These are trying times for defenders of democracy, and for believers in the American constitutional experiment. We’re living through a political moment in which the rules and norms that make limited government possible are openly flaunted, in which policies are made and unmade with bewildering capriciousness, in which outrages to common decency are routinely committed, and in which faith in democratic institutions is worryingly (and understandably) low. It’s hard just to keep track of what’s being done, let alone to see what it amounts to or how we might best respond. Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum’s Ungoverning is an effort to make sense of what they aptly describe in the subtitle to the book as the “politics of chaos.” While the book is thus unusually timely for a work of political theory, it was published before the 2024 presidential election and so doesn’t address the outcome of that election and the truly chaotic politics of the second Trump administration—developments which, as we’ll see, both amplify and complicate their story.
Surprisingly, given that it was written at a time when “democracy is on the ballot” was a prominent anti-Trump slogan, Muirhead and Rosenblum don’t focus on the threat that the Trump movement poses to the familiar mechanisms of democratic rule: free elections, the rule of law, the peaceful transfer of power, and so on. They focus instead on what they describe in the other half of their subtitle as “the attack on the administrative state”—the threat that the Trump movement poses to the “vast array of government agencies that shape, implement, adjudicate, and enforce public policies of every kind” (1); in short, to the federal bureaucracy. In framing the issue this way they’ve chosen, as they admit, an unsympathetic plaintiff: where “democracy” is often treated as a political ideal—even if we disagree about what exactly it means—“bureaucracy” is often used as a shorthand for inefficiency, opacity, and sclerosis. In addition to making a case against a certain kind of politics, then, the book also makes the case for a competent and independent civil service as an essential feature of democratic governance.
The neologism “ungoverning” refers to what Muirhead and Rosenblum characterize as a systematic effort not just to restrain, but to dismantle, the administrative state. Where there can be good reasons to want to reform or rein in public agencies—for example, if we’re concerned about government overreach, regulatory capture, or high public spending—the effort to destroy state capacity for its own sake is, they argue, “unthinkable,” “irrational,” and “almost entirely without precedent” (4). “Ungoverning,” they write, “is vandalism, a willful sabotage of the institutions that do the work of government” (6); it “is not an attempt to make government work better. It is an attempt to make government not work” (7). The reader will immediately be reminded of the actions of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in the first half of 2025—again, after this book was published—in which federal employees were harassed and fired, and federal programs infiltrated and terminated, without any obvious organizing pattern or goal. This is the most striking example of how later events have amplified Muirhead and Rosenblum’s account.
What can account for this “irrational” behavior? Why would the people who are tasked with governing intentionally undermine the very institutions that they need to govern effectively? Muirhead and Rosenblum offer two responses. The first, which can be thought of as a top-down explanation, appeals to President Trump’s desire to remove any constraints on his will; to replace regular procedures with arbitrary rule. This is of course an intelligible motive—all presidents chafe at the limitations on their power—but it is nevertheless, they argue, an irrational one, because durable changes in public policy can only be brought about by working with, rather than against, the administrative state. “One-off commands,” they write, “do not have a sustained effect; unlike policy, they do not deliver regular results”; rather “[c]ommand creates the illusion of control” (70).
The second, bottom-up, explanation that Muirhead and Rosenblum offer for the rise of “ungoverning” is that the Trump movement “wants from politics what no liberal democratic government could deliver: a restoration of America as a Christian nation, a white nation, a nation that subordinates women, a sovereign nation divorced from the ‘new world order’” (5). This is (they argue) an impossible aspiration—because “no political insurrection or rogue act of violence can reverse the fundamental fact of the United States as a pluralist society” (86–87)—as it gives rise to what they call “the anti-politics of ‘right now’” (93–94); a politics in which the often tedious work of public administration is set aside in favor of inflammatory rhetoric and symbolic gestures which temporarily satisfy the demand for immediate action but don’t bring about meaningful or lasting change.
The experience of the second Trump administration complicates this story somewhat. While there has of course been no shortage of inflammatory rhetoric and symbolic gestures, Trump’s advisors spent their years out of power learning how better to use the levers of the bureaucracy to enact his agenda. In particular, the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025” report was explicitly aimed at finding ways to bend the administrative state more closely to the president’s will, and despite his disavowals during the 2024 campaign this blueprint has been energetically pursued (this seems to have been one of the aims of the DOGE effort). To the extent that Trump’s legacy proves to be a fragile one it won’t be because his administration failed to take the administrative state seriously, but rather because it failed, and indeed didn’t make a serious effort, to work with Congress to enact its policy agenda on (for example) immigration and foreign trade through legislation. What’s done by executive order can be undone by executive order.
Having said that, this book performs a valuable service in stepping back from the current chaos to consider larger trends, larger causes, and larger implications. Among other virtues, it provides a damning account of the various ways in which the Trump movement has subverted the norms and institutions of democratic rule (though not all of these, I think, are properly described as forms of “ungoverning”). It faces up squarely to the nihilism that has become increasingly and worryingly prevalent on the political right. It offers a powerful (but not starry-eyed) reminder that the administrative state has an essential role to play in democratic governance; a role that’s often neglected by democratic theorists and students of American politics more generally. No single book could possibly do justice to our political moment, but Ungoverning provides a distinctive and compelling lens for helping us see things more clearly.
