In this episode of the Politics in Question podcast, the team discusses thermostatic politics to explain what it means and how it works.
Podcast: What is thermostatic politics?
Site Navigation
Search
Latest Stories
Join a growing community committed to civic renewal.
Subscribe to The Fulcrum and be part of the conversation.
Top Stories
Latest news
Read More
Trump’s 10-to-1 rule aims to cut red tape, but fewer regulations can mean weaker food safety, Head Start services, and checks on presidential power.
Wu Xiaoling/Xinhua via Getty Images
Trump’s 10-to-1 Rule Gives the Presidency Too Much Power
Oct 21, 2026
We only think about the plumbing in our homes when something goes wrong. The same is true for government bureaucracy. Rules, procedures, and bureaucrats operate largely out of sight, making sure food is safe, Social Security checks arrive, workplaces are safe, and children with disabilities receive the services promised to them by law. Yes, there is plenty of red tape in government, just as an old house can accumulate pipes that no longer serve much purpose. But ripping out pipes simply because there are too many of them is not much of a plumbing strategy. Yet the Trump administration has made the number of federal regulations it eliminates a measure of success. That raises a more important question: When does cutting bureaucracy stop making government more efficient and start making it less capable?
1. The Case for Cutting Red Tape
Critics, including Trump, have a point when they say Washington has too many regulations. Rules, like weeds, accumulate over time. With each passing year, some become outdated, others duplicate existing requirements, and for still others, costs start to exceed benefits they once provided. Businesses, state and local governments, and ordinary citizens can spend an enormous amount of time trying to comply with them.
Trump claims that eliminating these rules is a major goal of the administration. Trump's 10-to-1 policy requires federal agencies to eliminate at least ten regulations for every new one they issue. The administration boasts it has already surpassed that goal. This is evidence, according to Trump, that the government is becoming more efficient.
Few would argue with getting rid of rules that no longer serve a useful purpose. Indeed, some should have disappeared years ago. But fewer rules don't automatically mean better government. Food safety rules, environmental regulations, and protections for workers exist because there were things government needed to protect. Getting rid of the rule doesn't get rid of the problem it was intended to address.
2. Rules Make Government Work
Consider Head Start. The program provides important services to children with disabilities. Federal rules govern how children are screened, how they are referred for additional help, how parents are involved, and how Head Start works with other agencies. These may sound like bureaucratic details. But they are also how good intentions get translated into actual services for a child.
Now Trump wants to get rid of many of these requirements, and he frames it as giving local programs more freedom. On the surface, that sounds reasonable. Why should Washington tell every Head Start program exactly how to do its job? The problem is what happens next. Without common requirements, services that children receive in one community may be radically different from those available in another. A right isn't worth very much if whether you receive it depends on your ZIP code.
Environmental regulations present a similar problem. Business owners have complained about their cost for decades, and some of those complaints are justified. But these rules weren't created to make things more expensive for businesses. They were intended to keep pollution out of the air and water. Common sense dictates getting rid of regulations that don't work. But eliminating the rule doesn't eliminate the pollution that gave rise to it in the first place.
Food safety provides another example. This summer, thousands of people became sick in a Cyclospora outbreak linked to Mexican iceberg lettuce. Hundreds were hospitalized, and two people died. We can't say that deep cuts at the FDA caused the outbreak. But those cuts have led FDA staffing to fall and foreign food inspections have declined. Given how much of our food comes from outside the United States, that's something worth worrying about.
Most of us don't think much about food inspectors until thousands of people get sick. Then suddenly the bureaucrats don't seem quite so unnecessary.
3. A Weaker Bureaucracy Can Mean a Stronger President
Something else is going on here. Trump isn't simply getting rid of regulations; he is bringing more of the federal government under his control in the process. White House oversight has been extended to independent agencies, while civil service rules have been changed for some federal workers involved in policymaking. The administration says this makes bureaucrats more accountable to an elected president and hence, indirectly, the people. It also gives the president more control over the workforce who carry out the law.
The Framers would have understood the problem. They distrusted concentrated power, no matter who exercised it. That is why the Constitution divides power among Congress, the president, and the courts and then gives each branch ways to check the others' overreach. Madison wrote about this in Federalist 47. Putting legislative, executive, and judicial power in the same hands, he said, was the “very definition of tyranny.”
This can make American government maddeningly inefficient. That's not an accident. The Framers were willing to sacrifice some efficiency to make it harder for one person or institution to dominate the government. If the Framers lived today, they might say the system's inefficiency was a feature, not a bug.
Trump is attempting to move us in the other direction. Giving a president more control over federal agencies and career officials makes it easier to carry out his agenda. For Trump's supporters, that's part of the appeal. They elected him to change Washington and don't want unelected bureaucrats getting in his way.
But there is a price. A president who faces fewer restraints has more freedom to act on his own. That may work fine when you agree with the person in the White House. It looks rather different when you don't. Fewer checks and balances also mean fewer opportunities to catch mistakes before they become policy.
This is where deregulation becomes about something larger than red tape. Concentrating power in the presidency doesn't by itself make a government authoritarian. But it removes some of the obstacles that make authoritarian government harder. And once presidential power expands, it rarely goes back to what it was before. That is how the threat of authoritarianism grows.
Robert Cropf is a professor emeritus of political science at Saint Louis University.
Keep ReadingShow less
Recommended
Herbert Hoover (1874 - 1964), Republican Party candidate for the Presidency of the United States of America, listening to a one valve radio set.
Topical Press Agency/Getty Images
A Second Axial Age Demands Global Leadership Rooted in Hoover’s Ideals
Oct 20, 2026
The time has come when we must take an enlarged vision of the future. (Herbert Hoover)
Our 31st President, Herbert Hoover, said this in 1926. Although one hundred years have passed since — and it is always time to take a larger view of the future — his proclamation rings truer now than ever.
The Axial Age refers to a period in human history and a turning point in human development, generally considered the 8th--3rd centuries BCE, when disparate societies shifted away from localized beliefs toward more universal truths. Urbanization, endless warfare, and the rise of empires had broken down tribal structures. With a new collective awareness, people instituted just moral codes and emphasized societal responsibility. These profound changes brought a time of great achievement and promise. Individuals took responsibility beyond their own societies, recognizing that the general good and an improved state benefited all. This “One for All and All for One” collective awareness resulted in a tremendous leap in human achievement.
Hoover was born in a simple two-room cottage in West Branch, Iowa, in 1874 and orphaned at ten. He was a self-made man. An expert mining engineer, he lived and traveled worldwide and was a millionaire by age 40. He gave away most of his fortune; when he made more, he gave away more. He was not motivated by money or by power. He wanted to serve.
Hoover lived a life of public service, embodying the vision our founding fathers had for our nation. The authors of the Constitution did not envision career politicians or PAC money, but people who would serve their constituents. They were to act as leaders, implementing visionary ideas to improve the welfare of individuals and families and thus enhance and promote our country’s welfare.
If there was a President who embodied what the United States strives to be, it was President Hoover, known as the Great Humanitarian. With extraordinary organizational skills, he had a strong ability to work with others and enlist cooperation toward a common goal. In one instance, as Director General of American Relief after World War I, he was responsible for feeding 350 million people in 21 countries. Millions of Europeans credited him with saving their lives.
Hoover served under Presidents Wilson, Harding, and Coolidge before assuming the presidency himself. He won a landslide victory in 1928 and served as president from 1929-1933. But our previous president, Coolidge, and our nation were deafened by the Roaring Twenties and did not listen when he, as Secretary of Commerce, repeatedly warned of impending financial disaster. Much as he tried to circumvent it, Hoover’s presidency was defined by the Great Depression. Yet, after losing to Franklin Roosevelt in 1933, Hoover continued to serve under two more presidents, Truman and Eisenhower.
Many contemporary philosophers believe we are now standing at the threshold of a second Axial Age. Driven by an impending planetary crisis with the triple worldwide threats of climate chaos, global conflicts, and accelerated technological advancement and our increasing dependence on it, we are on the precipice.
Such threats demand a worldwide shift from the “state” to a global perspective, yet we face this tipping point with a dangerously disturbed world order. Governing has a moral component that, if not upheld, will rot a society from within. The “Queen of Hearts” strategy of “off with their heads,” figuratively “decapitating” anyone who disagrees with the “ruler,” does not work now, if it ever did.
Whether millennia ago, during the first Axial Age, or a century ago when Hoover lived, the essential requirements remain the same. Humanitarian qualities must define this movement. Caring for one's fellow man is not a threat to individualism. This is not the time for isolation; it is a time to work together. It is not “us” or “them”; it is all of us.
Now is the time to advance just values and a clear vision. We need statesmen who can see the “bigger picture” and will truly “step across the aisle,” as so few have the courage to do.
There is no reason the United States should not lead the rest of the world as we plunge into this second “Axial Age.” And we will, if we act upon the ideals our country was founded upon.
Our individualism differs from all others because it embraces these great ideals: that while we build our society upon the attainment of the individual, we shall safeguard to every individual an equality of opportunity. I have had every honor to which any man could aspire. There is no place on the whole earth except here in America where all the (children) of man can have this chance in life…. (Herbert Hoover, once again)
Amy Lockard is an Iowa resident who regularly contributes to regional newspapers and periodicals. She is working on the second of a four-book fictional series based on Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice."
Keep ReadingShow less
U.S. President Donald Trump on October 16, 2026 in Palm Beach, Florida.
(Photo by Eric Lee/Getty Images)
Trump — President by Law, Not by Constitutional Duty
Oct 19, 2026
A president can win an election and still fail the test of leadership. The presidency is a public trust, not a personal platform, family enterprise, or license to demean people and disregard the law. Donald Trump holds the office legally. Yet his conduct raises a fundamental question: is he fulfilling the constitutional duties that give the presidency its meaning? The answer, visible in his behavior, is no. He performs the role of president the way a showman performs a part — loudly, aggressively, and without the substance the office requires.
Leadership is not conferred by a title; it is demonstrated through conduct. Ethical leadership requires integrity, honesty, sound judgment, and accountability. Moral leadership demands empathy, fairness, humility, and the courage to do what is right even when doing so carries a personal or political cost. When a president repeatedly demeans people, disregards established norms, and places personal interests above public duty, citizens have every reason to question his leadership — or whether he is leading at all.
Millions of Americans now say, “He is not my president.” They are not denying his election. They are expressing a deeper concern: a president cannot fully discharge the office while rejecting the obligations that define it. The Constitution grants power, but it also imposes duty. When a president abandons those duties, he hollows out the meaning of the presidency and becomes president in law only — not in constitutional substance.
On January 20, 2025, Trump took the presidential oath. The Constitution does not require a Bible; it requires a commitment to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution and faithfully execute the office. The oath is not ceremonial. It is a promise to the American people. The question is whether his conduct honors that promise.
No serious leader behaves the way Donald Trump behaves. He is unfocused, impulsive, and driven by personal grievance rather than public duty. His deeds are often cruel, his rhetoric divisive, and his priorities centered on power, praise, and money. He praises dictators, demands constant admiration, and treats public office as a stage for self‑promotion rather than a responsibility to the nation. FOX News awarded him a “Patriotic” honor, yet patriotism is measured by service, sacrifice, and fidelity to the Constitution — not by showmanship or self‑congratulation. In my view, he is not a leader, not a patriot, and not a president in the constitutional sense. He is a man who holds the title but rejects the substance.
Courts, Congress, and federal agencies exist to check presidential power, yet Trump has repeatedly treated those limits as optional. Federal judges have ruled against administration actions, and reporting has documented delays and defiance of court orders. After the 2020 election, he challenged lawful results and pressured state officials to change outcomes. Presidential power is substantial but not unlimited; the Constitution’s Take Care Clause requires faithful execution of the laws. A president cannot make personal certainty the final authority over elections, courts, or law. Constitutional government collapses when lawful constraints are dismissed as inconveniences.
Public trust erodes when the presidency appears to advance personal interests rather than national priorities. Attacks on the press deepen that distrust. The late Senator John McCain warned that suppressing the press is “how dictators get started.” A free press helps citizens evaluate government claims and hold officials accountable. Leaders who seek to restrict scrutiny weaken the public’s ability to judge their actions.
Many Americans fear that public service is becoming self‑service. When questions about conflicts of interest, personal financial gain, or the use of public resources arise, citizens deserve transparent answers. Public office must never become a means of private enrichment. A president cannot demand public trust while treating accountability as an attack.
Professionalism also requires humility and perspective. Trump has repeatedly insisted that he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize. A president may believe his diplomatic efforts deserve recognition, but ethical leadership does not demand honors or treat their absence as an insult to the nation. Leadership is measured not by awards a leader believes he deserves, but by responsibility accepted and consequences faced. Public service is not a personal competition for recognition.
Constitutional leadership requires evidence‑based decisions, sound judgment, and respect for lawful outcomes. Repeated litigation and judicial rebukes should prompt restraint and compliance, not attacks on the legitimacy of the courts. When citizens are expected to obey the law, the president must demonstrate that he is bound by it, too.
Effective leaders also demonstrate empathy, humility, resilience, and the ability to build shared purpose. Critics see the opposite in Trump’s governance: loyalty‑based appointments, attacks on journalists, disregard for established processes, and behavior they regard as retaliatory or cruel. The question is not whether another president would have faced identical circumstances. It is whether constitutional standards are applied consistently, regardless of party. Accountability that depends on political allegiance is not accountability.
Senator Lisa Murkowski warned in 2025 that “retaliation is real.” When elected representatives fear punishment for exercising independent judgment, the issue extends beyond one senator or dispute. Congress is supposed to check executive power, not accommodate it.
Congress has both the authority and the responsibility to restrain presidential overreach. It must investigate credible evidence of misconduct, protect inspectors general and whistleblowers from retaliation, and demand transparency about executive decisions and public spending. Its appropriations power is a constitutional safeguard. No administration should divert public money without lawful authority or evade meaningful oversight. Taxpayer funds must serve legitimate public purposes, not personal image‑making or partisan advantage.
Congress should also strengthen safeguards against conflicts of interest and require meaningful disclosure of presidential financial interests. These are practical protections for public trust. Oversight must be continuous, evidence‑based, and applied without regard to party.
Not every presidential action citizens dislike is unconstitutional. Presidents have legitimate authority to set policy, issue lawful orders, veto legislation, nominate officials, and conduct foreign policy. Constitutional government depends on evidence, legal process, and institutional checks — not partisan assumptions or personal allegiance. Allegations must be investigated fairly, and violations must be addressed through lawful remedies.
The responsibility does not rest with Congress alone. Americans can vote, petition, organize, support independent journalism, demand transparency, and examine how their representatives vote. Democratic accountability continues between elections.
The deeper danger is the erosion of institutional trust: constitutional limits become negotiable, loyalty replaces independent judgment, and accountability is dismissed as persecution. Confidence without competence is not leadership. Power without restraint is not strength.
The question is not whether Trump occupies the office. He remains president in law. Whether he fulfills its responsibilities must be judged by his conduct, the evidence, and constitutional standards. The title cannot substitute for duty.
No Fortune 500 board would tolerate the patterns of conduct we have seen — not because of politics, but because leadership requires judgment, accountability, and respect for institutional limits. A president may hold the office in law, but leadership is earned through duty.
A president may hold the office in law, but the Republic endures only when its leaders fulfill the constitutional duties that give that office meaning — and when its citizens insist that no president is exempt from those obligations.
______________________________________________________________________
Carolyn Goode is a retired educational leader and former principal who spent her career advancing civic responsibility, equity, and public engagement. She writes about democracy, ethical leadership, and the values that strengthen American communities.
Keep ReadingShow less
USA flag
Photo by Joshua Hoehne on Unsplash
The Faces of Fascism and Challenges to Democracy
Oct 17, 2026
“A republic – if you can keep it,” was Benjamin Franklin’s reply in 1787 when asked what the Constitutional Convention had produced. For the first time since the Civil War, whether we can keep that republic is again in question. The answer will depend on the actions we take and also on the words we use, because political discourse is the soil and climate in which actions grow.
Like a lexical chick trying to hatch, the term “fascism” has cracked the surface of American political discourse but has not fully broken through. Whether it does has intellectual and moral consequences. So we must ask: What is fascism? Is it accurate to call Trumpism fascism? And if it isn’t fascism, what is it?
No one has written more trenchantly on this subject than Umberto Eco. In “Ur-Fascism” (New York Review of Books, 1995), Eco drew on his Italian childhood under Mussolini to identify fourteen features that cluster within the concept. They include (paraphrasing Eco):
- an emphasis on tradition and the …
- the implicit rejection of modernism;
- a cult of action for its own sake and disdain for thought, hence a predilection for violence;
- intolerance of criticism, and the belief that “disagreement is treason”;
- fear of diversity or difference;
- appeal to “a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups”;
- nationalism and xenophobia; an “obsession with the plot”; ‘
- the figuration of one’s political enemies as by turns either too strong or too weak, and an “Armageddon Complex”;
- a conception of life as permanent warfare;
- military and aristocratic elitism and contempt for the weak;
- the cult of the hero;
- machismo and “disdain for women and intolerance…of nonstandard sexual habits”;
- what Eco calls “selective populism,” wherein individuals have no rights, only the people collectively, and disdain for democracy; and
- lies and distortions in the use of political language, per “Newspeak” in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, including a focus on certain symbolic words and the abolition of others.
- I would add one more: the mobilization of the masses through electronic media, beginning with radio. That is why fascism is a distinctly modern phenomenon.
Eco also borrows Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notion of “family resemblance.” Games share no single essence. Some are competitive and some are not; some involve money and some don’t. Fascist regimes likewise share no single defining trait. As Eco writes, “one can eliminate from a fascist regime one or more features, and it will still be recognizable as fascist.” Resemblance, not identity, is what makes fascism a coherent rubric for a particular variety of misrule.
That leaves some unavoidable vagueness around the edges. As Orwell noted, even the major fascist states “differ from one another a good deal in structure and ideology.” But vagueness doesn’t strip a word of its validity or descriptive power. “Fascism” is in the lexicon because it is useful and sufficiently clear, and rigorous analysis of exactly the kind Eco performed makes it clearer.
FASCISM IN THE TRUMP ERA
The New York Times has editorialized persuasively on how the United States has accelerated toward autocracy in Donald Trump’s second term. Although it does not use the word “fascism”, the second Trump Administration has exhibited many of Eco’s features:
- It has targeted political enemies through criminal and mortgage-fraud investigations while pardoning friends.
- It has detained American citizens without due process.
- It has deployed federal troops and the National Guard to cities including Washington, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Portland.
- It has sought to silence critics in the military, the judiciary, and Congress.
- It has poisoned debate with lies and epithets (”low-IQ,” “evil,” “the enemy within”) that appeal to racism and xenophobia.
- It has built a patently corrupt system of shakedowns aimed at corporations, news organizations, universities, and law firms.
We should add kleptocracy to the list of frequent, if not universal, markers of fascism.
Additionally, we must not overlook the ways Trump departs from Eco’s model. His policies are not overtly antisemitic, even if he has not distanced himself from backers who are, and until attacking Iran he had shown little appetite for large-scale war. Courts and grand juries have often stymied his efforts to persecute opponents. Unlike Franco’s Spain, his movement is not formally tied to a church, though the Christian Right’s influence cannot be ignored. Thankfully, since the January 6th attack on the Capitol, he has not inspired violence along the lines of Mussolini’s blackshirts and Hitler’s brownshirts.
The largest difference is that Trump operates within a democratic system and erodes it, rather than replacing it. We are not living in a full-blown autocracy like the classic fascist regimes of 20th-century Europe. Trump has moved the United States toward “anocracy,“ a weakened democracy that allows fascistic policies. Our trajectory resembles Hungary, Turkey, or Poland, where authoritarians were elected and then eroded democracy without extinguishing it. The pattern also has American precedents: the Know-Nothings, Jim Crow, the Red Scare, McCarthyism. Ours is not a sudden seizure of power like Chile in 1973. It is a gradual kind of national electoral suicide.
HEARTS OF DARKNESS
One more dimension goes beyond Eco’s scheme: the movement is essentially non-ideological. All politics is emotive, and democracy is not designed for robots. But as Robert Paxton writes, fascism “does not rest explicitly upon an elaborated philosophical system, but rather upon popular feelings.”
Some figures in Trump’s orbit, such as Steve Bannon or Stephen Miller, could be called explicit, ideological fascists. Trump himself is an implicit fascist, as are many of his followers, most of whom would not recognize themselves as fascists. Among Trump’s supporters there is a genuine sense of threat and loss, and it is not baseless. What distinguishes fascism is not emotion as such but the emotional terrain that feeds it: racism, grievance, cruelty, openness to violence, and at times contempt for reason and expertise. MAGA isn’t a moral theory of how politics should work. It is a moral vacuum.
CONCLUSION
Like all general terms, “fascism” is imprecise and open to abuse. But we don’t banish words like racism, genocide, or terrorism because they can be misused or sound inflammatory. Fascism is both descriptive and implicitly prescriptive, and that is no reason to avoid it. To shrink from using it stunts discourse and amounts to unilateral rhetorical disarmament.
The same goes for how we talk about polarization. Yes, we are more polarized. But the casual use of the word implies that both sides are equally responsible for the chasm. It hides the fact that one side has drifted far further from democratic norms. Polarization is not like the weather, falling on everyone equally.
I am not suggesting we attach the fascist label to voters, as opposed to politicians and policies. People vote for all sorts of reasons, including the better and worse angels of our nature. Nor am I urging anyone to “understand” Trump’s movement as if it held a coherent worldview waiting to be fathomed. Reading Eco relieved me of that burden.
For the political class and the commentariat, the task is different. Focusing only on safer themes like corruption, incompetence, or affordability is a failure of moral nerve. Naming fascism plainly, and holding leaders and policies to account for it, is the first step toward the reckoning that must ultimately come.
The Faces of Fascism and Challenges to Democracy was first published by Expand Democracy and is republished with permission.
Jeffrey Scheuer is the author of The Sound Bite Society, The Big Picture, and most recently, Inside the LIberal Arts. The arguments and recommendations here are the authors’ own.
Keep ReadingShow less
Load More