This brief essay is based on the National Affairs article “Minoritarianism Is Everywhere.”
Turning Marx’s maxim about history on its head, the effort to deconstruct the American administrative state was a farce in Trump’s first term, but has returned as tragedy. Armed with the Project 2025 report, a group of 20-something technologists, and premier access to Grok, the Trump administration is attempting to use executive action to squeeze through massive changes to the American state that it could never pass through ordinary lawmaking. This unconstitutional power grab is an extreme case of Republicans’ penchant for minoritarianism — governing through institutional devices that circumvent the need to build a majority coalition. Resisting is the minimum that is required for constitutional hygiene.
Going beyond the minimum means asking what sort of state we want to build on the rubble left us by DOGE. To answer that question requires reconsidering some prominent elements of the state that liberals built starting in the 1960s and 1970s. Reviewing these elements should remind us that while MAGA minoritarianism may be an acute condition, liberal minoritarianism is a chronic one. Rebuilding a state fit to create the conditions for abundance will require reassessing both.
Critics of right-wing populism, whether in the U.S. or abroad, have emphasized its minoritarian tendencies and diagnosed them as the most prominent symptom of “democratic backsliding.” But there is a problem with this account, which is that almost no one who studies how public policy has actually been made in the United States over the last half-century would characterize the status quo from which we are supposedly backsliding as mostly majoritarian. In fact, the most salient changes in how we make public policy – changes that were mostly driven by the center-left–over the last half century — have made policymaking pervasively less majoritarian. It may thus be best to understand right-wing populism as a reaction to minoritarianism, at least as much as an instance of it.
Consider, for instance, the governance of the built environment, whether in housing or infrastructure. There is no question that the way we make decisions in these areas has led to a dramatic under-supply of housing and dramatically higher costs for the transportation and energy projects needed for a lower-carbon future. But as important, all of the changes in how we make choices in these areas have been pervasively minoritarian.
The key to understanding what’s gone wrong in these areas is that they have made policymaking more “participatory,” but paradoxically, done so in a way that makes it less majoritarian. Those who show up and have disproportionate impact on where and what housing and infrastructure are built are profoundly unrepresentative — older, whiter, wealthier and more likely to be homeowners. They have the resources, the knowledge of process, the access to policymakers, and the networks for collective action to stop projects, while the majority of mostly unmobilized citizens do not. Moving toward majoritarianism would actually require taking away opportunities for effective participation and obstruction by this organized minority.
Scholars of public policy have also identified another group with massively disproportionate power: public sector unions. In huge swaths of American politics—large blue cities in particular — there is effectively no general election competition. As a consequence, who governs is determined in low-participation primary elections. Low-participation, that is, with the exception of the government’s own unionized workforce. Both teachers and police have a lopsided control of their own work because they help elect their own bosses, and because they are able to make key decisions about education and public safety in the very low-visibility context of collective bargaining. It’s even worse when you consider that public sector unions are typically controlled by a minority of their members — those most concerned about facing discipline, such as police accused of abusing citizens. As a consequence, in important parts of local government, we effectively have government by a minority of a minority.
Minoritarianism also extends to the regulation of the public and private sectors, through what Frank Dobbin and John Sutton have called “the strength of a weak state.” Legislators in the United States typically pass vague but sweeping legislation, which passes decision-making on critical questions to administrative bodies. Those agencies, however, have less authority than in other advanced countries, and they manage their limited capacity and legitimacy to set policy by themselves passing the buck, empowering professional boards and networks to give meaning to mushy legal text in a decentralized fashion. This is how American liberals built large swaths of the modern activist state, including how we regulate disability accommodation, the treatment of sexual minorities, human subject review in universities, and professional licensing. Add in policy areas where regulators decide but find themselves routinely overruled or managed by courts taking expert advice, and you cover much of the waterfront of modern governance. While this mode of regulation facilitates professional input into policymaking in a society with skepticism of experts, it also empowers those experts to produce actual governing outputs very far from public preferences, which may play a role in populist backlash.
Minoritarianism is thus a fundamental feature of modern liberal governance, in a way that is hard to square with its more recent rhetorical enthusiasm for majoritarianism. Supply-side liberals have argued that the United States needs to rebuild state capacity, a mission that seems urgent in the wake of the Trump administration’s sweeping attacks on government. The question of minoritarianism raises the question, however, of what sort of state we should want to rebuild.
One option would be to take majoritarianism seriously by reorienting at least national government toward big, brute-force interventions that Congress can specify precisely: large child benefit programs administered by the Social Security Administration, carbon taxes, outright bans on various forms of social media, and clear property rights to build housing. A second option would be to accept discretionary, expert government as a fact of life, but to make our expert class and bureaucracy more diverse in ideology and partisanship, by opening up the places that train and recruit them to public service. A pluralist option would also give citizens more choice of the kind of public services they wish to avail themselves of, delivered by what in another piece I referred to as “plural professionalism.”
Those of us who want an active state capable of delivering a wide range of public goods do not have much time to think seriously about the state capacity we want to rebuild. As hard as it is to envision while the Trump administration is mindlessly wrecking so much of our inherited state, the time to imagine its revived form is now.
Steven Teles is Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University and a Senior Fellow at the Niskanen Center.