Trump’s takeover holds an unexpected lesson: A weak government isn’t all bad

The buzzword of the past couple of weeks is Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s new book about why we stopped being able to build things in America and how that’s destroying our country. (Klein is a co-founder of Vox and now a columnist for the New York Times; Thompson writes for The Atlantic.)

Abundance’s core thesis is almost impossible to dispute: It costs mind-boggling amounts of money and time to build bridges or trains in the United States; this isn’t true elsewhere in the world so it’s clearly not inevitable; and their inability to build keeps progressives from providing the safety net, climate action, and affordable housing that they say they want.

Since the central thesis is hard to argue with, most of the arguing about the book has been about the authors. (Are they secret libertarians just trying to sneak deregulation into the Democratic platform? Should they be willing to speak to New Right personalities? Are they too agreeable to take on the many parts of the Democratic coalition that stand to lose if we try to build things more cheaply?)

As for me, I enjoy the book and agree with 90 percent of it, which shouldn’t be surprising from my own body of work. But I have one serious concern that I haven’t seen anyone else raise.

I’ve been finding myself grateful in the last few years and especially in the last few months for the existence of federalism.

Here in the US it is states, not the national government, that run elections, which makes it much harder for an authoritarian in the White House to rig an election in their favor.

It is states, not the national government, that run schools, so to change school policies the national government has to persuade the locals — or at least bribe them, as Donald Trump is attempting to do with threats to withhold federal funds from any state that allows trans children to compete in girls’ sports. The government doesn’t directly control health care providers, so it has fewer avenues to interfere with insurance coverage of procedures it disagrees with, like transition or abortion. State and federal governments effectively no longer have the power to order neighborhoods bulldozed for highways, and I consider that a very good thing.

It’s far from all upside, of course. Federalism also allows for injustices to persist past when there’d be sufficient national support to abolish them; I expect many states still wouldn’t have legalized gay marriage if it’d been left up to the states.

Part of why the word has such a bad reputation on the left is the frequency with which it was leveraged to keep the horrifying racial segregation of the pre-Civil Rights Act South from becoming a national concern. And as Abundance explores in detail, the devolution of systems to local control produces policies that can be locally popular but nationally disastrous. Few people want more housing next door, but few people are happy about the state that America’s largest cities are currently in, either.

There are very serious downsides. But the upside of our sometimes kludgy federal system is a backstop against tyranny that I, for one, have recently become very grateful for.

A government that has more power is a good thing if the government will only, or at least mostly, do good things. But if you think that the government’s power will frequently be wielded to hurt you and people like you, you will rediscover a fondness for low state capacity, devolution to local control, and a system with lots and lots of veto points.

Or maybe not. Because there is an argument that in fact, if you add too many veto points to the system, you actually end up empowering autocrats, rather than putting up barriers to them.

You could argue that people are sympathetic to actions like DOGE’s smashing and hacking through the federal bureaucracy because they feel on an intuitive level that the rules make it impossible to get anything done, so anyone who wants to act must go around the rules. And at that point, why quibble over which exact rules got broken? In this view state capacity and the rule of law reinforce each other; paralysis is unsustainable, and the ways it ruptures will usually be ugly, as we may be seeing now.

I might end up finding myself persuaded by that argument, but I want to see it made. You won’t really find it in Abundance, one of the ways that makes it clear that it was initially written chiefly to influence a potential Democratic administration. Indeed, the book was originally meant to be published in the summer of 2024, right in the middle of the presidential election.

But it came out instead in March 2025, a couple of months into a second Trump administration that seems even darker than many people’s worst fears. Abundance is a vision of the future of big government, and right now every bit of news I see out of the White House makes me grateful for limits on government.

I think that if the Trump administration had more state capacity, things would be worse — and I think that any progressive administration rebuilding in the aftermath of Trump should count among the failures that brought us to this stage the unwillingness to limit state power as well as the unwillingness to effectively use it. Let’s figure out how to build, absolutely. But let’s only give the state power we’ll be glad it has when our enemies are wielding it.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!