Support Your Local Collaborator
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Every few weeks, a Trump administration official comes up with an insane plan that would devastate some American industry, region, or demographic. Maybe an Undersecretary of the Interior decides that aluminum is “woke” and should be banned. They circulate a draft order saying it will be illegal for US companies to use aluminum, starting in two weeks, Thank You For Your Attention To This Matter.
Next begins a frantic scramble on the parts of everyone affected, trying to make them back down. Industry lobbies, think tanks, and public intellectuals exchange frantic emails, starting with “They said WHAT?”, progressing on to “Oh God we are so fucked”, and occasionally ending in some kind of plan. Sending letters. Phoning members of Congress. Calling up that one lobbyist who had a fancy dinner with Trump a year ago and is still riding that high to claim he has vast administration influence.
I’ve been on the periphery of a handful of these campaigns, usually in medicine or AI. The common thread is that protests by liberals rarely work. The Trump administration loves offending liberals! If every Democratic member of Congress condemns the plan to ban aluminum, that just proves that aluminum really was “woke”, and makes them want to do it more. What works, sometimes, is objections/protests from Republicans and Trump supporters.
These are hard to get. Trump supporters might support the insane plan. Even if they don’t, they might be nervous to speak up or appear disloyal. You’ve got to find someone who’s supported Trump until now, built up a reputation for loyalty, but this one time they finally snap and cash in some of their favors and agree to speak out. Sometimes it’s because they’re an aluminum magnate themselves and this would destroy their business. Other times they’re just a think tank guy or influencer who happens to be really knowledgeable on this one issue and willing to take a stand on it. By such people is the world preserved.
Yes, the Trump administration has been horrible. But these people have prevented it from being, well, slightly worse. You can see this most clearly in the difference between Trump I and Trump II. In Trump I, there were far more of these people, and they could do a better job keeping Trump’s worst impulses in check. But even in Trump II, people have talked Trump out of crazy ideas so often that there’s a famous acronym proposing that it “always” happens: T.A.C.O. Just last month, RFK Jr’s FDA made an unprecedented attempt to cancel its review of a potentially revolutionary flu vaccine. After what I assume was a concerted campaign, they chickened out and reversed course, and we’ll probably all be slightly healthier.
But these sorts of thoughtful collaborators are a limited resource. There were a lot of smart, thoughtful career Republicans who worked for GW Bush, or libertarians who thought the GOP was the lesser of two evils. These people seeded the original Trump administration. Gradually they reached their limits, crashed out, went on rants which dutifully made the fifth page of the New York Times, then forever lost their status as loyal people whose opinions might be listened to. As they fade, they are replaced by a new stratum of grifters, groypers, and podcasters who have no expertise in anything and are selected entirely on loyalty, ie never disagreeing on anything.
So my request in this post is: don’t make these people’s lives harder.
I know five people who will think this paragraph is about them: there’s a guy who endorsed Trump in 2024. Now they have a job in a conservative-coded think tank, where they do good work pushing back on the administration’s worst ideas. Because their think tank is GOP-aligned, the administration sometimes listens to them. But their social media contains a lot of blink-twice-if-you’re-being-held-hostage-style signs that they’ve come around and are pretty embarrassed at their original Trump support. Liberals sometimes notice this, accuse them of hypocrisy/collaboration/cowardice, and demand they vocally and explicitly condemn Trump or quit their conservative think tank. I hope these people don’t listen, because they’re approximately the only ones pushing back on some of the administration’s worst ideas. If we socially pressured them into explicitly posting “I renounce Trump and all his demons, now I’m part of the #Resistance”, it would feel great and cathartic for an hour or so, and then various horrible things would happen and an industry or academic field or medium-sized state would collapse.
If this resonates with you, here are some suggested actions:
If you generally trust someone and think they’re doing good work, don’t additionally demand they condemn the administration. If you think it’s important they condemn the administration, discuss it in private and see what they say.
If someone publishes a policy paper, or even a blog post that seems aimed at policy-makers, expect them to write as if the administration is a reasonable bargaining partner that might do good things for good reasons, even if this is, let’s say, optimistic. Don’t demand that the paper intended to convince the administration additionally be used to insult the administration. Here I’m thinking partly of my own post Trump II Health Policy Proposals, where I tried to talk about health policy ideas at the intersection of “good” and “congruent with the cultural DNA of Trump health policy nominees” in the hopes of injecting them into the conversation among FDA employees. I am told this had some positive effects, but it also got me several comments (1, 2, 3) and emails accusing me of “whitewashing” the administration by treating them as reasonable people whose cultural DNA might be associated with good policies. I don’t think it’s acceptable to lie (and I don’t think my post did), but I will defend not including “btw you suck” in a post intended for administration consumption.
Don’t demand that a movement expel its conservative members. The most successful movements have both liberal and conservative branches (even if one is much smaller than the other), and use their liberal branch to lobby when liberals are in power and vice versa. Organizations like the Liberal Gun Club or the Conservative Animal Welfare Foundation may not be behemoths that control their party from the shadows, but they can sometimes improve things around the edges through access to policy-makers who wouldn’t meet with the opposition. But this strategy requires that the gun rights movement doesn’t purge all of its liberals, or the animal rights purge all of its conservatives. Even though the purgees might be able to work on their own, they can accomplish more when they stay connected to the side of their movement with orders of magnitude more members, funding, and talent.
When people say this doesn’t resonate with them, they usually bring up the risks of collaboration. Suppose that working with the administration succeeds in improving policy - won’t that make the administration more successful, and so improve their political standing and chances of getting re-elected?
I worry about this less than some people, because voters are so uninformed and polarized that policy is almost irrelevant to their decisions. Two weeks in, Trump’s war on Iran has yet to affect his approval rating. If voters aren’t moved by Iran, how likely are they to be influenced by that flu vaccine that got blocked? If it had stayed blocked, would most Americans have heard about it? Would they have formed opinions (“this move was contrary to the best available science, and so must have been politically motivated”)? Would they remember it on Election Day? (there’s substantial evidence that voters don’t punish candidates even for things they care about, like gas price increases, if they happen too far from the election). The vaccine probably won’t be available until after 2028, so it’s not even like Americans will have less flu and subconsciously associate their good health with this administration. It’s just a total political non-starter - but also, getting it right could save tens of thousands of lives.
If some area has a higher vote-relevance to real-world-relevance ratio - public relations, the economics of gas prices, I don’t know what else is in this category - maybe it’s worth taking an accelerationist mindset, deliberately letting policy go to hell, and hoping the benefits in voter anger outweigh the direct harms. But few things are in this category.
Then there’s a deeper question about the non-consequentialist ethics of participating in a bad government. Even if it makes things better, does it stain your soul? I take this seriously, but I apply less social pressure to non-consequentialist decisions. If someone does decide to participate, I think outsiders like us should lay off them and let them do good work.