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Something has gone wrong in American democracy. Though our diagnoses differ, the entire political spectrum chafes at the widespread dysfunction. Our traditional modes for understanding democratic decline—tyranny of the majority, corruption, erosion of trust, polarization—all of these shed some light onto our current circumstances, but they fail to explain how policies with broad public support don’t materialize.

While reporting on the democratic terrain in state and local government, I’ve become preoccupied with how easily minority interests are able to hijack broadly beneficial policy goals—often through mechanisms we view as democratically legitimate. Tools developed to push against a potential “tyranny of the majority” have allowed majorities to be subjugated to the will of minority interests time and again. Whether it’s by professional associations, police unions, homeowner associations, or wealthy individuals, majority rule has repeatedly been hijacked.

Steve Teles, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University, has a similar diagnosis. In a new essay titled “Minoritarianism Is Everywhere,” he argues that America’s democratic deficits require a serious rethinking of liberal governance and values.

On today’s episode of Good on Paper, we discuss the causes and consequences of minoritarianism and debate potential solutions.

“Faced with the fact that actually lots of people don’t want things that liberals want, the way that liberals have responded is finding sneaky, complicated, roundabout ways to get around” that fact, Teles argues. “And instead of trying to find other ways to persuade them or compensate them or other things, we’ve tried to find these complicated, expert-delegation kinds of ways around that. And sometimes that works. But one thing I think it does is it also raises questions about the legitimacy of the larger system.”

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Jerusalem Demsas: We’re used to thinking about the tyranny of the majority. We don’t have to imagine what happens when majority voices vote to trample on individual rights.

That fear so animated the Founding Fathers that they designed a system to restrain it: a bicameral legislature with one chamber—the Senate—insulated from electoral pressure by staggered six-year terms, and lifetime appointments for judges to shield them from the shifting tides of public opinion.

They spent far less time thinking about the opposite problem: tyranny of the minority.

[Music]

Demsas: Yet today, much of my own work is thinking through the ways that well-organized interest groups and strategically placed individuals have managed to take hold of the systems of power throughout government and enact their minoritarian preferences.

From land use, permitting, and zoning abuses by homeowners associations to police unions, gun-lobbying groups, and environmental groups fighting against popular opinion in favor of a niche ideological perspective—once you start looking for undue power wielded by a minority, it’s all you can see.

This is Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives. My guest today is Steve Teles, a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University and a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center. He has a new article out called “Minoritarianism Is Everywhere” that I think is the single most important piece you can read about this trend in American democracy.

Steve, welcome to the show

Steven Teles: Thanks for having me.

Demsas: In the early days of the United States of America, thinkers like Madison and Tocqueville were primarily afraid of tyranny of the majority. Why was that the dominant mode through which they feared democratic collapse?

Teles: So the Founders had a lot of experience from their own experience of the colonial period and going back to their reading of the Greeks and Romans about how republics fell apart, and they thought that republics fell apart, in part, because they had too much of an expectation of homogeneity. And so one of the most important things to understand about the Founders is they actually did believe that diversity, as the yard signs say, is our strength and that the way to actually make a republic work was not to actually try and get homogeneity but actually to get conflict, to get diversity so that no part of the community would be able to actually tyrannize the rest.

We know the famous line from Madison that when you extend the sphere, you take a greater variety of interests. And so part of their theory was to create a republic that was big enough that no single interest could dominate and, within that, to break apart whatever level of government in order to ensure that there would be deliberation. I think deliberation was really the underestimated part of the Founders’ constitutional idea. It was not just that they wanted to ensure that a majority couldn’t tyrannize over a minority, but that people would actually have to argue—they would have to provide reasons—and that was the one of the motivations for having separation of powers, as well as having what they call the “extended sphere.”

Demsas: What’s the extended sphere?

Teles: So the extended sphere was the idea that you would have a large republic. Every other republic in history had been small. They’d been city-states. The anti-Federalists, who were the opponents of the Federalists, had some of that same idea—

Demsas: Including Madison.

Teles: —that the only way republics could work is if they didn’t have disagreement, because otherwise, one group would tyrannize over the other.

And the experiment of the Founders was to have an extended sphere, to have one over, originally, 13 colonies but eventually a kind of continental republic. And a continental republic is something that nobody had ever attempted. People only thought you could have that level in an empire. And so that was really the experiment that the Founders were trying—was to have something large that had only been imperial in the past, but make it a republic.

Demsas: So you’ve recently written an essay warning us about the tyranny of the minority. Do you think that the Founders were wrong about their assessment, or do you think that something has changed?

Teles: So there’s kind of two stories you can tell about this. One is: The government just does a lot more than it used to. A lot of our system was designed to keep government from doing very much. It was designed to slow the government on the way up.

And one thing I often tell my conservative friends is that separation of powers has, and a lot of the other devices that the framers created, a kind of perverse effect on the way down. Once you’ve already built a large government up, all of those systems are also a brake on trying to reverse it. So it may be that having separation of powers means you have to have a much larger majority in order to create new government programs. But all those same separation-of-power systems also are an obstacle to cutting them later on, which is one of the reasons, for example, that DOGE is having to do all these things that are of, I’ll say, marginal constitutionality—

Demsas: Questionable legality? Yeah.

Teles: —because they can’t actually pass things through the separation-of-power system that the Founders created. So they’re trying to do it through a sort of soft authoritarianism. So that’s one thing, right? One thing is that the Founders didn’t anticipate that we’d have a government as big and as sort of into everybody’s business as we have now.

And the other thing, and this was something that Mancur Olson, the economist from the University of Maryland (go Terps), said a few decades ago, which is that one of the things that Founders didn’t really count on was concentrated interest—that one of the basic problems of democracy is that, in many cases, you actually can dominate government if you have a very concentrated interest, which gives you disproportionate attention, and that democracy is really not a system that lets the majority govern. It’s the system that allows the attentive majority to govern. And the attentive majority is a lot smaller than the actual majority.

And that also is important if what you mostly want to do is to keep things from happening, right? So when we talk about—a lot of the things that you write about in your own work are about people stopping things, obstructing things. And so when you combine the fact that in our system it’s easier to obstruct than it is to create—and again, you go back to all the systems of separation of powers, and we can talk about all the other forms of participation that got layered on top of that—all of those are wired up for obstruction. And when you combine obstruction plus concentrated participation and concentrated attention, you have a formula for allowing often very small minorities to dominate government.

Demsas: I think for a lot of listeners, this is going to feel like an odd conversation to have right now, because a lot of the blocking points, a lot of the veto points, a lot of the obstructionist things that we’re witnessing right now are actually preventing a lot of harm or at least are the only things that are standing in the way of even greater harm done by, whether it’s DOGE or whether it’s other types of soft authoritarianism. So isn’t this kind of a misplaced concern in this moment?

Teles: So that’s funny. I actually thought at the very last minute of pulling this essay. Literally a couple days before I was supposed to send it to Yuval Levin, who’s the editor of National Affairs, I sent him an email that was more or less along the lines of, I don’t know, man. Should I actually be publishing this?

And then I thought, I don’t know. I mean, when are you going to publish? There’s never a good time to do stuff like this. And part of my argument is that people who think government should be doing a lot of stuff, which is, more or less, me, need to be thinking about what it is, the state that we want to build on the rubble of whatever we may, inshallah, inherit in a few years.

And I think that’s a thing that we’re not going to have a lot of time to figure out. And if you go and look at the essay, one thing I argue is that the problem with this majoritarianism discourse or minoritarianism discourse that you see out there that’s been part of the democracy-trademarked discourse that’s been going on for quite some time is it sort of assumes something about what the status quo ante in the United States was before Trump, before authoritarianism.

It also assumes something about lots of European countries because this discourse is supposed to be transnational. It assumes that all of those systems were more or less okay, and then something twisted happened in conservatism, and it morphed into populist authoritarianism, and that was what was wrong. And I think that story has a lot to answer for. In the European context, it has a lot to answer for the fact that huge amounts of European governance, especially EU-level governance, is not majoritarian at all. It’s bureaucratic; it’s professional.

That’s exactly what the EU, and especially European Commission, was designed to do. It was designed to create a highly insulated, elite form of governance. And it’s not a surprise that lots of political forces grew up to counter that. And I think that’s a sort of hidden or overlooked problem. Also in the United States, a lot of the targets of populist authoritarianism are not about liberalism’s majoritarian manifestations. They’re about its most elitist and professional manifestations.

Demsas: Well, I want to push on this, because I think there’s a tension between two things that you care about. At the Niskanen Center, where you work, you guys have a state-capacity program where you’re trying to increase the ability of the state to do what it says it wants to do. That means having really high-quality staff. It means caring about expertise. It means updating your IT systems and your data systems, and ensuring that you have really high-quality people and products that you’re able to create for Americans.

And many of the minoritarian structures that you criticize—administrative agencies, and you just talked about this in the EU, licensing boards, etcetera—they’re created to add expertise and consistency to policy. If we sideline this sort of professionalized governance that you’re talking about in favor of more direct democratic control—I mean, walk me through how that works. Are we saying that Congress is writing extremely detailed laws delegating how agencies should work? But also, it feels like you get less information, like you get more short-termism in government. So how do you think about that?

Teles: Yeah, so this, in a way, gets us to the delegation question, which is raised in a lot of constitutional administrative law. And I actually think that often conflates two things. So the one question is, do we actually have rule of law? Right? Has whatever it is that the bureaucracy is doing, has it actually been authorized by the legislative branch? And that’s the question if you think about things like Title IX, where Congress has passed extremely vague laws and then passed that authority over to bureaucracies, which then passed the authority over to other organizations and divisions inside of universities and firms. I think that’s a legitimate problem of democratic governance.

And that’s separate from the question of whether government can actually manage the things that it has been legitimately democratically authorized to do—so the kind of things you were mentioning, the Niskanen Center, and I’m going to say that name as many times as I want because that’s my second job, along with Johns Hopkins. And Jen Pahlka helped set up a state-capacity program at—

Demsas: She’s been on the show.

Teles: And the things that they’re talking about are things like, as you were talking about before, setting up IT systems. So we’ve authorized the government to do a bunch of things—to send people Social Security checks, to send people unemployment insurance, to do all of these things. And that, I think, basically authorizes them to create whatever systems are necessary to do those things that the legislature has completely unambiguously, normatively decided that government should be doing.

And I think there, there’s a very wide breadth of legitimate expert authority to figure out how to actually act on those things. When, on the other hand, we transfer ambiguous regulatory authority over private entities or other governments, I think that raises a very different question, and it raises a question about whether or not experts actually do have the authority to answer deeply, morally, normatively complicated issues. So I actually think those are two different questions.

Demsas: I want to get into the “Democracy™️” discourse, because I think that situating this conversation is important. So the traditional arguments that most people, I think most listeners, will have heard about minoritarianism are focused on institutions like the electoral college and the filibuster that benefit the Republican Party by amplifying the voices of rural states, where fewer people live than coastal states.

In their book, Tyranny of the Minority, Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky argue that, and I’m quoting here from a review by Kurt Weyland, “The U.S. institutional framework has an exceptional set of counter-majoritarian features, designed to forestall the unfettered domination of the current majority and to give political minorities institutional mechanisms for defending their basic interests and rights. The Electoral College in presidential elections, the Senate with its disproportionate representation of small states and its filibuster, and the Supreme Court with its judicial review and its lifetime judges all fulfill this function. Yet in Levitsky and Ziblatt’s view, the effort to prevent a ’tyranny of the majority’ through this globally unique institutional set-up has gone too far: It has allowed the nationally ever less competitive GOP to establish its tyranny of the minority—while also enabling its continued focus on racially resentful whites and its refusal to adjust to multiracial diversity.”

So this argument, I think, is kind of weird in this moment because Donald Trump just won with a multiracial coalition, a multi-class coalition, for sure, and won with the popular vote. And there was movement to the right across this country, even in the most progressive jurisdictions. And we now see a trifecta in the federal government. And so while this argument kind of, I think, really struck true in 2016, when Trump won while losing the popular vote, it feels kind of weird now. So how much of your argument is in line with what Levitsky and Ziblatt are talking about? How much are you kind of actually critiquing this view?

Teles: So I do think there’s something to the Levitsky and Ziblatt—and they’re great political scientists. I’d say they’re probably better political scientists than I am, although that’s not much of an accomplishment. But the thing I would say about them is—and my critique is more about what they’re not talking about than what they are talking about. So I do think that they’re—and again, I’m probably more sympathetic to our basic constitutional arrangement than they are. I think there’s a reason why some degree of separation of powers, especially for a country as diverse as we are, makes a degree of sense. My critique is more all the nonmajoritarian things that we layered on top of the framers’ system, right?

So I would say that the degree of minority influence that we have in the original constitutional system was fine, and we should have stopped with that. But in the article, I argue that we’ve added a lot of other minoritarianism systems on top of the original constitutional system, which I think makes a lot of sense and is just the degree of nonmajoritarianism that actually works for a large, complicated government. So if we got rid of the filibuster, even with the malrepresentation in the Senate, we would have a lot more majoritarian way of making decisions. And also, we would not have the weird bias we have about doing lots of things through spending bills that we should really be doing through regulation or other kinds of things. But again, when you think about minoritarianism, there are a lot of things that Levitsky and Ziblatt don’t talk about.

They don’t talk about the weird ways that we make decisions about housing that are extremely—and you’ve, obviously, written a whole book on this, as well as a million essays that people have written—about the numerous ways that minoritarianism warps how we make land use decisions. But lots of other forms of minoritarianism had sort of crept into our system on top of the sedimentary layer of our original constitutional system. And those that were really created mostly by liberals, or at least by defenders of activist government, are mostly not part of the “Democracy™️” discourse.

Demsas: Is then your argument just, Yes, this is true that there are a bunch of benefits that the current system gives to the Republican Party in our federal system, but that’s an incomplete view of the ways in which minoritarianism has also upheld progressive ideas in the states?

Teles: Well, I actually think when you look at some of the bias—I don’t want to go too far back again into litigating the stuff that’s actually in the Levitsky and Ziblatt, and the other sort of people who are questioning our inherited Constitution, too much—but I think that some of that slant has actually declined in recent years.

If Democrats were more competitive in Texas, a lot of this discourse would look very different. And it’s not that far, although everyone always says that a Democratic Texas is the future and always will be. But I think one way to think about this is: There are parts of our governance system that are minoritarianism and are biased in favor of Republicans. There’s no question about that. And some of them, I think, are worth the benefits we get from those, and some of them are not.

But there’s lots of other parts of our governing system, especially things that were created in the 1960s and ’70s—forms of participation, forms of professionalism, forms of expert governance—that systematically, at least politically in the past, have favored Democrats and liberals. And that is not part of our democracy discourse. And if we really do think majoritarianism is the key normative guide that we should use for thinking about constitutionalism—and I’m not entirely sure that it is, but if it is—then we really need to think about the full sweep of minoritarianism and the parts that actually favor interests that we usually associate with Democrats and liberals.

Demsas: Well, that was a little milquetoast, Steve. You’re not going to defend majoritarianism?

Teles: No. I mean, I think majoritarianism in some cases is a perfectly legitimate argument, that it’s better than just straight-up minoritarianism.

Demsas: I mean, it’s quite literally democracy, right?

Teles: Right. Well, but again, democracy is legitimate to the degree to which we think that certain decisions should be made by government at all. There’s lots of things that we don’t think should be, either because we think they implicate rights or because we think that it’s just inefficient to have decisions made by majorities. So I don’t necessarily think that housing—

Demsas: But as a principle for what the government does do, you want to defend majoritarianism?

Teles: Again, it’s better than the alternative, right?

Demsas: Such a political scientist’s answer.

Teles: I mean, I don’t want to sound milquetoasty, but I want to be precise.

Demsas: That’s fair.

Teles: If we have to have a decision and a decision has to get made, I think a lot of people in the democracy discourse tend to import a lot of stuff into the idea of democracy, beyond the idea that at some point we should make a decision, and it’s better to have a majority make that. Now, the problem there with majoritarianism is: Which majority?

So again, this goes back to work you’ve done. We have to make a decision about the unit that we should actually have making majoritarian decisions. So it may be that we need to have regulation of what kind of things people build and where. But should that be made by Irvine? Or should it be made in Sacramento? And that is a decision that you can’t make on democratic standards. That’s a decision you have to make on some other standards. Should it be national?

Demsas: It’s also practical considerations.

Teles: It’s also about whether or not you can overload the agenda of one level of government. So even if you might think that, serially, having the national government do something would be better, having lots and lots of decisions would overwhelm the capacity of a central government to actually manage them simultaneously.

Demsas: After the break: why local politics are a breeding ground for minoritarianism.

[Break]

Demsas: One reason I wanted to bring you on is that Abundance, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, has taken over all policy discourse. And we had them on the show, and you should go listen to that episode if you haven’t. I asked them on the show when they came on about why there isn’t more conversation about localism in their book. Like, why don’t they talk more about the fact that a lot of the problems they’re identifying are actually a function of our localist and decentralist tendencies in government? That it’s not really a problem that some people don’t like housing. I don’t like a lot of things. Like, I don’t like certain colors. I don’t like certain architectural styles. I don’t like them.

The problem is that we have a structure of government that takes that preference and allows it to be a veto on larger public interests. Like, well, we do need homeless shelters. We do actually need a place to house people who are lower income. We actually do need a place to house everyone. We need a place to put people. And that is not cared about. And again, this is touching on exactly what you talk about in your piece around this majoritarian desire kind of being trounced by these minority interests.

And after reading your essay, though, part of what I kept thinking about was that maybe the problem isn’t minoritarianism itself, that there are these checks that allow for vetoes. The problem is that local government cannot—and state and local government cannot—mediate between a bunch of different minority interests and balance those against majority preferences. Meaning, I feel like this is not as much of a problem at the national level as it is at the state and local level. There are a lot of things you’ve identified that come into play at the national level, but I think in local government, what we see is: The reason why these special interests are able to exert so much influence is that voters have basically disappeared from the playing ground.

So this is Sarah Anzia’s great work. She’s a Berkeley professor who wrote this great book called Local Interests. And what she argues is, essentially, in the vacuum that’s been created by voters at the local level—and I mean, just to put some numbers on it, just 23 percent of eligible active voters in New York City cast a ballot for mayor in 2021. And that’s a city that has a ton of local media. People are highly educated. There’s a ton of activity there happening to create civic institutions to push people out to vote. Like, 23 percent of eligible, active voters—that’s a small percentage of the broader adults who exist there.

Teles: And that’s high for lots of local governments.

Demsas: That’s high for local governments. Yeah, in North Carolina, 463 municipalities held elections in November 2021. All told, about 15 percent of registered voters turned out. But when you look at what happened in 2020, the year before that, five times as many people turned out for the general and statewide elections. And the reason I say all of this is that part of the problem is not that there are interest groups coming and making their case to the government, whether it’s teachers’ unions or environmental groups or police unions or it’s homeowners’ associations. It’s that when they show up, there’s no voter majoritarian voice really there. So I wonder: How much of the problem do you think is attacking minoritarianism writ large, versus how do you make more of the decisions pushed up to levels of government where majority voices are actually heard?

Teles: There were a bunch of things in your peroration there that I want to pull apart. One is, especially in housing, the basic problem with localism is where you have governments that are making decisions about their jurisdiction, but the influenced parties are in some other jurisdiction, right? So again, in lots of these cases, the thing that’s a problem is the people who would benefit from new housing are not only in the jurisdiction, but not participating, right? They’re somewhere else. They’re in Ohio. They’re in Indiana. They would benefit from actually being there. And so that’s a particular problem of putting decisions that have enormous national or even or statewide implications in the hands of local governments.

As you were saying, we do have this basic, really corrosive problem of incredibly low participation in local elections. And especially when you get to pretty small jurisdictions, the other problem is: We don’t have functional party competition in most of those places. So not only do we have very small turnout, but we have almost no political competition to help people actually organize their decisions. So especially in lots of blue jurisdictions, there ought to be parties. And they wouldn’t be Republican and Democratic Parties—they would be a Jerusalem Demsas party versus a left NIMBY coalition that would want no one to ever build or even walk around or do anything. They’d just all stay in their houses.

Demsas: That was a really generous take on left NIMBYs. (Laughs.)

Teles: Yeah. So again, we have all these sort of reinforcing problems in local government. And in the paper, one thing I say is that that’s bad for what you might think of as a more general interest, but it’s very good for the people who do show up. And the people who do show up are organized. So you think about local governments where you only have 15 percent of people showing up. All the election is in the primary, as opposed to the general election. Well, who wants that? So one way political scientists talk about that is that the institution is endogenous, in the sense that it’s related to the interest of the people who help shape the institution, right?

Demsas: Yeah, so why do we have off-year elections at all?

Teles: Right. We have off-year elections, in part, because the people who benefit from them, which are often the government’s own workforce, want them that way. So teachers’ unions, for example, love off-cycle elections where decisions are made in primaries, because they know what’s going on, they know what the decisions are being made, and they can actually participate and get their interest magnified.

Demsas: And they have organizing capacity to turn people out to primaries.

Teles: Right. They can show up at every level of government. That’s one of the advantages of having teachers’ unions that are organized in a federated way, which is that when nobody else is organized at a local level, they’re organized, and they can draw on this rich basis of information they get from being part of a national organization. The same thing is true of police unions. The same thing is true of other government unions. And those public-employee unions had the further advantage that lots of the decisions that matter to them are made in collective bargaining rather than through normal lawmaking, which is even less public and accessible to ordinary voters. And again, that’s where their informational and organizational advantages are particularly consequential.

Demsas: Yeah, you make this point in your piece. But the thing I want to ask you about, which I think needles at me a lot, is: Is there a majoritarian preference for minoritarianism? And by that I mean, it’s hard to know that the majority preferences aren’t being followed. Someone once told me the reason there’s so much low voting in local elections is because everyone’s happy with what’s going on. If they were really upset, they would show up and say something about it and do something about it.

And I think that’s a bit flippant and ignores a lot of things, the cost that it might require to show up in elections. But there’s something there, right? There’s something there about this system in many ways. Every one of us, every member of the electorate, is both part of the majority and part of a minority at every given moment in their lives. Maybe you’re a part of the majority because you’re a part of a racial majority, but you’re part of a religious minority. Maybe you’re part of a minority of people who like a certain economic policy, but you’re a majority in terms of abortion policy. All the time, you are part of both majorities and minorities. And it may just be the express preference that, given that you know that, we actually do kind of have a preference for a system where minority voices can obstruct, because everyone is more afraid of bad things happening to them than they are of the good things they want not happening.

Teles: Yeah. So this is where I think some of these questions are related to the particular time that we’re in. When a lot of the laws that we’re talking about were passed in the late ’60s and early ’70s—

Demsas: What kinds of laws?

Teles: When you think about a lot of the environmental laws that were passed in that era, or laws about public participation—when court decisions were changed, they gave people more access and more ability to use things like the Administrative Procedure Act to get influence. That was a period in which Americans were, for a variety of reasons, particularly sensitive to the risks of things happening, of various things happening. Their kids getting a terrible toy that killed them or having environmental damage or having—

Demsas Rivers on fire—

Teles: Yeah. I mean, there’s all kinds of things that you can think about. I think we’re in a different era, and a lot of the conversation we’re having around abundance comes from a general sense that that government just doesn’t work, and it’s not delivering things, and that there’s something really temporally urgent about the need to actually do things. And so the decision of whether the government should have a bias toward allowing majorities to work their will or allowing minorities to obstruct, to keep things from happening is partially a function of the times that we’re in.

I also think when you add in geopolitical competition—the fact that Americans are worried that we might not have the economic wherewithal to actually compete with a militarizing China. When you actually think of European countries are now really having to face this, the fact that they don’t have the economic base to actually have a military that can do anything, I think that’s actually making all of those things seem really urgent and is making the need to actually ensure that nobody is ever harmed by anything seem less consequential. And so that’s what I think a lot of the abundance discourse that you were referring to earlier is responding to, that sense, and also responding to the sense that it’s generating populism.

If you look at the ads that the Reform Party put out in Britain, one of the most striking of them started out with the person saying, “You know, nothing works anymore.” And that sense that nothing works anymore is one of the most important and most sort of lost factors in driving populism—is the idea that all this supposedly expert liberal governance doesn’t seem to be making anything better.

Demsas: I want to return to the solutions that you presented at the beginning when we talked, and you had two. One was liberal populism, or plural professionalism. These are the two ways forward you see for someone trying to combat pernicious minoritarianism in our democratic system. I’m first hoping you can define both of those for us.

Teles: So by liberal populism, I mean the idea that we could have an activist government without necessarily a high degree of delegation to expert authority. And if you go back to the original populists, back in the day, in the late 19th century, the thing that was interesting about them is they really liked legislatures, and they really disliked courts and executive agencies, and they thought, We’re going to go get the people en masse to go and vote for us, and then we’re going to pass very specific laws in Congress that don’t give executive-branch agencies or courts a lot of authority.

And I think there are ways that we could do that now. I mentioned earlier, if you think about a carbon tax, or you could, actually, just literally take away the authority of local governments to make decisions about housing at all. You could just say, Look—everything’s by right. Now, again, there’d be a lot of problems with that. There’d be difficulties. But compared to the status quo, the point about liberal populism is not that everything they do is going to be perfectly calibrated but that it would be relatively simple. It would be easy. It would be easy for the public to actually know what was happening and whether it was succeeding.

And so doing things straight up through taxing and spending is another way of doing things through what I would call liberal populism. So just making things illegal, or making them legal, or spending or taxing, right—doing that, as opposed to doing things through complicated, multistep expert delegation of the kind that liberals have gotten used to. That’s what I mean by liberal populism.

Demsas: Let’s stop right there then, because I want to ask you about this. What happens when you can’t pass something that is simple to address an important problem, like carbon tax—most environmentalists would love to see a carbon tax. They would love to see a price on carbon. We’re seeing now in Canada and the new prime minister, Mark Carney, who’s taken over from Justin Trudeau for the Liberal government, as part of his appeal to voters as he’s facing a real threat from the Conservative Party, is that he is repealing their carbon tax. And we see this in the United States. There was a real attempt to do a cap-and-trade system to try to get a carbon tax passed. It just was not politically viable in this country. People do not want to see their energy costs go up. It’s just not something that they’re going to accept.

Given that is often true for a lot of the first, best policies that people want to get passed, you inevitably have to go, like, Okay, what can you get done in this system then? And a part of why we see such a kind of kludgy outcome from many of these other policies is that there are smart people working on this problem, realizing that they cannot get their first, best policies. And so is your answer that you should just not do things if you can’t get that first, best policy? Or how much of a kludge are you willing to accept to get us marginally closer to these goals?

Teles: Yeah, so I’ve always found this a very weird argument. What I would say on this is: The most simple point of democracy is you have to persuade people to do things. And if they regularly and repeatedly say they don’t want something, then you don’t do it. Experts can come up with lots of ideas about what should be done, but at some point, there has to be a check on that from legislators, from the public, and if you actually can’t persuade them, you just don’t get to do it.

Demsas: I think this is unfair, though. Because I think that often what’s happening is the public is giving competing signals. The public is saying, I don’t want to see my energy costs go up. They’re also saying, I would like hurricanes not to be as intense all the time. They’re also saying, I care about environmental protection in some ways. And these are things that the democracy has to mediate, because if every single country was like, We’re not going to tax carbon. We’re just going to let this happen, people would be really upset with the eventual outcome.

Teles: Okay. Just to be clear, I want to tax carbon, and I think climate change is a big problem. I don’t want to have anybody come at me and send emails saying, Steve Teles didn’t think climate change is a big problem.

But I do think that one of the things you are describing is what I’ve sometimes called “structural sneakiness.” Which is: Faced with the fact that actually lots of people don’t want things that liberals want, the way that liberals have responded is finding sneaky, complicated, roundabout ways to get around the fact that people just don’t want to do what people who want an activist government want to do. And instead of trying to find other ways to persuade them or compensate them or other things, we’ve tried to find these complicated, expert-delegation kinds of ways around that. And sometimes that works. But one thing I think it does is it also raises questions about the legitimacy of the larger system.

If you keep producing governing outcomes that people don’t like—they don’t like the consequences of them—and you don’t actually just directly try and convince them and find other ways to convince them, find ways to pair it with other stuff, overall that this creates sort of alienation from the larger regime of activist government. So I think every time you try and do these end arounds that you’re talking about, there is a kind of external effect. It’s not necessarily in that domain, but it’s on the general system of activist government.

Demsas: So people lose trust, and they feel betrayed by government.

Teles: Yeah. And again, I think that this is a problem that has happened to liberals, in general. It’s just that instinct of having to actually take people’s problems and take their objections seriously. And directly trying to argue with them, as opposed to finding end arounds, as you were just describing, is a real fundamental problem with liberalism.

Demsas: So I want you then to explain your second solution, which is plural professionalism.

Teles: Right. So what I say is, liberal populism is a partial answer to certain kinds of problems, but there’s going to be a lot of stuff that government’s still going to have to do through experts. There’s a lot of things in which some degree of delegation is inevitable, given the complexity of what government needs to be doing. And when that’s true, the argument I make in the piece—and it draws in another piece I wrote with Jal Mehta on plural professionalism and education—what I say is, it’s a problem that our expert class has gotten more and more ideologically homogenous.

And that is not, I think, an inevitable feature. There’s lots of smart conservatives out there. We might disagree about how many there are. But I think there—I meet a lot of them. They could be in government, but in many cases, they’ve decided that lots of these expert fields are simply sort of ideologically coded. So you think about the example of nursing, right? It wasn’t that long ago that everybody just thought that nursing was, by definition, a female field. And so men who might’ve liked to be nurses, who might’ve been good nurses, just didn’t go in, because they thought it was definitionally incompatible for men to do that. I think many of these expert fields are increasingly ideologically coded in the way that nursing was gender coded.

And that has lots of consequences. I actually think it has some consequences for explaining what DOGE is doing right now. If there was a larger cadre of conservatives who actually knew what they were doing and actually knew how government works and actually knew what the actual programs of HHS were, they would be able to govern by sort of taking the reins of these things and taking away the parts that they don’t like, the parts that they think are excessively woke or in infested with DEI. But they don’t actually really know how lots of these government agencies are working, so they’re trying to make it up with having a bunch of 20-something technologists operating with AI telling them where to cut.

And I think if we actually had a cadre of people in the regular civil service who were more diverse, we would actually have, again, more deliberation. We would actually have more arguments, not so much about the facts or about technique but about the relative weighting of normative preferences. I think that’s one answer, is to actually diversify that expert class. That takes you back to universities. It takes you back to professional schools. And it also, I think, should also make conservatives have to look in the mirror and ask themselves why there aren’t as many people going into these expert fields in public policy and social work and other kinds of areas.

Demsas: We had Sahil Chinoy on the show recently, and he has a paper called “Political Sorting in the U.S. Labor Market.” And his finding is that a Democrat or Republican’s co-worker is 10 percent more likely to share their party than expected based on local partisan shares. So if you’re comparing the partisanship of Silicon Valley to the partisanship of Google—these are just hypotheticals—you might expect that there would be a certain level of partisanship just by who lives in that area, but it’s even more partisan than that. And the thing that I found really interesting about his research is that he’s tracing it throughout the entire system of how someone decides what company they end up working at. It begins with what college you go to, and then what major you choose within that college, and all these other things that end up with you choosing a more partisan workplace for whatever reason.

And the thing that—I mean, I agree with a lot of what you said, but the thing I really want to push on, though, is this idea that there are a lot of experts across the ideological domain who could provide these functions. So because there’s all this sorting going on, if you are a completely ideologically neutral person hiring at the PPO in the White House, and you’re looking for the best people in certain spheres, they’re going to be people who are predominantly one ideology over the other. And more than likely, they’re going to be liberals because liberals end up working in areas that are adjacent to public policy. And conservatives end up working more in private-sector areas. And so part of the problem we’re identifying here, though, is that even if someone wanted to have this sort of plural professionalism, it would mean you got worse people who were conservatives.

Teles: Well, so if you think the answer to this is just ideological affirmative action and preferential treatment, then in equilibrium, you’re going to get worse. And again, now, that’s a function of other things that were happening earlier in the labor market.

And this is where, again, I think it’s worth thinking about this as a structural problem. Just as we have ideas about structural racism, I think it’s also worth thinking about sort of structural ideological bias. And most of the bias in many of these fields really is structural, in the sense that it’s self-reproducing; it’s chronic. Again, once a field gets defined ideologically in the way that I talked about before, then nobody has to do any discriminating. The perception of what the field is about does all of that work.

So my friend Harold Pollack at University of Chicago has talked about this in the field he’s in, in social work. And social work is now so definitionally marked as being a left-of-center thing that people would just think it was inappropriate for a person like them to do that if they were more conservative, even though there’s lots actually really important work that people who come from a more conservative point of view could be doing in social work—and, in fact, are doing but they’re doing without, necessarily, that kind of technical training.

So I think of this as a long-term project. So one of the things I’m involved with is a new school of government at Johns Hopkins, and we have a very deep sort of institutionalized commitment to ideological diversity in the faculty we hire and the students that we’re going to bring on. And part of that’s an effort to try to get some capture on the problem that we’re just describing.

But to go back, there’s a reason why the labor-market phenomenon you’re talking about exists, which is: Homophily is a very powerful force in human affairs—the fact that birds of a feather flock together. It’s because at any one time, that reduces conflict. People like being around other people who share their values, and managing diverse workforces, whether they’re managing for race or ideology, is hard. It takes extra work to do that.

Now, again, I think there’s a reason to think that it produces, over time, better outcomes, because it surfaces conflict in ways that are actually necessary, as opposed to simply having everybody assume they know what everybody thinks and, also, not checking each other’s work when it agrees with their ideological priors. One of the advantages of having some degree of diversity, for example, in academia, is you really want people rerunning people’s models or checking their footnotes. They’re going to do that more if they have an ideological motivation to do so. And they’re going to do it less if it feels like, well, that’s just going to make you feel like a jerk because you’re that guy who is checking the model of the thing that everybody wants to believe is true.

Demsas: Well, Steve, I think this is a great point for our last and final question. What is something that you thought was a good idea but ended up being only good on paper?

Teles: So I know you want me to say that, like, my choice of toothpaste or something was the thing I thought was good on paper, but I’ll give the more prosaic one, that I thought the Iraq War was a great idea.

Demsas: Really?

Teles: And I wasn’t, like, out there writing stuff in Foreign Affairs at the time. But for lots of reasons, at the time, I remember very strongly thinking that—now, part of this was that I thought we had sort of run out of other options, that the old line that lots of ways you get in trouble is that you say: This is unsustainable. Something must be done. This is something, ergo we should do this something.

And the thing, and in retrospect, that was so disturbing to me when I actually saw what happened in the Iraq War is: I was ignoring lots of things that professionally I should have known about. A lot of what I actually teach people about is the problem of joint coordinated action, the difficulty of actually doing big, complicated things. And for some reason, I just didn’t apply any of that knowledge when it was about something that, for normative or other reasons, I thought was a really good idea.

And so my penance for that is I started teaching a class called Policy Disasters that always ended with the Iraq War. So that was the last case I would do, but it was my effort to sort of ritually abuse myself for having made that big mistake and to try and teach other people how to apply what we know about why big, complicated things go wrong, even the things that they care a lot and feel normatively invested in.

[Music]

Demsas: I was too young to have a considered opinion on the Iraq War at the time, but I do find it interesting that there’s—like, polling had like large majorities in favor of the Iraq War, yet I never find anyone admitting that they were one of the 60-something percent of people who were ready to go to war there. So I appreciate you admitting that to us on this podcast.

Teles: Thank you for having me here.

Demsas: Good on Paper is produced by Rosie Hughes. It was edited by Dave Shaw, fact-checked by Ena Alvarado, and engineered by Erica Huang. Our theme music is composed by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio. Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

And hey, if you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts.

I’m Jerusalem Demsas, and we’ll see you next week.