Decades of trickle-down thinking hollowed out our government—and now the anti-democracy crowd is finishing the job. This week, legal scholar and former Biden advisor K. Sabeel Rahman joins Nick and Goldy to talk about what happens when the rule of law becomes optional, what the Biden administration got right (and what it didn’t,) and why simply restoring the old system isn’t enough. If we want a real democracy—one that can stand up to corporate power and actually deliver for people—we need to stop playing by outdated rules and start constructing a government that’s faster, fairer, and fit for the modern world.
K. Sabeel Rahman is a legal scholar, policy expert, and former senior advisor in the Biden administration, where he served as Associate Administrator at the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. A leading voice on democracy, governance, and economic justice, he is Demos’s former president and a law professor at Cornell University.
Social Media:
Further reading:
Civic Power: Rebuilding American Democracy in an Era of Crisis
Website: https://pitchforkeconomics.com
Instagram: @pitchforkeconomics
Threads: pitchforkeconomics
Bluesky: @pitchforkeconomics.bsky.social
Twitter: @PitchforkEcon, @NickHanauer, @civicaction
YouTube: @pitchforkeconomics
LinkedIn: Pitchfork Economics
Substack: The Pitch
Nick Hanauer:
The rising inequality and growing political instability that we see today are the direct result of decades of bad economic theory.
Goldy:
The last five decades of trickle-down economics haven’t worked, but what’s the alternative?
Nick Hanauer:
Middle-out economics is the answer, because the middle class is the source of growth, not its consequence. That’s right.
Speaker 4:
This is Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer, a podcast about how to build the economy from the middle-out. Welcome to the show.
Nick Hanauer:
Goldy, today, we get to talk to my friend Sabeel Rahman, who is a legal scholar, policy expert, and he was a senior advisor in the Biden administration, he ran something called OIRA, which is-
Goldy:
OIRA.
Nick Hanauer:
OIRA, which is the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, which means they administer how the federal government deals with regulation, and it won’t surprise you to know that the structure of that approach had been very neoliberal for a very long time. It was basically-
Goldy:
It was designed that way in the Reagan Administration to basically make it hard to regulate.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, and care a lot more about corporate profits than anything else, and so on and so forth.
Goldy:
But by the way, pretended to be all about openness, and process, and democracy, and all that.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. What was interesting about the process that we, as you may know, had a big part of… and by we, I mean, the team at Civic Ventures and some of our allies, were both extremely involved and extremely supportive of this process to fix how we regulated. It was also an exercise in how painstakingly slow and difficult it is to make sensible progress in government.
Goldy:
So you’re telling me, Nick, that it’s hard to reform OIRA when these OIRA reforms are subject to OIRA.
Nick Hanauer:
Well, I think it was slightly more complicated than that. But the hoops that you had to jump through and the process that was involved was pretty extraordinary. And the pushback was incredible, as you can imagine from corporate America, wants to believe that the only thing that matters is profits. But here we are a couple of three years later and all of that effort is for naught, and we’re in the process of watching the state as such be dismantled, extra judicially and outside of the rule of law-
Goldy:
Extra constitutionally-
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, all that stuff, which of course is upsetting and annoying, but it does raise the question-
Goldy:
Annoying. Upsetting and annoying. You don’t live in my head, obviously, Nick, because those are not the words I would use. Existential, catastrophic.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, all that stuff. But anyway, it does raise the question, which is you can’t go back, but did we approach-
Goldy:
Why would you?
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. Did you approach it right? And if you had to do it again, would you do it the same way? And Sabeel is a very thoughtful guy, and I know he’s wrestling with a lot of these issues. He’s spoken out about the need for government to deliver more faster. So I think that that’s really why we wanted to have him on the podcast, is to talk about this very, as you put it, existential question, which is what is the role of government? How do you make it work? I do think that it’s just true, I take it as a given that part of the reason we are where we are is that we didn’t do a good enough job in the past and we didn’t deliver enough.
Goldy:
That is a theme of this pod, that part of the reason why we are where we are is that over the past 50 years, government has failed to deliver the kind of lives that the American people want. We have failed to deliver to the middle class. We’ve made it less secure, we’ve made it poorer, we’ve made it smaller, we’ve made it angrier-
Nick Hanauer:
And now, we’re paying the price. You reap what you sow. So anyway, I think it’ll be very interesting to talk to Sabeel about his reflections on his experience and what he’d do differently in the future.
Sabeel Rahman:
I am Sabeel Rahman. I teach at Cornell Law School, formerly of the Biden administration, and before that, I ran a think tank on racial justice.
Nick Hanauer:
Sabeel, you and I met, I think, really for the first time when you were running OIRA, the organized… what is it called?
Sabeel Rahman:
It’s the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. In the alphabet soup, that is our federal government.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. And you were helping with a very ambitious plan to rewrite how the federal government did regulation and to, I suppose, summarize it. The prior 25 or 30 years, the organization had been highly neoliberally oriented, that is to say when it thought about regulations, it more or less asked the question, would this affect corporate profits? And if it did, then it probably was bad, and really struggled to care or weigh any other considerations. And the Biden administration came along and said, “That makes no sense,” and you and a bunch of other people working hard to change that.
Goldy:
It made sense to the folks in the Reagan administration who designed OIRA to work that way.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s right. But it did not make sense in the 21st century. And I think, if I may say so, you guys worked diligently and extraordinarily slowly and cautiously to try to make that so. We’re more or less having this conversation because, really, in the blink of an eye, all of that work went down the drain, because a different group of people came in and had a very different view about the constraints on power, and what you should be able to do, and how you should be able to do it. And so we wanted to talk to you about both how you feel about that. Obviously, you must be profoundly annoyed by the circumstances we find ourselves in, but also, I’m hoping a little bit self-reflective about the degree to which we, you, held yourself to a different and maybe silly standard. So can we start with that… Does that set the conversation up?
Goldy:
Yeah, let’s frame this up. I’m going to summarize this very briefly. The Biden administration acted methodically, responsibly, slowly, the Trump administration comes in and says, “Hey, there are no constraints on power. Let’s just destroy everything we want to destroy.” Any regrets?
Sabeel Rahman:
Well, let me rewind, because I actually think it’s important for us to think about what are our first principles. If we believe in democracy and equality, that means we should be opposed both to the kind of authoritarian power of a state that operates outside of any constraints of law or democracy, and to the kinds of authoritarian power of private actors who make it such that an Amazon warehouse worker dies of a heart attack on the floor because they can’t get away for two seconds because they’re being surveilled every moment on the job. But if you believe in democracy, we want a system of government that is self-democratic and that has the power and ability to restrain other kinds of power out in society in service of our freedom.
So how do we get there? I would characterize some of the work in the Biden administration differently than you all, but I think it’s fair to say that for progressives, I think we’re really caught in this moment between two different models of government, one we inherited, and one that we’re seeing playing out before our eyes, and neither of which I think are really good for that kind of country that we want to have. The version of government we see before us right now is utterly lawless. So I actually think it’s a mistake to say, “Oh, look, they’re doing all these things fast. We could do things fast too.” Well, if you don’t care about basic human and civil rights, you can do things pretty fast. But the government that progressives have been living in for many decades now, in both the Biden and Obama administrations, was deeply constrained by, as you say Nick, a lot of neoliberal presumptions.
So both parties had, for decades, absorbed, I would argue, a presumption against governmental action, and particularly, a presumption against governmental action when it cuts against various forms of corporate power or cuts against hierarchies of race and gender. And that’s partly where you get the many, many steps and procedures that agencies have to go through to make any kinds of policies, the kind of gauntlet of legal requirements, the shadow of very skeptical judicial review from the courts, those are all things… from hostile courts, I should say, those are all things that produce the slower moving process. Now, I think you’re exactly right that certainly looking back, it would’ve been much better for the public and for the country if, in a brief window of time, a progressively oriented administration could deliver more impactful results. And I would argue that actually some of the best results of the Biden administration were in that realm, in those first early years during the COVID crisis, the American Rescue Plan. And we can talk about the inner workings of how did that stuff move more quickly than other things, because I actually think it’s instructive.
But the bottom line for me is that part of the challenge, I think, for progressives in this moment sitting between a self-reflective critique of the last few years and a clear eyes about what’s happening right now is to think for ourselves about, “Okay, what is the version of government that we actually need that is fit for purpose, that is not authoritarian, but that also can actually deliver the kind of structural economic change that makes us all more free. And there’s a lot that we can unpack there, but I think that’s how we should be entering in this moment.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. Can we go back to… if you think I unfairly characterized the approach of the Biden administration, you should say so. What do you think… Did I not characterize that correctly?
Sabeel Rahman:
I’d say a couple of things about the cost benefit piece of it and the regulatory piece of it in particular. One, is that there are existing on the books laws that the current administration is disregarding that actually govern some of this stuff. When you change the data and informational framework for the executive branch, which is the circular A-4, the document you referenced, Nick, that actually has to… under then and still current law, has to go for notice and comment and peer review. We can talk about whether or not those are good ideas, but that is-
Nick Hanauer:
That’s the law.
Sabeel Rahman:
… at the time. Right, it’s the law. And so there’s good reasons for that. We could talk about maybe there are faster ways for that to happen, but that’s where that requires then certain steps to be taken. But the reasons for that then you are theoretically have a new framework that meets certain standards of evidence and academic integrity, and so forth. I would argue that the blink of an eye rescissions of those documents that the Trump administration has issued because they’ve not followed the procedures are in fact unlawful, not that it is high on the list of unlawful things that this administration is doing every day. So that’s the first part. I think the second point is when we think about policymaking through the executive branch, I think of this as really… there are two different things here. One is what are the substantive policies that we want to do that are on overtime, and corporate concentration, and racial discrimination, things of that nature.
And then there’s an underlying question of how do we evolve the practices of government itself so that it doesn’t systematically overlook questions of market power or questions of equity? And I think that’s where there was, in that second category, a lot of really important foundation laying and experimenting. And I would put here not just the cost benefit work, but I think the administration’s work on customer experience, on competition, on equity were really important attempts to try to bring different broader considerations into regulatory policymaking. If you look at some of those other activities, which many of us and many other folks were working on doing great work on, those were things like how do we get agencies to take into account corporate consolidation of markets when they’re making their rules? So you actually get USDA starting to tackle the poultry monopoly, you get the CFPB starting to tackle junk fees. Then how do you get agencies to put long histories of racial inequity, bake that into their thinking about what policies are going to serve most vulnerable communities.
And so to me, those were really important attempts to try to change the underlying logic of regulation. Because I think the bigger issue here is I think for a long time, progressives and liberals have been overly fascinated by a technocratic mindset. Not that there isn’t such… not that science and evidence aren’t important, they are, but I think there’s been a prevailing notion for many decades that if we just focus on the things that we can quantify and that have market signals, those are more justifiable policies to move on, but that means you leave a lot of other things out that the public needs. And so those are the kinds of things that I think evolving our government’s going to have to tackle one way or another, even in if there is a next progressive-aligned democratic administration.
Goldy:
Is there a structural issue in the shape and form of our government that makes it hard to do the right thing, that if you want to approach these regulations in an open and democratic and responsible way, there just isn’t the time to do it in a government where Congress can flip hands every two years, and the White House can flip every four years, and not just flip from one party to another the way it used to be where you had two parties that disagreed on how to achieve our goals, but at the very least, there was a broad, broad consensus on things like the rule of law that there just isn’t anymore? We went from a rule of law party… regardless of how progressive, whatever you think the ideology is, policy-wise, we went from a rule of law party to an anti rule of law party overnight. And even if you had managed to accomplish more in the Biden administration in OIRA, it would’ve been all thrown out the window anyway.
Sabeel Rahman:
Yeah, that I think is totally right. And I think… I mean, what I love about where you started us off on the conversation, and it can go… because I do think we have to be thinking if there was a central conceptual failure of the Biden era, it was the notion that we could restore government and restore democracy by going back to the way things were, as opposed to the way things were is not working, the vision on the other side is not even playing the same small-d democratic game, to your point, Goldy. And so we actually… those of us who care about small-d democracy have no choice but to reconstruct in more of a blue sky way from first principles the kind of government we need that is fit for purpose in the modern era. I think that was an approach that some folks took, but by and large, that was not the overall frame from 2021 to 2024. And I think that’s where then a lot of the missed opportunities to your earlier point start to stem from.
Goldy:
Okay. So let’s just start… We’re going to start from an assumption that we are living through a political shit show of catastrophic proportions unseen since the Civil War. This is like the equivalent of secession, “Well, Oh, that Constitution thing doesn’t apply. You can’t enforce it, we’re not going to obey it. Good luck North, you go your separate ways.” This is where we are right now. There is a party in control that doesn’t obey the courts, the constitution, the rule of law, democratic norms, et cetera. Right, okay, this is the world we’re in right now. Let’s get to the positive side of the argument and start rethinking what type of government would work in this highly polarized nation we’re left with today because that is the nation we have, a nation, by the way, in which 550,000 citizens of red Wyoming has 67 times more representation in the Senate than 39 million Californians.
And because those two states are so incredibly polarized, they have this outsized power and always will, there’s no way to fix it, a constitutional convention would likely end up much worse than where we are now, and they’ll never cede that power. So what do we do within those constraints? The historical constraints we’re left with and the modern constraints of the polarization that exists today.
Sabeel Rahman:
Yeah, I think you’re right to orient us towards the kind of underlying structures, because I think a lot of what we’re living through in this moment is downstream of the structural disparities of power baked into our constitutional system. You mentioned the Senate, that disproportionate power in the Senate. I think the strong form judicial review that we see from the Supreme Court and the stacking of the Supreme Court is also contributing a factor here-
Goldy:
Right, which is a result of the Senate and the Electoral College and the over-representation of rural minority states in those two institutions ended up giving us the court that we have right now.
Sabeel Rahman:
Right. All these structural disparities all stack on top of one another. Look, I think, will we have an opportunity to amend the constitution? I don’t know, politics is indeterminate, but I do think we should be thinking in the frame of the first Reconstruction period, the New Deal period, even the civil rights movement era, which a lot of scholars and folks call second reconstruction moment. These were moments of pretty transformative, democratizing, small-d, democratizing change to our institutions and how our constitution operates. And I think that’s the kind of orientation we’re going to need coming out of this moment. Some of that is going to involve familiar things to both of you in terms of in the realm of structural democracy reform, how do we actually make sure that everybody’s able to vote, every vote is counted, that you don’t have hugely gerrymandered districts, and money and politics that now has been weaponized to an absurd degree when you look at some of the oligarchic influence on our elections, even the Wisconsin Supreme Court election, the attempts to turn that election a few weeks ago.
So all of that’s going to have to happen. And then I think there’s another set of things that has to happen in parallel, which is what we’re talking about earlier, that we’re going to have to reinvent the way we actually do the work of governing and policymaking. And here, I think, back to where we started, our premise should be that government needs to work a lot faster, needs to be able to operate at scale, so being able to actually deal with the root causes of economic inequality, economic insecurity, and that means we’re going to have to get away from some of the ways, the standard ways, that policy was designed, and we can call it the neoliberal era, say, the ’80s, ’90s, 2000s, 2010s, and start playing around with very different models. And we can talk more about all of that, but I think pretty much on any issue, you’re going to have to see that same kind of reorientation for how lawyers like me do policy and policy work.
Nick Hanauer:
One of the things that you said early in the conversation that I really agree with is that it’s a mistake to think that we need to choose between the thing that came before, the good old days, which really weren’t working very well, and the shit show that we find ourselves in today, the lawless, I’m calling it neo-feudal authoritarianism, that is the Trump-Musk view of the world. Yeah, we need to find a third option, door number three.
Sabeel Rahman:
Totally. Totally. Totally. And I think there are lots of really good things to work with here. We’re not building from scratch, there are a lot of advocates, social movements, scholars, policy folks who have been thinking about this or struggling with this question I think for a while. And just to get concrete, for example, if we’re dreaming blue sky, I would love to think about, “Okay, in the modern world where corporate power operates the way it does, not just in the familiar form of the boss and the worker, but through private equity, and finance, and the control of data and information, what are the new kinds of agencies and authorities we’re going to need to actually rein that in? Is it the FTC, the way it was working, I think, really powerfully and effectively in the last administration? Or is it something even bigger?”
We created the CFPB, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, in part, to respond to the 2008 financial crisis. So I would love us to get back in the business of building new and different institutions again that are up-to-date. Or to take another example, a lot of debate rightly so right now about folks coming for social security, and that’s a legislative problem, but a lot of other aspects-
Nick Hanauer:
What’s a legislative problem?
Sabeel Rahman:
Meaning, potential attacks on social security that might be coming through future legislation. A lot of people are talking about that, but there’s-
Nick Hanauer:
I don’t think the danger to social security is through legislation. Do you?
Goldy:
Oh, so you’re confident, Nick, that Republicans will not push through dramatic cuts to social security because they somehow care about how voters might respond?
Nick Hanauer:
I think the threats are from DOGE and to the institution itself. I don’t think… It has nothing to do with the legislation.
Sabeel Rahman:
Well, so I think it’s both, and that’s where I was going, Nick, which is that we can have a conversation about how to protect against legislation that may be coming down the pipe, but exactly to your point, the actual administration of the thing, once there aren’t people to answer the phones, you can’t get your benefits. But the crazy thing about it it’s even before DOGE, it was a multi-year wait for people to get on disability, for example. And that had to do with decades of both parties cared so much about waste, fraud, and abuse that it meant that a lot of people couldn’t actually get the benefits to which they were entitled, that they needed to live lives of dignity. And so when we’re thinking blue sky, I think part of my hope would be not only do we defend against the cuts and the illegal firings of civil servants, but we also think about, okay, for social security to really do what we want it to do, which is create that floor that allows people to live with dignity, we should administer it differently.
And we shouldn’t administer it in the way that it used to be in 2015 or even 2022, there are things that we should build different so that folks can get the benefits that they need immediately, and those benefits are fulsome and robust and can be taken away at the whim of a random person who might be hostile to the applicant. So I think there’s a lot of work to be done to build that alternative, that third option that you were describing.
Goldy:
And that’s just one of many examples. The same critique you have of Social Security Administration, you could have of the Veterans Administration, exact same thing, if not worse.
Sabeel Rahman:
In some ways, I think, what the brazen attacks from the so-called Department of Governmental Efficiency is helping reveal is that there are a lot of ways where in the before times, I think people who didn’t like the safety net try to pick it apart through more hidden mechanisms, just make it that much harder for people to get access to benefits. Now, there’s no artifice, it is just destroy the thing. And so for us who think people should have a safety net, we should come with, I think, a next iteration for 21st century vision of what those institutions could look like.
Goldy:
The core components of our safety net were constructed for an economy that no longer exists in a polity that no longer exists. We’ve spent all this time, the past 40 years, trying to defend the remnants of the New Deal. And I don’t think that any of us, if we were starting from scratch in the wake of the total destruction of our democracy by a fascist administration, not to go over the top there, but I think that’s kind of what we’re looking at, we wouldn’t build them this way to start with.
Sabeel Rahman:
Right. And I think to bring it back to some of the points we started earlier about what’s the right way to think about the analysis say that an agency should do, if you take something like the safety net programs, there’s really important empirical work that agencies could do to understand, okay, who are the different people who we’re serving, and how hard is it for them to get access to this service or benefit, and how do we make that really easy? That takes work, that takes analysis, it takes research. That’s the kind of evidence-based government that I think we ought to have. And so it’s not to say that we shouldn’t take time… policymakers, regulators shouldn’t take time to understand the evidence and the empirics of what’s going on, but it’s that it should be focused on the lived experience of people and how do we use that to make government actually speak to the things that are most threatening and troubling for people trying to live their lives, which is a different orientation than what is the thing that’s going to keep me from getting attacked by industry or by a hostile court?
Goldy:
So if we do that though, if we make these… I mean, there’s that line about the government being a giant insurance company with an army, that social insurance is the largest part of the budget, and if we make it easier to actually get access to social security, and SNAP, and housing assistance, and the VA, the CBO is going to do a cost-benefit analysis, and it’s going to get a bad score because it’s going to increase the debt, the deficit and the debt. Because if you make it easier to access these policies, these programs are going to be more costly. And that raises the question of how much of reform do we need to have in terms of not just the way we’re regulating these things and building these programs, but in our entire mindset to what government is and how we analyze and understand it. Because the CBO models have been this constraint on progress for decades.
We talk about a lot on this podcast, that comes straight from the field of economics, the way it is taught, and the way these experts are respected throughout the system. How do you change something like that?
Sabeel Rahman:
Right. And I think that was some of the… CBO is a really good example. In some ways, it’s a congressional counterpart to the regulatory cost-benefit analysis that Nick was mentioning earlier. I think there are two ways we can think about this. One is an evolutionary approach, and I think the Biden administration’s rewriting of the cost-benefit analysis framework, we could think of it in that frame, the president’s original directive was… the way it was framed was to say, “Okay, take into account more up-to-date social science, about what is actually impacting people, and how climate is impacting the economy, and how do we take into account inequality and distributional effects, and all of that kind of stuff.” And so there’s new science out there, social science, that one could incorporate to evolve. I think it’s fair to ask whether that’s a big enough transformation for what we need. And so I think a different way might be to say, “Well, maybe that whole framework isn’t quite right.”
Goldy:
The cost-benefit analysis framework. Because you can’t do one without putting prices on things that you really can’t put a price on.
Sabeel Rahman:
And so the things… I think that’s right. And so I think… I’m an ecumenical kind of person, so if you show me a system that works and delivers on the needs that actual people have that the government is trying to serve, then great, let’s go for it. For me, this is why I think it’s good to think for us as we’re thinking about what comes next to be thinking in terms of first principles. And for me, the first principle is you want government that is rooted in evidence, that is actually doing stuff that is rooted in evidence and rooted in impact for the communities we serve. That should be the North Star. And there are many ways to get at that, but we shouldn’t be so tethered to a particular model that the assumptions, potentially, faulty assumptions, of that model then lead us to massively ignore the huge benefits that some policies might deliver to some folks.
And so when the Trump administration fiddles around with the discount rate, a kind of wonky parameter, that the purpose of that is to make it look like climate change isn’t that big a deal, and so it’s actually more costly to regulate greenhouse gas emissions than to leave it alone, that’s fiddling around with a model to get a result you want. That’s not good government. But we also shouldn’t be stuck in an old model that is keeping us from properly taking to account climate disaster and how that’ll completely upend whole cities and whole economies. So the point is, we should be thinking about what are the ways we look at evidence and look at impact so that government’s actually serving people and is able to do so at scale and speed. We shouldn’t be locked into a kind of circa 1980, circa 1990, circa 2000 set of models and approaches.
Nick Hanauer:
I want to zero in a little bit more in our final minutes about door three, because I think that that’s the most interesting bit in this moment. In our podcast, we always ask the benevolent dictator question, which is, if you were in charge-
Goldy:
Increasingly uncomfortable with because there is a dictator, so it doesn’t seem so funny anymore.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, I know. It used to be funny, now, it’s not. But if you were a benevolent dictator, and as much as you do know about government and how it works because you’ve worked in it, what would you do? How would you… at the highest level.
Sabeel Rahman:
There are many ways to go with that. I think I’d lift up two things that actually go together. One is that we actually need the foundational structures of our democracy to be democratic. This goes back to something we were talking about before. You can’t have a democracy that’s actually going to be effective in the long run with the massive forms of a counter-majoritarian and elite veto power that you see in the Senate, and the Electoral College, and the strong form of judicial review that we see. So I would love us to have a proportional representation model of Congress, for example, and we can talk about judicial reform, but there’s structural changes to our democracy that are constitutional changes. We are stuck in a 1700s constitution that just doesn’t work for the kind of society we have. Then there’s I think a second set of things, which is more in the realm of regulation and governance.
What happens after an election to make government able to proceed? And here, I think similarly, we should be thinking about how do we re-legislate, recreate a modern fit for purpose administrative state? So we should be rewriting the APA, we should be creating new agencies, we should be making sure that those benefits programs actually work, that the government has the power to actually regulate and rein in the modern day forms of corporate power. Those are all regulatory things that we’ve created in fits and starts, the burst of activity in the New Deal, burst of activity around civil rights, but we’re going to need that scale of rebuilding, or building anew, of the federal administrative state going forward.
Goldy:
Should we be rethinking the use of the federal administrative state as opposed to maybe devolving some, if not a lot of this, to the states for… we’ve talked about this in the office, we’ve mused about it a lot, West Coast alliance of California, Oregon, and Washington… and California is key here because it’s a small country all by itself, but we could deliver our own social insurance programs, we could do… given the fiscal space, if we were not to let the federal government take so much in taxes, give the states the fiscal space to raise their own revenue, and everything we want in a blue state like Washington, we could provide for ourselves together with California, you need that giant pool.
And there are other parts of the country where states, through state compact and uniform legislation and other agreements, could band together to provide their own competing vision of how to provide for their own citizens. And those collections, regional collections of states, those would be the laboratories of democracy, as opposed to relying on a federal government that’s very hard to rely on due to the structure of the constitution and the polarization that it’s going to take a very long time, if ever, to go away.
Sabeel Rahman:
Yeah, it’s a really good question to wrestle with. I think there are obvious benefits to federalism as a response to overreach in the central government or as a way to innovate. I think it’s also true, of course, historically, that greater state autonomy has also been a vehicle for imposing all kinds of economic, racial, and gendered hierarchies in society that are not good for the people who are affected by them and not good for a small-d democracy. And so I don’t think it’s actually clear cut, I think if we are sort of waving a magic wand, I think what you would want is you would want states that have the policy space and the fiscal resources to innovate in a progressive direction to really go to town and really model a different way of being, and you would want that to help feed a broader national grassroots, bottom-up movement to make the transformations we would want to make to the national government.
And in a lot of ways, that historically is how these big transformations, progressive-oriented transformations, to our country have happened. You needed states in the teens and twenties pioneering attempts to rein in the oligarchs of the time, the railroads, and the money trusts, and so on. And the folks who cut their teeth on those campaigns and those grassroots mobilization, those policy designs, those were the people who became the sort of feed into the New Deal. But you needed that 20, 30, 40 years of trial and error and groundbreaking, at the state level and at the local level, to have the ideas and the political power to pull it off at the federal level. And so I think sometimes, when we skip over that and we try to go right to like, “Oh, what can the White House do to make change happen?” But if we haven’t built the mass movement and pioneered attempts at the… pioneering policy at the state level first, then you find that some of these things don’t stick.
Goldy:
And from a very practical organizational level, one consequence of this gutting of the federal administrative state is that the only expertise remaining is going to be in progressive blue states.
Sabeel Rahman:
Yeah, I hope folks can grab some of the supremely talented civil servants, because this is something that we don’t talk about enough, I think, for whatever challenges, or inertias, or inefficiencies of government there might be. In my experience, the federal civil service is a huge, huge foundation, building block, of a democracy, people who are absolutely there to serve the public and in a nonpartisan way with the best of values and dedication, and those are folks who we want to protect and we want to help keep their expertise and their commitment to the public as a resource for the work ahead. So I think that would be hugely helpful for states to step into that space.
Goldy:
I was at a Union Station in DC a few weeks ago, and there were electronic billboards from New York state recruiting federal workers saying, “We want you.”
Sabeel Rahman:
Yeah. And by the way, going back to something we started the discussion with, if you were to ask federal workers like, “Hey, if you were to blue sky fix the program that you’re running, they’ll give you a million excellent ideas about how things actually could work if they were given that magic wand.” And so I think even in this door number three, “Let’s reinvent government and not just try to put the old stuff back,” I think those are some of our most talented and best thought leaders on this stuff.
Nick Hanauer:
So one final question, why do you do this work?
Sabeel Rahman:
Well, I appreciate this question a lot. I was born here. I’m born here, but I’m the child of immigrants, my family is from the Global South. And I think for us… or for me, I say, growing up, the precarity and preciousness of democracy of a society that treats you as a human was just always very clear to me, it is not a given, it is rare. It is hard to achieve and hard to hold onto, and really terrible when you don’t have it. I don’t mean like just elections, but a society that treats you as a real human, as a full human. And so this idea of whether it’s the research, or pedagogy, or policy to be a part of making that real for more people is deeply meaningful.
Nick Hanauer:
Well, Sabeel, thank you so much for being with us. And thank you for your work.
Sabeel Rahman:
Thank you. Thank you for this space and for keeping these important conversations going. We’re going to need it going forward. So appreciate you guys.
Goldy:
So I want to focus, Nick, on a caveat from Sabeel, which he put in front of some of his thoughts, which was, quote, “If you believe in democracy,” and a lot of the problem we’re facing today is that one of the two parties does not believe in democracy. Some of them are just open about, “Oh, it’s a republic, it’s not a democracy.” They don’t believe in democracy. They don’t believe that they’re constrained by the constitution, or democratic institutions, or norms, or the rule of law, or the courts, or human decency, it’s totally unconstrained. And so we have to start with a caveat, I think, in talking about what Sabeel is talking about, and that is we’re talking about what we might do if Democrats ever have control of the federal government again. Because it’s not clear that we will, not because the American people won’t want change, but because they might be denied the opportunity to have changed.
And I don’t think that is… it’s very dark to have these thoughts, but I don’t think it’s hyperbolic or unrealistic
Nick Hanauer:
For purposes of this conversation, that doesn’t matter though.
Goldy:
That’s the caveat right off the bat. I just want to say that because I’m sure there’s a lot of listeners who are going to listen to this and think, “This is a waste of time. We’re never going to get there.”
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, and that may be true.
But I do think that there’s a lot of work that needs to go into formulating what I characterize as door number three-
Goldy:
And what I wanted to get at here is that we are acknowledging that we are in a deep state of political crisis right now, but crisis is an opportunity. And if we want a new America, in a way, if we get through this… and this is not the path I would ever want to take to get there. We’re not saying, “Oh, we needed Trump to just wipe everything out so that we can build the America we want,” because it’s going to create a lot of unnecessary suffering. We’re just saying, this is the reality that we may be in a situation a few years from now where they have done all this destruction and we have an opportunity to rebuild.
And we need to start thinking about how we’re going to rebuild not incrementally, the way Democrats are accustomed to doing, because all of the justification for incrementalism has just been tossed out the window and sent off to El Salvador to die in a prison camp. No incrementalism. What would we do to build the kind of America we want if we were starting from scratch? Because we may be pretty much starting from scratch.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. Well, I think it’s not clear, but a lot of important work will have to be done to answer that question.
Goldy:
Yeah. And I think… It’s interesting, one thing he did mention that I think we need to maybe focus on a little more is we live in an information age, and we didn’t really have an agency for regulating information. We regulated trade, and we regulated communications, but not information, and that is an oversight. And again, it gets to the point that we have institutions that were built for an economy, and a technology, and polity that doesn’t really exist anymore. And when we start over, we need to start thinking about the things that are really at the heart of our economy, and information is definitely one of them, and that’s never occurred to me, Nick.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. Well, in any case, Goldy, despite your, I think, worry, the conversation was to be… it was really interesting. He’s a great guy and really interesting, a very smart, thoughtful person who hopefully will be part of the new way.
Goldy:
Yeah. And I hope we have an opportunity to talk to him again at a more constructive moment in our history, or should I say, a more reconstructive moment?
Speaker 5:
Pitchfork Economics is produced by Civic Ventures. If you like the show, make sure to follow, rate, and review us wherever you get your podcasts. Find us on other platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Threads at Pitchfork Economics. Nick’s on Twitter and Facebook as well @NickHanauer. For more content from us, you can subscribe to our weekly newsletter, The Pitch, over on Substack. And for links to everything we just mentioned, plus transcripts and more, visit our website Pitchforkeconomics.com. As always, from our team at Civic Ventures, thanks for listening. See you next week.