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TRUMP’S ANTISOCIAL STATE  
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Melinda Cooper
March 18, 2025
Dissent
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_ The administration is attempting to incapacitate the redistributive
and social protective arms of the state, while exploiting its vast
bureaucratic powers to silence, threaten, and deport. _

Donald Trump awards the National Medal of Freedom to former attorney
general Edwin Meese on October 8, 2019., Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images


 

Just two months in, any doubts about the tenor of Trump’s second
presidency have been dispelled. The Heritage Foundation’s _Mandate
for Leadership: Project 2025_ has produced a much more focused Trump
than we saw the first time around. It has found a way to convert the
president’s flare ups into a constant source of energy and to
arrange his thought bubbles into a sequential narrative. Project 2025,
as the report has come to be known, contains a plan for reconstructing
the American state from the ground up. To get there, however, it first
has to overcome obstacles created by the existing state and its
workforce of civil servants. One refrain beats consistently
throughout: abolish the administrative state. The report whispers in
the president’s ear at every turn, explaining how he can use
executive power to “fire supposedly ‘un-fireable’ federal
bureaucrats; shutter wasteful and corrupt bureaus and offices; muzzle
woke propaganda at _every _level of government; restore the American
people’s constitutional authority over the Administrative State; and
save untold taxpayer dollars in the process.”

Project 2025 indulges every fantasy of Trump’s cabinet members, a
coterie of private fund investors and business founders with
preferential ties to the fossil fuel industry, real estate, and
Silicon Valley. The manual shows how the president could open up
federal lands to fossil fuel prospectors and actively obstruct any
progress on climate change mitigation. It shows how the Federal
Reserve could abandon its function as lender of last resort and allow
for a return to free banking, with gold or some other commodity
equivalent (perhaps cryptocurrency) acting as backstops to privately
issued money. And it shows how the Department of Housing and Urban
Development could sell off the country’s remaining public housing
stock and withhold support from low-income borrowers. Meanwhile, the
president is urged to dissolve the Federal Deposit Insurance
Corporation (the independent government agency charged with preventing
bank runs) and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (the agency
that recently extended anti-fraud regulation to the digital finance
sector). Project 2025 represents the apotheosis of the antisocial
state: a state form that has withdrawn from the task of social
insurance and placed its entire administrative apparatus in the hands
of a small group of uber-wealthy business partners.

_Mandate for Leadership_ is the ninth in a series of presidential
user manuals issued by the Heritage Foundation since 1981. Their
guiding themes are monotonous: attack government bloat, slash
regulations, and defund the left. At over 900 pages, Project 2025
rivals the doorstopper handed to Reagan in 1981. But what really
distinguishes this iteration from previous ones is its assumption of
vigorous judicial back-up. Trump appointed three new Federalist
Society–approved judges to the Supreme Court during his first term.
He is now working with a 6-3 conservative majority that has granted
him presidential immunity from criminal prosecution for acts extending
to the “outer perimeter” of his office. The pages of Project 2025
are littered with abstruse reflections on constitutional law that are
likely illegible to the general public. But they would make sense to
anyone familiar with the Federalist Society’s judicial critique of
the administrative state and the closely allied theory of unitary
executive power.

Dating back to the early twentieth century in its American usage, the
“administrative state” is a term of art first used by legal
realists to describe the kind of government bureaucracy demanded by a
modern, industrial society. Progressives saw the New Deal as a high
point in modern administrative law. For legal conservatives and
libertarians, the term serves as a shorthand for all that is wrong
with the contemporary state.

In recent years, the judicial assault on the administrative state
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shifted into high gear. The libertarian legal scholar and Columbia
University professor Philip Hamburger has played a critical role in
this escalation. In _Is Administrative Law Unlawful?_
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his 2014 indictment of administrative tyranny, Hamburger compares the
power of modern-day state regulators to the royal prerogative in
seventeenth-century England. During Trump’s first year in office,
Hamburger founded the New Civil Liberties Alliance, a public interest
law firm that purports to “protect constitutional freedoms from
violations by the Administrative State.” The NCLA brings cases
against government agencies such as the Securities and Exchange
Commission (SEC) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA),
challenging settled jurisprudence on the congressional delegation of
rule-making power to administrative agencies (the so-called
non-delegation doctrine) and on the proper chain of command between
the courts and administration (the question of judicial deference).

With a university professor at its helm, the NCLA cultivates an air of
lofty nonpartisanship. Yet a look at its case record suggests it is
playing an orchestrated game of tag team with the very partisan Cause
of Action Institute, a law firm with close links
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the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity. In 2024, the firms litigated
one case each—_Loper Bright Enterprises v.
Raimondo_ and _Relentless, Inc. v. Department of Commerce_—which
jointly led to the historic defeat of Chevron deference, a doctrine
compelling courts to defer to administrative agencies’ reading of
federal statutes. As a result, ultimate authority to resolve conflicts
of interpretation—in the matter of climate change or financial
fraud, for instance—now redounds to the federal courts. Any
disgruntled oil prospector or hedge fund manager can challenge agency
jurisdiction over their business dealings and turn to a receptive
Supreme Court as final arbiter of the dispute.

The NCLA is a who’s who of the reactionary legal establishment. Its
president and chief legal officer Mark Chenoweth formerly served as
in-house counsel for Koch Industries. Its board members include Gary
Lawson, a founding member of the Federalist Society and early
libertarian critic of the administrative state, and Eugene Volokh,
another prominent legal libertarian and Federalist Society stalwart,
among others. Collectively, they hope to complete the unfinished
business of the Reagan revolution. They hold a special reverence for
the legacy of Edwin Meese III, who served as Reagan’s chief advisor
in his first term, then as attorney general during his second. (Lawson
recently coauthored a hagiography
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a direct line of descent from Meese to the Trump-appointed justices on
the Supreme Court today.)

Meese was both the key in-house enabler of Reagan’s attack on
government regulation and an early patron of the Federalist Society.
As head of the Department of Justice, he joined forces with other
important Reagan officials to obstruct the EPA and the Occupational
Safety and Health Administration and ward off litigation from liberal
public interest lawyers. While Reagan appointees waged procedural war
on the portfolios under their control, Meese exploited his position as
attorney general to expound a radical constitutional critique of
administrative power. In a speech
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to the Federal Bar Association in 1985, Meese complained that
administrative agencies had usurped the powers of the legislative and
executive branches by claiming the right to freely interpret and
enforce federal statutes. He impugned this administrative mission
creep as a violation of the Constitution’s separation of powers.
Federal agencies, he intoned, “are not ‘quasi’ this, or
‘independent’ that.” According to strict separation of powers,
federal agencies could only be “agents of the executive,”
and executive power
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to the president alone. Under Meese’s direction, the Department of
Justice became a haven for exponents of the “unitary executive
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theory that inflates the so-called vesting clause of Article II of the
Constitution to ascribe supreme, king-like powers to the president.

Despite Meese’s ambitions to remake constitutional law, it was on
the judicial front that the Reagan revolution ultimately fell short.
Reagan cabinet insiders used all the procedural tricks they could to
incapacitate maligned federal agencies such as the EPA, but the
right-wing attack on the administrative state hit a wall in the
courts. As one conservative legal theorist complained
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the courts had become a “managing partner in the modern
administrative state.”

Almost half a century later, the Federalist Society now virtually owns
the Supreme Court. Its conservative majority is well versed in the
constitutional critique of the administrative state and has rubber
stamped almost every case teed up by right-wing public interest
lawyers. In three recent cases—_Lucia v. SEC_, _SEC v. Jarkesy_,
and _Loper Bright_—the court has dramatically curtailed
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independent power of agencies to issue, adjudicate, and enforce
consumer protections of any kind. The decisions expose all federal
regulators to a minefield of future litigation.

In the meantime, right-wing legal theorists have refined the premises
of unitary executive theory and broadened its reach to require
legislative as well as administrative deference to the president. Most
recently, scholars at the Center for Renewing America (founded by
Project 2025 coauthor Russell Vought in 2021) have conjured the idea
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Article II of the Constitution grants the president the right to
override or impound funds appropriated by Congress—that is, to
defund agencies or programs at will. Trump has refused
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spend congressionally approved funds in the past. Elon Musk
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counting on him to do the same thing again, this time on a much
grander scale, with the help of his newly invented powers of
impoundment. For Trump to do so legally would require an overhaul of
the Impoundment Control Act of 1974; conservative legal scholars
believe they have the constitutional arguments to achieve this.
Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett
have all issued opinions endorsing some version of unitary executive
theory
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It remains to be seen how far they will go in validating Trump’s
executive fantasies.

Two months into Trump’s second term, the only real surprise is the
ubiquity of Elon Musk. This time around, Trump has assumed a
trinitarian form: the erratic father has sent his anointed son Musk to
micromanage his work on earth, while X pumps the Trumpian spirit into
the flesh of his followers. The result, unfortunately, is a much more
potent Trumpism.

For all its nihilism, Project 2025 is much more than a guidebook to
government demolition. It is just as concerned with reconstructing the
state as deconstructing it: in its pages, we find the outlines of a
far-right theory of state power in which the most “paleo” forms of
personal, autocratic rule rise from the scorched earth of economic
libertarianism. Trumpism would revolutionize the world in order to
reinvent the most archaic social structures, a lost world of racial,
sexual, and class subordination. Like every project of revolutionary
conservatism, it needs a new constitution and a new epistemology.
Constitutional interpretation is brushed aside in favor of outright
fabulation. Experimental knowledge is treated as an existential threat
to power, to be replaced wherever possible by theocratic dogma and
presidential edict (witness Trump’s extraordinary attack on the life
sciences).

Just as surely as it wants to incapacitate the redistributive and
social protective arms of the state, Project 2025 wants to exploit its
vast bureaucratic powers to silence, threaten, and deport. And it
intends to consolidate these powers under the personal authority of
the president. The report recommends the suppression of abortion drugs
and the decriminalization of protests outside abortion clinics. It
calls for the militarization of the border and a dramatic expansion of
migrant detention centers. It demands that ICE be allowed to use
“expedited removal” against undocumented migrants throughout the
country. With the arrest and attempted deportation of Columbia
University student and green card holder Mahmoud Khalil, we have
confirmation that Trump is prepared to go much further.

Trump’s attack on the federal security complex is the most chilling
sign yet of his authoritarian intent. By purging the Pentagon and FBI
of its senior officials and replacing them with concentric circles of
loyalists, Trump is seeking to take personal charge of the state’s
monopoly on violence, leaving him free to unleash its fire power on
anyone he singles out. In short, he is attempting to build something
we can genuinely call a deep state—a windowless echo chamber, as
desolate as a Mar-a-Lago bathroom strewn with classified documents and
inhabited by a lunatic.

Where does resistance go in the face of overwhelming assault?
Democrats have contemplated a variety of legislative responses
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the right-wing takeover of the Supreme Court, among them court
packing, term limits, enforceable ethics oversight, and independent
bipartisan review of judicial nominations. Whatever their merits,
these proposals are on ice for the foreseeable future. Biden did
manage to stack
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lower federal courts with Democratic appointees—but this measure can
only buy time as court challenges await final adjudication by the
Supreme Court.

In the meantime, Democrats are rallying at the state level. Project
2025 devolves much of the responsibility for public health and
emergency management to state governments, turning blue states and
their attorneys general into an obvious firewall against the Trumpian
onslaught. But the real issue is whether Democrats are equal to the
task at hand. Republican hyper-activism has a knack for pushing
liberals into a defensive position, leaving them with little choice
but to mouth hollow-sounding vindications of the status quo. The
defense of technical expertise and procedural norms _is_ essential.
But it is hardly sufficient as a response to a decades’ long process
of attrition that has gutted the social and redistributive functions
of the state and reinforced its punitive arm. Nor is it effective as a
response to the revolutionary far right. Standing still is a losing
strategy against an enemy that is constantly moving the ground beneath
our feet.

It helps to recall a moment when the assault on the administrative
state was being waged by the left, not the right. Throughout the long
1970s, left-wing activists and liberal public interest lawyers
conducted an offensive campaign to occupy and transform the
administrative state from the margins. Informed by the minority
politics of the New Left, these activists were troubled by the
narrowing of the New Deal’s initial promise: federal agencies
established to monitor big business had become mere enablers of the
Cold War industrial complex, fully complicit in the destruction of the
environment; welfare departments across the country had imported the
racist practices of the South to exclude and police the black urban
poor. To counter these trends, New Left activists adopted a strategy
of working “in and against
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the state: that is, they sought to expand the social welfare and
social protectionist horizons of the state while simultaneously
weakening its powers of discipline over the poor. The liberal wing of
this movement looked to the courts as a means of forcing the hand of
government administrators: public interest lawyers won landmark
rulings in the area of welfare and environmental law, often invoking
an exalted vision of constitutional rights to buttress their claims.
To their left, activists in the welfare rights and black justice
movement had a more pragmatic, agonistic understanding of the power of
law and remained skeptical of the cozy relationship between public
interest lawyers and elite donors. In either case, their combined
efforts succeeded in profoundly reshaping the scope of administrative
action, forcing the state to assume new responsibilities vis-à-vis
the environment, everyday consumers, the welfare poor, and racial
minorities.

This history helps to clarify something about the right-wing legal
movement that is routinely occluded from its own self-narration. As
noted by political scientist Steven Teles
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it was the left’s assault on the post–New Deal administrative
state that spurred legal conservatives into action in the first place.
While right-wing revisionism treats the administrative state and
“wokeism” as one and the same, a closer zoom reveals a moment when
the left was leading the struggle to occupy and transform government
bureaucracy. The New Left treated the administrative state as a combat
zone, not a neutral terrain of democratic arbitration. For a time, it
managed to move the distributional battle front inside the state. It
is this incursion that legal counterrevolutionaries have been fighting
ever since, even when any active opponent has long since disappeared.

We are dealing with a very different state form today. The late
Keynesian social state, with all its contradictions, has been replaced
by the neoliberal _antisocial_ state—a state that has downsized
its redistributive functions, converted much of its welfare arm into
punitive and carceral functions, privatized or outsourced as many of
its services as possible, and multiplied its guarantees to private
operators. This is a state form that abandons the low- and non-waged
to self-care yet still includes them within its nets as permanent
debtors and generators of income such as toll fees, rents, utility
bills, and interest on student debt. In its most inclusive “third
way” form, the neoliberal state creates “social markets” as a
substitute for social insurance: that is, instead of underwriting and
equalizing the risks borne by everyday citizens, it incentivizes
private insurers or asset managers to operate these services at a
profit. This is the impoverished social policy model that informed
Obama’s Affordable Care Act or Biden’s infrastructure and energy
legislation (although we should not forget the genuinely progressive
elements of both these agendas). Private health insurers and mega
mutual fund managers such as BlackRock were the natural allies of this
form of neoliberal capitalism.

Libertarians radicalize the antisocial proclivities of the neoliberal
state. They are determined to destroy not just the last vestiges of
New Deal social welfare, but even the neoliberal model of
state-subsidized social markets. During the Obama years, Tea Partiers
attacked the ACA’s private insurance market as if it were socialism
incarnate. Under MAGA, ire has shifted to the allegedly woke
BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager and a major beneficiary
of the Democratic de-risking state. Trump is now threatening to
abandon Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, along with all its private
sector contractors. Perhaps most shockingly, he has slashed the
National Institutes of Health grants that have fed the biopharma
innovation pipeline since Reagan. It is becoming clearer by the day
that the war on “woke capitalism” was more than just theater.
Trump’s minions really are prepared to take down whole economic
sectors—the very summits of neoliberal capitalism—to elevate their
own faction of private investment partners, company founders, and
controlling shareholders.

How far the war on “woke capitalism” can be pursued without
provoking an all-out recession (or intra-capitalist revolt) remains to
be seen. What we can be sure of, however, is that Trump’s business
allies will be spared the DOGE austerity treatment. As Musk’s raid
on the Treasury and Trump’s attempts to interfere with the Federal
Reserve make clear, libertarians don’t actually want to abolish the
state, much less the massive fiscal and monetary powers embodied in
the US Treasury and Federal Reserve. Instead, they want to drastically
narrow the scope of beneficiaries to a small group of ultrawealthy
private capitalists (company founders or controlling owners) and
private fund managers in the world of crypto, security, real estate,
and fossil fuels. This group of people is so small that we know their
names; their faces are literally stamped onto their own privately
issued coins, which will no doubt require propping up by the Federal
Reserve in due course. Rarely has capitalist power been so personal,
yet so massively inflated by the public purse.

What could it mean to work “in and against” the state today, when
so many are included at one remove only, as income-generators to
publicly subsidized private interests? Does it make sense to work
“in and against” the state when it comes to purely punitive
services such as policing and prisons? Will there be any state left to
resist once Musk has completed his mission? It seems to me that we
cannot afford to leave the state alone as long as we are caught in its
nets as passive enablers or victims of immense wealth concentration.
Musk has clarified something once and for all: libertarianism
doesn’t actually _liberate _anyone from the state. It simply
destroys the last remnants of the social state, installing in its
place an intensely autocratic, patrimonial form of state rule, in
which personal subordination is enforced at every level of society.
Distributional struggle in and against the state remains as urgent as
ever, then, even as the hybridity of current power relations
complicates the question of strategy. Depending on the focus of
intervention, efforts to work in and against the state may deal with
neoliberal, libertarian, or residual social democratic state
formations. At different levels of government, distinct policy and
party regimes may be in force, making choices of scale and target an
important element of any left strategy.

 For the moment, federal workers are on the front lines of the
Trumpian offensive. Not only do they administer programs that
Republicans detest; their very status as public sector workers
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heart of federal government (a DEI employer _avant la lettre_) places
them in the direct line of fire. The challenges facing federal unions
right now are immense. Yet their position at the nerve center of the
American public sector also offers unique opportunities. The long
right-wing attack on the administrative state has always relied on a
widely shared indifference to the fine points of public spending. The
attack could be pursued as long as people were convinced that
“their” taxes were being protected from government spending on
underserving others. As countless studies have shown, lower- and
middle-income Republican voters live in a state of cognitive
dissonance: they see their own Social Security, Medicaid, and
veterans’ benefits as earned income, apparently unaware that any
significant cut to the federal budget would have to target these
budgetary items in particular. In this regard, Musk’s willingness to
raid the Social Security Administration
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a month into Trump’s presidency suggests a distinct lack of tactical
foresight. The project may backfire by making things too personal too
fast for too many people, including the average Trump voter.

We don’t need to look far to find a precedent for this kind of shift
in public sentiment. As Eric Blanc reminds us, the long wave
of public-school teacher militancy
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began in 2018 unfolded under similarly unpropitious conditions. The
cycle of action had its origins in West Virginia, a solidly red
right-to-work state where public employee strikes were illegal. That
campaign was successful largely because it refused to accept the
state’s narrative of fiscal incapacity. By reaching out to parents
and students as “users” of public services who stood to lose as
much from funding austerity as did workers, the teachers made it
impossible for the state to use divide-and-conquer tactics and
effectively neutralized the legal ban on their strike action. A
crucial element in the campaign was the drafting of an alternative
state budget proposal, recommending an end to the state’s
ultra-generous tax preferences
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oil and gas firms. Having built a contestation of state budgetary
politics into their campaign from the outset, the teachers were able
to transform the meaning of industrial action from negotiated crisis
to a genuine battle over spending priorities.

“Bargaining for the common good” describes a strategy
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which workers connect their immediate wage demands to the larger
distributional issues of state spending and taxation. This strategy
has met with notable success in the public sector union movement and
at the level of state government. It has yet to be extended to the
private sector, where the illusion of corporate independence from the
state still prevails, or indeed to the federal public sector. Any
scale-up to this level remains extremely challenging. Ironically,
however, Musk has performed a useful service in bringing these various
work sites under the same organizational umbrella.

It is obvious, for instance, that the kind of slash-and-burn tactics
currently being deployed against federal workers are identical to
those experienced by Silicon Valley tech workers
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the last few years of mass layoffs. But beyond this, what are Tesla or
X employees today if not federal workers? What are X users if not
customers of a public infrastructure—the propaganda arm of the
patrimonial state? When the company executive controls the levers of
the Treasury, it is hard to maintain the pretense that the tech sector
in any way represents the fount of private initiative, independent of
government. Inadvertently, Musk has done more to highlight the
commonalities between private and public sector workers than any labor
organizer in recent history. It remains to be seen how these
opportunities might be exploited by an incipient big tech
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worker
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movement.

 One important implication of the bargaining for the common good
framework is that distributional struggle can arise from any facet of
our daily lives in which government spending decisions play a critical
role. For the past several decades, fiscal and monetary policy has
sought to inflate property prices and suppress wages. The pressures
have become acute since the coronavirus pandemic, as renters bear the
brunt of distressed mortgages and rising interest rates. Housing
tenure is increasingly salient as a factor in class stratification:
wage demands mean nothing if they don’t also account for the growing
portion of wages handed over to landlords. For this reason,
the tenant unions
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mushroomed across the country in the last few years can be seen as a
logical extension of the resurgent union movement
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One particularly promising development in this space is the adoption
of tactics that look beyond individual landlords to target the
government regulators responsible for backstopping their mortgages or
otherwise guaranteeing their risks. In October 2024, residents in two
Kansas City apartment blocks kicked off a historic rent strike that
placed demands on both their landlords and the Federal Housing Finance
Agency (FHFA). Coordinated by the recently formed Tenant Union
Federation, the strikers
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demanding that the FHFA enforce rent caps and regular maintenance on
any landlord that receives federal loan guarantees through Fannie Mae
or Freddie Mac.

In the normal course of things, landlords can count on the collective
rent checks sent in by residents to service their loans. The
expectation of renter compliance functions as a kind of social
collateral; it’s what allows the landlord to purchase the property
in the first place and to hike rents whenever interest rates rise. By
the same token, however, tenants can push a borrower to the brink of
insolvency by collectively withholding their rent. If the loan is
guaranteed by a government agency, then the state is ultimately on the
hook for the money owed. It can either negotiate with renters and
restructure the loan or transfer the unpaid mortgage back onto its
balance sheet, thereby assuming de facto public ownership of the
property in question. At this point, renters are in a much stronger
position to demand that the building be maintained indefinitely as
public housing. The director of the Tenant Union Federation, Tara
Raghuveer, explains that the point is to oblige federal regulators to
redirect their bailout and regulatory interventions in the service of
renters rather than real estate developers. “Each of those
interventions that the federal regulator or the GSEs
[government-sponsored enterprises] might take to protect the landlord
and protect their investment, becomes an opportunity for us to
intervene and say, ‘Protect the tenants.’”

Although perfectly pitched for the conditions of the Biden
administration, the attempt to establish federal footholds may prove
harder to implement in the age of DOGE. Elsewhere, however, tenant
unions have pursued similar strategies at the state and municipal
levels, especially in older cities that still have tenant protection
laws on the books. In 2019, a coalition of New York tenant activists
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to pass the New York State’s Housing Stability and Tenant Protection
Act, a law that prevents landlords from serially evicting residents to
evade rent stabilization statutes. In cities across California, tenant
unions are pursuing a similar campaign against the state’s Ellis
Act, which allows landlords to strategically go out of business in
order to evict tenants. In April 2024, members of the Hillside Villa
Tenants Association in Los Angeles concluded a four-year rent strike
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having secured a ten-year renewal of their building’s affordability
covenant. This was only a partial victory: Hillside Villa Tenants
wanted the L.A. City Council to take back possession of their building
through eminent domain, a goal they came tantalizingly close to
achieving. Ultimately, legislative wins to cap rents and curb
evictions can only be first steps in a strategy to put the powers of
public money creation and debt issuance back in the hands of
residents. To truly relieve the housing crisis, cities and states must
be compelled to use their powers of municipal or state debt issuance
to create and maintain public housing, instead of subsidizing real
estate developers like Donald Trump.

 Of course, we know that Trump will crack down hard on unions and
other forms of organizing, imparting a new urgency to the kinds of
activism that target the criminal justice system “from below.” In
a recent article
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on the fallout from the Supreme Court’s right-wing takeover, Amna A.
Akbar urges us to refocus our attention on the lower courts, where
countless people encounter the brute force of the law in their
everyday lives. There is not much we can do about the Supreme
Court’s overruling of the coronavirus eviction moratorium or
Biden’s student debt forgiveness plan, but there is ample
opportunity to intervene in the lower courts where people are
deported, evicted, and criminalized for unpaid debt every day. Akbar
identifies the emergence of a new kind of activism “happening within
and against the courts” in the wake of protests against racialized
police violence. This activism eschews legal formalism to intervene in
the most material ways in the mechanics of judicial power. Its tactics
extend from the ostensibly passive act of witnessing, as in court and
cop watching, to coordinated actions to shut down eviction proceedings
or block courthouse arrests of undocumented migrants. It includes
weaponized forms of mutual aid such as collective bail funds that
prevent courts from condemning indigent defendants to pretrial
detention. Taken together, Akbar writes, “the protests happening
within and against the courts seem connected as strategic flash
points, part of a growing struggle over the value of legal process and
legal equality for ordinary people — or even a rejection of the
rule of law within this bourgeois democracy.”

Arguably, public defenders occupy a critical hinge position between
the state, the courts, and the accused. Their employment by the state
is supposed to guarantee a constitutional right to legal counsel, as
laid out in the _Gideon _decision of 1963. Yet chronic underfunding
and overwork turns them into cogs in the system, more often employed
to rubber-stamp plea deals than to offer real representation to their
clients. As such, the recent upsurge in unionization by progressive
public defenders represents an invaluable new source of leverage in
left-wing struggles against the carceral state
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County public defenders were first off the block when their union,
organized through the American Federation of State, County and
Municipal Employees, was recognized by the county in 2018. Public
defenders in Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Colorado, and New York have
since followed suit. For the most part, the people driving these
unionization efforts are fellow travelers of the wider movement for
racial justice. They are just as concerned with fighting for
structural reforms to the criminal justice system as for better wages
and conditions.

 In this respect, they follow the playbook laid out by the
Association of Legal Aid Attorneys of New York, the first (and until
recently only) unionized public defenders’ office in the country.
The ALAA conducted five major strikes
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1970 and 1994, exploiting its ability to shut down the city’s court
system to negotiate better funding and improved representation for
clients. The union lost much of its bargaining power in the late 1990s
when Mayor Giuliani established a suite of nonprofit defenders’
offices to compete with its services. It is significant then that the
recently unionized Bail Project emerged out of the Bronx Defenders,
one of the nonprofits that Giuliani commissioned to undermine the
ALAA. When union density reaches a critical threshold, public
defenders dispose of a unique weapon enjoyed by no other class of
worker: by collectively withdrawing their labor, they can shut down
the entire court system. If deployed in solidarity with the wider
union movement, this weapon could be cultivated as an instrument to
shape decisions about how and where public funds are allocated in the
first place: toward carceral institutions, or toward better schools,
healthcare, and social housing.

Patrimonialism is one answer to the devastation wrought by the
antisocial state. It teaches subordinates that their only hope of
security lies in the patronage of the boss or the landlord. All
loyalty is funneled upwards, and all obligation reduced to the
individual or familial form of household debt. This is a state form
that tolerates only one type of horizonal solidarity: that between
brothers vying for the goodwill of the chief executive. Trump embodies
this style of power like no one else. His success in reducing the
Republican Party to a swarm of warring fraternities, hanging on his
every word, defies historical comparison. But Trump’s mesmerizing
personalism can also obscure the vulnerability of the project. For
Trumpism to sustain itself as a popular movement, patrimonial
relations of hierarchy and dependence must be replicated at every
level of society, from the household to the workplace.

 Horizontal forms of solidarity such as workplace strikes, rent
strikes, and bail funds pose an existential threat to this project
because they offer safety outside the bounds of clientelism. By
turning individual liability into collectivized credit, debt strikes
of all kinds offer an at least temporary release from the blackmail of
personal dependence. These actions are valuable not just on their own
terms—as punctual efforts to raise wages and lower rents—but also
as incubators of a new kind of social relation. The struggle against
the far right demands nothing less.

_MELINDA COOPER works in the Research School of Social Sciences at
the Australian National University. She is the author
of Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public
Finance (2024)._

_DISSENT is a magazine of politics and ideas published in print three
times a year. Founded by Irving Howe and Lewis Coser in 1954, it
quickly established itself as one of America’s leading intellectual
journals and a mainstay of the democratic left. Dissent has
published articles by Hannah Arendt, Richard Wright, Norman Mailer, A.
Philip Randolph, Michael Harrington, Dorothy Day, Bayard Rustin,
Czesław Miłosz, Barbara Ehrenreich, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Chinua
Achebe, Ellen Willis, Octavio Paz, Martha Nussbaum, Roxane Gay, and
many others._

_Dissent is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization. We publish the very
best in political argument, and take pride in cultivating the next
generation of labor journalists, cultural critics, and political
polemicists. If this work is important to you, please make a
tax-deductible donation today by clicking here
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