Delusion, Hypocrisy, and the Threat to Democracy
10th November 2024
“Ungoverning” is a term invented by Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum, political scientists respectively at Dartmouth and Harvard, to describe the project of “deconstructing the administrative state [conducted] by a reactionary movement.” This would include elected Republican officials and Supreme Court justices, aimed at depriving government of the ability to govern. But the individual they hold most responsible for this is former and future president Donald Trump, who brought decades of preexisting “hostility toward government to a crescendo.”
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The authors pursue their critique of Trumpian ungoverning through a consistently one-sided analysis. For instance, relying on a single New York Times article from April 2020, they allege that even in the COVID emergency, the Republican goal of “incapacitating government prevailed”—disregarding the remarkably rapid success of Operation Warp Speed, a public-private partnership established by the Trump administration that developed effective vaccines by the end of that year. They also scold Trump for “imped[ing] the Centers for Disease Control … from issuing its own public guidance” on how to minimize COVID transmission. This ignores infectious disease czar Anthony Fauci’s subsequent admission that his six-foot distancing rule was something he arbitrarily invented; Fauci’s dogged dismissal, backed by National Institutes of Health head Francis Collins, of the evidence that the virus originated in a Chinese lab, not a “wet market”; and the costs (to the economy and especially to schoolchildren) of extended, bureaucratically devised lockdowns.