Opinion | As the Trump disaster gets worse, a new political theory helps explain it - T... - 0 views
www.washingtonpost.com/...itical-theory-helps-explain-it
trump disaster theory authoritarian incompetence
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Law professors David Pozen and Kim Lane Scheppele present “executive underreach” as a species of leadership failure that’s as destructive as executive overreach, defining it as:ADa national executive branch’s willful failure to address a significant public problem that the executive is legally and functionally equipped (though not necessarily legally required) to address.
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But crucially, the paper links this phenomenon to fundamentally illiberal and anti-democratic tendencies: Hostility to science and expertise; and the leader’s abiding faith in his ability to confuse the public with disinformation as a substitute for acting in the national interest, all typical of “demagogic populists” like Trump and Bolsonaro.
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Defining executive underreach isn’t easy, since the executive is endowed with the discretion to opt for inaction. So the paper suggests this:Underreach occurs when domestic and international legal sources are widely seen to authorize, if not also encourage or oblige, an executive to tackle a particular sort of problem with particular sorts of tools and yet the executive declines to do so.
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the paper notes that it occurs when the rationale for inaction is offered in naked and destructive bad faith, as Trump has been doing for months.
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Authoritarian and autocratic impulses perhaps belong in a separate category from illiberal and anti-democratic ones. But there’s plenty of overlap: Wielding disinformation to supplant solutions in the public interest and prodding friendly governors into putting untold constituents at risk — all to serve the leader’s cultish political needs — surely partake from both.
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In the leadership context, when incompetence and the distraction of narcissism do appear, they don’t necessarily hamper the realization of illiberal and anti-democratic tendencies. They are rooted in the same tangle of impulses, and mutually reinforce each other in a uniquely toxic way that compounds the wreckage.