to investigate abuse of power; investigative journalism, underpinned by university-based researchers whose efforts added to the credibility of efforts to document what was happening; and a high-profile public inquiry led by the Deputy Chief Justice of the country’s supreme court. Four weeks into the Trump administration, similar momentum is building in the United States. The courts are intervening; elected Democrats in the House and Senate are becoming increasingly emboldened and forceful in mobilizing resistance; citizens are spontaneously coming out in support. But experience in South Africa and elsewhere shows that more is needed.
The result of a too-narrow pre-occupation with tactical victories can all-too-easily be to win many battles, but lose the broader war. Hence the third lesson:
Keeping democratic space open requires a coalition that is broader than the usual fault lines of political partisanship – a sense of urgency and willingness to act not only from ‘natural’ opponents but from elite actors for whom it is more expedient to stay silent.
It takes courage to override expediency and party loyalty and lead with principle. In 1930s Germany, expedient silence (indeed, often, tacit support) on the center-right opened the door for Adolf Hitler, and all that followed. 2010s South Africa, by contrast, saw some inspiring examples of courage. Veteran leaders of the ANC (including Pravin Gordhan; Ahmed Kathrada; and Mavuso Msimang to name just a few) were willing to override lifetimes of loyalty and take a high-profile principled stand against state capture in favor of constitutional democracy. In the USA, principled Republican leaders who took a stand against Richard Nixon in the early 1970s showed similar courage. But in today’s United States, aside from a few lonely voices, the silence from the center-right is deafening.
The combination of a multi-front effort to leverage checks and balances institutions and mobilization of a broad coalition may be enough to eke out an electoral victory – but it has not been enough to decisively turn the tide. Both the 2019 South African and 2020 U.S., elections enabled a temporary pause in attacks on constitutionalism. But more than a pause was needed. Hence the fourth lesson:
A vision of democratic renewal is key to a decisive victory against encroaching tyranny – more than short- and medium-term band aids are needed.
On offer in South Africa’s 1990s “rainbow miracle” was not only formal constitutional change, but hope – “a better life for all” as per the African National Congress’s campaign slogan. Indeed, after decades of stagnation, the first fifteen years of democracy witnessed a steady acceleration of economic growth, and a reduction in the incidence of extreme poverty. But by the time Zuma acceded to the presidency, the promise had reached its sell-by date. Ramaphosa promised only a return to the earlier formula, and his presidency has turned out to be a time of muddling through. Viewed from the vantage point of 2025, parallels with the Biden presidency are clear.
For an electoral victory to result in a decisive political realignment, it needs to build credibility on two fronts – inclusion, and public governance. South Africa’s early successes centered around an expansive “we” – underpinned by an economic program that addressed many everyday concerns of working people. In the wake of 2024’s electoral shock, the Democratic Party in the U.S. seems increasingly to be learning the lesson that the cobbling together of multiple disparate parts does not add up to an expansion vision of ‘inclusion’. To win credibility with the electorate the message needs both sharpening and consistent championing by credible messengers.
As for the capacity to govern, a distinctively American challenge is to break through the relentless drumbeat of political demonizing of the public sector. But the challenge goes well beyond messaging. All-too-often, the result of a progressive vision of governance in which one good thing is added on top of another is way less than the sum of its parts – each good thing is accompanied by a small dose of administrative process, and the cumulative sum of the good things is sclerosis. The Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan makes the point pithily:
“A word to Democrats trying to figure out how to save their party…. Most of all, make something work. You run nearly every great city in the nation. Make one work—clean it up, control crime, smash corruption, educate the kids. You want everyone in the country to know who you are? Save a city.”
In 1860 when Abraham Lincoln became president, he described America as “the world’s last best hope”. That is how it felt to me when I came to this country almost five decades ago. Is the vision of America as a beacon to the world coming to an end? Is there no alternative to angry, chauvinist isolationism? Making it through the present moment without deepening disaster requires tactical resistance – but it also calls for more. We also need to raise our sights. What kind of country do we want the United States of America to be?
Two days into DT’s second presidency, it is clear that constitutional democracy has (re-) entered into a time of extreme, urgent danger. Despair, complacency and (un-strategic) resistance traps abound. What, then, are ‘strategic’ ways forward? From the vantage point of January 2025, the crucial point is that the USA continues to be a democracy – and it is only 21 months until the next round of House and Senate elections. The overriding strategic goal is to act , between now and then, in ways that increase the odds that control of both shift back to the only political party in the USA that remains committed to constitutional democracy – the Democratic Party (and perhaps also to encourage any brave Republicans who run on a constitutional democracy platform in their party’s primaries).
Much follows from this point of departure, way more than can be said here. But (though the speed and ruthlessness are now much greater….) we were at a parallel point at the outset of DT’s first term. Back then, I wrote a piece, “hope in the dark”, that suggested some ways forward. What follows updates that earlier piece. [While I have added some new themes, and changed some emphases, much of what I said then remains relevant, and is quoted directly. Subsequent work, linked below, elaborates on some key themes. And here is a link to the original piece.]
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When power shifts and the presumptions that have underpinned our way of engaging the world no longer hold, what then? For the past quarter century, many of us engaged in policy analysis and implementation have worked in the spirit of ‘possibilism’ – seeking entry points for change that, though initially small, have the potential to set in motion far-reaching, positive consequences. But more than we perhaps had realized, our work has presupposed that the center broadly holds.
We have presumed that there is a reasonably stable ‘outer’ concentric circle within which experimentation plays out, facilitating an evolution-like process — momentum for initiatives that add value, and dead-ends for bad ideas. But with the election of Donald Trump (henceforth DT) in the USA (and similar elsewhere, though in this piece I will write principally from a US perspective) we find ourselves in a world where the stability of the outer circle, the container, has itself been put into question. How, now, are we to engage?
In an earlier effort to explore possible pathways of development for messy democracies, I distinguished between long-run vision, medium-run strategy, and short run process. The vision as to what comprises the core elements of a flourishing democracy remains intact. However, when confronting a risk of reversal of the magnitude which is possible under a DT presidency, strategy and tactics need to shift profoundly. But how?
The air is filled with talk of resistance, of the necessity of not normalizing a DT administration. The urgency of the moment is clear, and I do not want to lessen it. So what follows might perhaps usefully be viewed as a complement rather than an alternative to this sense of urgency. How can we act in ways that not only respond to the short-term imperatives, but also help incubate a platform for a reinvigorated politics and society? Here (adapting some with the grain approaches for the current moment) are some potential entry points.
First, checks and balances institutions – for societies endowed with them, these comprise the first, and crucial, line of defense against the erosion of freedom and democracy.
Second, protect the electoral process – and win elections. As per the opening of this blog, the 2026 midterm elections are only 21 months away. Those opposed to democracy will look to ways to fuel the flames of polarization in advance. [Think: “Reichstag fire” – on which, see more here.] Resist their provocations. Stay relentlessly focused on what it will take to win votes. Political parties are THE crucial actors.
Third, cultivate alliances. Beyond checks and balances institutions and programmatic political parties, the sustainability of democracy rests on a broad societal consensus in favor of democracy and the rule-of-law. This consensus has been America’s ‘civil religion’, one reason why it is so startling that so many voted for DT [in 2016 – and again in 2024]. But it is wildly premature to conclude that a short-term expression of discontent reflects a broader abandonment of America’s core principles. Defense of democracy requires a coalition that reaches across the traditional left-right ideological spectrum. Thus, rather than responding in kind to anger and polarization, opposition to DT needs to capture the higher ground of America’s political center.
Fourth, embrace a democracy-friendly discourse — one which, as per Albert Hirschman, “moves beyond extreme, intransigent postures, with the hope that participants engage in meaningful discussion, ready to modify initially held opinions in the light of other arguments and new information”. DT’s discourse has, of course, been the exact opposite – an embrace of whatever might help to arouse supporters, with zero regard for its truth value. But the breakdown in discourse goes beyond DT.
Openness to evidence comprises the bedrock foundation, the necessary condition, for civilization to thrive; yet we find ourselves in a world where the arbiters of the truth value of claims are losing their legitimacy. This can be explained, in our era of rapid change, by the power of cognitive dissonance to override inconvenient evidence. But explaining is not enough. We urgently need to rebuild mutual confidence, a consensus across society as to the legitimacy, indeed the necessity, of fact-based discourse – else (if it is not already too late) all will be lost.
Fifth, focus on the consequences for inclusion and equity of the coming tsunami of policy initiatives from the DT administration. DT’s success is a (perverse) consequence of the accelerating dualism of American society – major gains at the top, stagnation for everyone else. In his campaign, DT promised to make things ‘great again’ for the struggling (predominantly white) middle. But the reality is (again) likely to be the opposite. Here are a few examples:
Sixth, cultivate islands of effectiveness. Developmental forces continue to be present throughout society – within civil society, at state and local level, within public bureaucracies. As I explored in depth in my earlier work, in politically contested environments developmental actors can achieve valuable victories by focusing on specific initiatives, acting collectively, and building coalitions capable of fending off destructive, predatory influences. (Here is a link that introduces some new 2024/5 work that explores the possibilities of cross-cutting alliances between the public sector and civil society.) Not all space has closed. In a generally dispiriting time, showing what is possible continues to matter — both as antidote to despair and as inspiration, pointing the way towards a more hopeful future.
Some of the entry points I have highlighted above might seem inadequate to the moment. But it seems to me crucial that we look beyond a politics that offers nothing beyond deepening polarization. German politics in the interwar Weimar years of 1918-1933 provides a cautionary tale. As a white South African inspired by the fall of apartheid, as a Jew who has refused to be defined by history, the stereotypes of others (or a narrow ethno-nationalist vision of identity….), as a parent with two American children, I continue to believe that the life worth living is one fueled by our hopes and dreams, not our nightmares. The dream that all humans are created equal, with inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The dream of equal dignity. The American dream (perhaps even now in 2025….]. The human dream.
WORKING WITH THE GRAIN: Integrating governance and growth 