Donald Trump is waging war on the federal civil service. This is, in part, a war on the government’s ability to provide public services and to undertake its legitimate functions. It is also, in part, a war on the individual human beings who work in the civil service.
Trump’s assaults are overlapping and complementary — if you make civil service careers intolerably undesirable, you won’t have a quality civil service and therefore won’t be able to have an effective and competent state.
But they’re not identical.
Progressives recognize this distinction in contexts where there’s an explicit ideological contention between activists/intellectuals and service providers. They understand, in other words, that “have the police department do a good job” and “do whatever the police union wants” are not the same thing. But in contexts where the service providers themselves tend to be friendly liberals, things get murkier. To govern effectively and to make the affirmative case for tackling big new progressive projects, Democrats need to be more clear-eyed and rigorous about this.
Thus, point eight of the Common Sense Manifesto:
Public services and institutions like schools deserve adequate funding, and they must prioritize the interests of their users, not their workforce or abstract ideological projects.
I wrote a five-part series (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) on what I termed “The Strange Death of Education Reform” since Obama’s second term, and I don’t want to rehash that whole conversation. But while I think the story of what went right and wrong there is nuanced, there is a more clear-cut bottom line.
For quite a while, many Democrats believed that improving the performance of the K-12 school system required doing some things that teachers unions disagreed with. After Trump took office, Democrats became much more uniformly aligned with the unions. Some of this was a good-faith belief that certain reform ideas hadn’t worked out. Some of it was a belief that fighting Trump required maximum solidarity and avoiding intra-coalition fights. And some of it was passivity in the face of the rising power of “the groups.” And I will say, on behalf of teachers unions, that unlike many of the advocacy organizations on the left, these are genuine mass membership organizations with accountable leaders and a cadre of highly engaged rank-and-file members who vote and volunteer and actually do things. So it’s not like “do what Randi Weingarten wants” is a totally crazy idea. But the post-reform era has coincided with a precipitous decline in Democrats’ traditional advantage as the more trusted party on education.
I’m the parent of a public elementary school student, and I know a lot of other parents, so education issues happen to be very salient to me. And objectively, teachers are the largest category of public sector workers, so this is an important example. But the basic point applies broadly across the board: If you’re not willing to risk some intra-coalition tension, you can’t govern effectively.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Slow Boring to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.