Author: Benjamin Ginsberg

As the long and bitterly-fought 2016 election drew to a close, President-elect Trump, President Obama, Hillary Clinton and a host of commentators and pundits declared that it was time to heal the wounds and bring the nation back together. It seemed more likely, however, that competing political forces would lick their wounds and move their battles from the electoral arena to the nation’s capital.
During the course of his campaign, Trump had outlined an ambitious agenda of foreign and domestic policies and programs designed, as he said, “to make America great again.” Though we often tend to be skeptical of candidates’ campaign promises, these pledges usually offer a reasonably accurate blueprint for understanding candidates’ plans. Trump seems likely to attempt to make good on a number of his pledges which are consistent with his nationalistic and populist orientation and with mainstream views within the Republican party. With the House and Senate in Republican hands, Democrats will be hard pressed to block Trump’s efforts. Democratic congressional leaders will, nevertheless, wage pitched battles against Trump and his allies, producing new wounds over the scabs of the old ones.
One of the first battles of the Trump presidency will concern the appointment of a new Supreme Court justice to replace the late Antonin Scalia. After Scalia’s death in 2016, President Obama designated Merrick Garland, a moderate Democrat, as his replacement. Senate Republicans refused to move on the Garland nomination which would have given the Court a 5-4 Democratic majority. Trump promised that he would designate a conservative jurist and, during the campaign, published a list of potential nominees that included many of the nation’s most distinguished conservative judges. Among those named were U.S. Appeals Court judges William Pryor, Diane Sykes and Steven Colloton, all of whom were thought to be opponents of abortion rights. Sykes is also known as a proponent of 2nd Amendment rights. Trump’s list pleased Republicans but Democrats vowed to battle any such nominee who, if confirmed, would restore the 5-4 conservative majority of the Scalia years. This battle could produce a Democratic Senate filibuster and a Republican effort to change Senate rules to bring an end to this venerable Senate tactic.
A second battle will almost certainly be fought over Obamacare. During the campaign, Trump frequently asserted that the repeal or modification of the Affordable Care Act would be among his first priorities. For the most part, House and Senate Republicans agree that Obamacare should be repealed and many support the idea of replacing it with Health Savings Accounts (HSA’s). Democrats are prepared to mount a fierce battle to defend a program that they hoped would join Medicare and Social Security as entitlements giving millions of voters a reason to support the Democratic party.
A third battle will involve immigration and border security. Trump famously declared that he would build a wall along the U.S. border with Mexico, prevent illegals from entering the country, and increase deportations of non-citizens who committed crimes in the U.S. Democrats castigated Trump for his callous attitude toward refugees. The fact is, however, that much of the U.S.-Mexican border is already strongly fenced and heavily patrolled. President Obama, moreover, greatly accelerated deportations while claiming to search for a more humane solution to the problem of immigration. Nevertheless, Democrats view the Hispanic community as an important constituency and will resist efforts by Trump and the GOP to strengthen border security.
Fourth, Trump will seek to revise American economic and trade policy. During the campaign, Trump accused the Democrats of allowing millions of blue-collar jobs to leave the country for China and Mexico while American workers faced unemployment. Trump will seek to provide manufacturing industries with reasons to stay in America by reducing corporate taxes and repealing many current financial, environmental and safety regulations that business finds costly and burdensome. Trump has also promised to scuttle the proposed Trans Pacific Partnership and to revisit America’s various existing trade and international environmental agreements to obtain terms more favorable to American firms and workers. Democrats will argue that under the pretext of helping American workers Trump and the Republicans plan to undermine the health and safety rules that protect American workers while offering unproductive but politically powerful American firms protection from foreign competition.
Fifth, Trump has criticized China while promising a better relationship with Russia. Both Democratic and Republican internationalist elites have long viewed friendly relations with China as a cornerstone of American security and trade policy–protecting American trade interests while enmeshing China in a series of economic relationships with the U.S. likely to prevent military rivalries. To Trump and other nationalists in the GOP, China is a growing enemy to be confronted rather than a beneficent trade partner, and Russia is a useful counterweight to China. Democrats are ready to accuse Trump of mounting a reckless and dangerous foreign policy, especially as Trump seeks to carry out his plan to greatly expand American naval and air power in the Pacific.
Thus, calls to heal the wounds and bring the nation together in the wake of the election seem rather whimsical. The conclusion of the election marked the end of one battle in a long struggle over the nation’s future.

At a Washington dinner party, I happened to mention to the woman seated to my right, an executive of Health and Human Services (HHS), the agency responsible for Americans’ health care, that a colleague and I had undertaken a survey of Washington officials to find out what the government thought of the people. My dinner companion expressed some bewilderment and asked why we needed a survey to learn the obvious. According to this experienced public servant, “everyone knew” that Washington officialdom did not think much of the American people. After a pause she added, “Many of the people are quite stupid, aren’t they?”
I have heard condescending comments like this from public officials too many times to have been surprised. Those of us who live in and around Washington, D.C. often hear such remarks from federal officials of all stripes. Officials like to point to opinion surveys as well as their own occasional encounters with ordinary citizens as proof that most Americans are fools and their views on public issues not worth much attention. Most Americans are taught theirs is a “popular government” by elected officials. This concept, however, as applied to contemporary America is misleading. Most of America’s national government today is not popular. It consists, instead, of administrative agencies staffed by unelected officials and linked to constellations of contractors, think tanks, quasi-governmental entities, and other elements of the Washington policy community that each year collectively write thousands of pages of rules and regulations possessing the force of law. This unelected government, though formally subordinate to Congress and the president, arguably does much of the actual governing of the United States, remaining in power year after year as presidents and congresses come and go. In many respects, this unelected bureaucracy is the real government of the United States.
We spent a year surveying these government officials and others in the Washington policy community. What we concluded after analyzing the results was disturbing. We learned that those who actually govern our nation do not think very highly of the American people. Many civil servants expressed utter contempt for the citizens they nominally served. We find, for example, that 72% of government officials think the public knows little or nothing about programs aimed at helping the poor and more than 60% think the public likewise knows almost nothing about childcare. Our survey also shows that government officials and ordinary Americans disagree on a lot of things. Interestingly, though, government officials are convinced that they hold policy positions even more removed from those of the general public than is actually the case. This is a phenomenon called “false uniqueness,” which usually means that one group believes that it is so much above the other in wisdom and intelligence that they cannot possibly agree on important matters. For example, 75% of the officials we surveyed believed that they disagreed with ordinary Americans on a number of key policy questions when, in fact, only about 12% disagreed on these questions. Many officials seem so blinded by their disdain for the citizenry that they cannot see the areas of agreement that might actually exist.
Even more disturbing, our findings show that officials don’t think it’s very important to heed the will of those they govern. With respect to policies that aid the poor, for example, only 12% of officials think they should follow public opinion. In the areas of social security and welfare, these numbers are a mere 18% and 13%. These findings seem inconsistent with the notion that a democratic government ought to be responsive to the public’s will.
We suggest that this disdain and disregard for the public results, at least in part, from the wide gulf in the life experiences of ordinary Americans and the denizens of official Washington.
Official Washington is wealthier, whiter and better educated than ordinary citizens. It lives in its own inside-the-beltway bubble, where Washingtonians converse with one another and rarely interact on an intellectual plane with Americans at large. We found that much of official and quasi-official Washington is content to think that ordinary Americans, and even the politicians whom they send to Congress, are uninformed and misguided and that policy makers generally should ignore them. This is more or less what they do, promulgating rules and regulations that make no sense to most Americans. How else can we explain federal agency regulations that make it a criminal act to whistle at whales or prescribe the exact ways flower bulbs must be described to customers? In thousands of different ways, unelected bureaucrats pursue policy agendas of their own and expect citizens to do what they are told.
It may, to be sure, be true that many Americans know little about government and politics. But, so what? Most patients know little about medicine, and most clients know little about the law. We expect, however, that doctors and lawyers will exhibit a fiduciary responsibility toward those seeking their services. The ignorance of patients and clients is a reason to listen more carefully and explain more fully, not an excuse for dismissing them as unworthy of attention. A physician or attorney who regards those dependent upon their services as fools, and undertakes actions without taking much interest in their life circumstances and without giving much consideration to their needs and preferences, is guilty of medical or legal malpractice. Similarly, public servants who have disdain for the public they nominally serve, and show little interest in the public’s needs and wishes, are guilty of civic malpractice.
We hope that our study, recently published under the title What Washington Gets Wrong will serve as a loud wake-up call for Americans. The officials in our survey do have one thing right—Americans need to learn more about the realities of government. Perhaps when they do, they will be inspired to begin challenging the status quo and pressuring Congress to leash the bureaucratic monster it has created.

Over the past year, America’s political waters have been roiled by a host of investigations and revelations aimed at influencing the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. Republicans fired the opening shots by launching a congressional investigation of Hillary Clinton’s role in the deaths of U.S. embassy officials in Benghazi, Libya and another investigation of Clinton’s use of a private email server to handle official State Department correspondence. Neither investigation led to the bringing of formal charges against Clinton but both convinced many Americans that the former Secretary of State was dishonest and untrustworthy. Republicans, indeed, charged that Clinton was spared prosecution only because her allies in the Department of Justice moved to protect her.

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1. Presidential succession is governed by the Twentieth and Twenty-Fifth Amendments of the Constitution and by the Presidential Succession Act. Neither the amendments nor the act covers the possibility that the general election winner might die or become incapacitated before the Electoral College votes or that the apparent Electoral College winner might die or become incapacitated before electoral votes are officially counted by Congress. Either eventuality could throw the presidential succession into doubt.

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One ongoing source of conflict between the president and Congress derives from what might be called their principal-agent relationship. When Congress enacts a law the executive is required to execute it. One might say that the president is serving as an agent for the Congress. Conflicts almost inevitably arise any relationship of this sort. Whether the agent is a president or a plumbing contractor, the principal is likely to find instances in which the agent did not follow the precise terms of the contract or, perhaps, failed altogether to fulfill the contract.

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