What Does Success Look Like?

Yesterday, I read Cory Doctorow's latest essay, "America cannot undo Trumpism," and it has been rattling around in my head ever since.

Doctorow, the fellow who gave us the wonderful term "enshittification," argues that the damage done by Trump II cannot simply be undone. We can't turn back the clock to 2016, restore the institutions that have been gutted, shake hands with our former allies, and pretend the whole thing was a particularly unpleasant fever dream.

He's got a point.

Skilled civil servants have departed. Scientific research has been interrupted, sometimes irretrievably. Relationships with allies have been damaged. And people and institutions around the world have learned something about America that they cannot unlearn: we are capable of electing someone like Donald Trump. Twice.

Even if we elect the most competent, reassuring, institution-loving president imaginable in 2028, what's to prevent another Trump in 2032? Or 2036?

The rest of the world would be foolish not to account for that possibility.

But as I thought about Doctorow's essay, and the rather spectacular Democratic victories in last week's midterms, I found myself returning to something from my professional life.

A question that I have spent nearly three decades asking people, usually at the beginning of an expensive project.

What does success look like?

The project nobody has scoped

I have been a product manager in the technology industry for a long time. Long enough to have witnessed some genuinely spectacular successes, and more than a few projects that should have been put out of their misery years before somebody finally, mercifully pulled the plug.

One thing I have learned is that before you commit significant resources to a project, you'd better have a reasonably crisp definition of success.

What are we trying to accomplish? How will we know when we've accomplished it? What constraints are we operating under? What are we explicitly not going to do?

This sounds ridiculously elementary.

You would be amazed how often very smart, very highly compensated executives cannot answer those questions.

Instead, you get aspirational statements, competing priorities, and an enthusiastic declaration that everyone is aligned.

They aren't.

Sometimes the project fails spectacularly. More often, something worse happens.

It becomes a zombie.

The original objectives get fuzzy. The milestones become accomplishments in themselves. Every quarterly review features another collection of impressive-looking slides about all the work being done, but somehow the promised outcomes remain tantalizingly out of reach.

Eventually, maintaining the project becomes the objective.

Now imagine that the project is rebuilding the United States government.

Oh, joy.

Too many cooks, and nobody agrees on the menu

The coalition that opposes Trumpism is not exactly a happy family.

It's more like a Thanksgiving dinner where three branches of the family have agreed that Uncle Donald is no longer welcome, but have wildly different ideas about who ruined Thanksgiving in the first place.

First, we have the progressive Democrats.

They see Trumpism as a consequence of deeper structural problems: concentrated wealth, corporate influence, inequality, and decades of economic policy that left enormous portions of the population feeling abandoned.

Their answer is substantial structural reform. And they're not entirely wrong about the problems.

But progressives also have a tendency to regard compromise as a character defect, particularly when the compromise involves someone who doesn't already agree with them. They're quite capable of turning a promising coalition into an argument over whether everybody has sufficiently acknowledged the failures of neoliberalism before anyone is allowed to order lunch.

Next come the moderate and centrist Democrats.

These folks tend to emphasize competent government, political stability, economic predictability, and reforms that won't frighten the suburban voters whose approval they desperately covet.

They are the political equivalent of the corporate executive who responds to a burning building by commissioning a six-month stakeholder alignment exercise.

Of course, their caution isn't entirely misplaced. Winning elections requires persuading people who don't already agree with you.

But there's a difference between pragmatism and treating every ambitious idea as a potentially fatal threat to the quarterly earnings call.

And finally, we have the Never Trump Republicans, or Republican Rationalists, as I tend to think of them.

These are the people who would like to restore constitutional norms, traditional alliances, and the respectable, sensible Republican Party of yesteryear.

You know, the one that spent decades cultivating much of the political infrastructure, resentment, and economic mythology that Trump eventually commandeered.

Naturally, they'd prefer not to dwell on that part.

Now, I'm generalizing. There are thoughtful people in all three camps, and their disagreements aren't imaginary or trivial.

But look at the problem.

The progressives want to substantially renovate the building.

The centrists want to repair the damage, update the wiring, and make sure the renovations won't upset the neighbors.

And the Republican Rationalists want to restore the original architecture, preferably without too many questions about who approved the faulty construction in the first place.

These are not the same project.

They can all agree that Trumpism must be constrained. They can probably agree on restoring scientific independence, protecting the civil service, and reducing opportunities for political corruption.

But what happens when they have to agree on the actual architecture of the replacement?

That's when the knives come out.

And suddenly our grand coalition for restoring American democracy looks suspiciously like three executive sponsors who approved the same project charter without noticing that each had attached a different requirements document.

Winning isn't governing

Last week's elections gave Democrats control of both houses of Congress, along with some remarkable victories in places that had become accustomed to Republican rule.

Texas elected Gina Hinojosa governor, defeating Greg Abbott. James Talarico won a Senate seat. These aren't small developments.

There are legitimate reasons for Democrats to celebrate. I mean, it's looking like a Black Democrat is going to win a senate seat in <checks notes> fucking Mississippi!!!!!

But an election victory isn't a governing philosophy, and it certainly isn't an institutional reconstruction plan.

Already, the progressive and moderate factions are arguing over what the results mean, who deserves credit, and what direction the party should take.

The progressives see validation of their approach. The moderates see validation of theirs.

Naturally.

And the online sniping about Schumer and Jeffries has become its own spectator sport.

I have no particular confidence that replacing either man would solve the underlying problem. They're experienced political operators. But managing a congressional caucus and designing a durable system of governance are vastly different skills.

The latter requires persuading people to accept arrangements that might disadvantage them politically.

That's a much harder sell.

Still, I don't think the factions need to agree on every policy. They don't even need to agree on the proper size of government.

They need to agree on the rules by which those disagreements are resolved.

A government can survive arguments about tax rates, environmental policy, immigration, and military spending.

It has a much harder time surviving when those arguments extend to whether elections are legitimate, court orders must be obeyed, or the civil service exists to serve the public rather than the president.

That's the project.

Not restoring the old policy agenda. Not installing a new one.

Making the machinery of constitutional government sufficiently durable that the next election doesn't put its continued existence in question.

The rest of the world isn't waiting

Doctorow's other major point is that the international order is changing, whether America likes it or not.

Canada, Europe, and other countries have learned that dependence on American technology, financial systems, trade, and military protection carries political risks that they previously felt more comfortable accepting.

They will diversify. Build domestic capacity. Establish new partnerships. Find ways to reduce their exposure to Washington's whims.

Some of that is undoubtedly overdue.

But I am considerably less enthusiastic than Doctorow about what comes next.

A world with several competing great powers is not automatically a more peaceful or equitable world.

It can become a world where regional powers carve out spheres of influence, smaller countries find themselves choosing between competing patrons, and military alliances become more fluid and uncertain.

I have been reading William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, and it is a sobering reminder of how international arrangements can unravel when nationalism, prestige, strategic miscalculation, and political arrogance become a combustible mixture.

I'm not predicting another world war.

But I find the confidence that a more fragmented international order will somehow organize itself into something benign rather unconvincing.

The major powers before 1914 did not all set out to create a catastrophic European war. They made decisions that seemed rational, necessary, or politically unavoidable within their own circumstances.

And collectively, they created a system that proved disastrously vulnerable to miscalculation.

Today's nuclear weapons make the comparison imperfect, and the costs of direct great-power war create powerful incentives for restraint.

But the central problem remains.

What happens when two powerful leaders believe the other fellow will eventually back down?

I keep thinking about that wonderful scene in Reservoir Dogs where Lawrence Tierney's Joe Cabot is assigning the gang their color-coded names, and everybody wants to be Mr. Black.

Except in international politics, there isn't a Joe Cabot who gets to settle the argument.

And everybody has considerably more dangerous weapons.

There will not be a magic reckoning

Another thing that troubles me about the anticipated post-Trump era is the enthusiasm in some circles for a grand reckoning.

The modern Nuremberg trials. Public prosecutions. Accountability at last.

I understand the desire.

But Nuremberg was possible because Nazi Germany had been comprehensively defeated and occupied. The Allied powers had the authority to establish tribunals and prosecute the surviving leadership.

And even under those extraordinary circumstances, the denazification of Germany proved far messier than the satisfying historical shorthand suggests.

Millions of Germans had belonged to the Nazi Party. Many continued to believe that National Socialism had contained worthwhile ideas, even after the catastrophe it produced.

And large numbers of former Nazi functionaries eventually returned to government service.

The new German state needed people who knew how to run things.

That is an uncomfortable lesson.

Note: I am not equating Trumpism with Nazi Germany. The historical circumstances and the nature and scale of the crimes are profoundly different.

But the problem of rebuilding institutions while retaining people who participated in compromising them is real.

A future American administration will face similar choices about competence, continuity, accountability, and the practical limits of political purification.

Where crimes occurred, investigate and prosecute them according to the law.

But trials alone aren't an institutional reform program.

And I suspect that a lot of people who enthusiastically supported Trump will eventually discover that they were really just traditional conservatives all along, terribly concerned about deficits and constitutional restraint.

Funny how that works.

So, what would success look like?

I don't believe we're condemned to an endless cycle of destruction and repair.

And I don't believe that everything Trump has damaged is permanently lost.

Institutions can be rebuilt. Expertise can be replenished. International relationships can improve. Public confidence can recover.

But none of those things happens automatically because the other party wins an election.

The next serious governing coalition needs to agree on some basic deliverables.

Federal agencies must be able to fulfill their statutory missions, staffed by competent professionals who are not subject to arbitrary political purges.

Oversight must function regardless of which party controls Congress or the White House.

Executive powers need meaningful and enforceable limits.

Government programs should be evaluated against real outcomes, not the amount of money spent or the number of initiatives launched.

And the political system must preserve the ability of future administrations to pursue different legitimate policy agendas without dismantling the institutions that make peaceful political competition possible.

None of that requires progressives, moderates, and former Republicans to become ideological soulmates.

It does require them to accept that the rules have to apply when their own people hold power.

That's the hard part.

And we shouldn't confuse restored staffing levels, reversed executive orders, or reassuring speeches with completion of the project.

Those might be milestones.

They aren't the outcome.

The opportunity

I don't want to leave this on a completely bleak note.

There is an opportunity in the wreckage.

The federal government was hardly a model of organizational efficiency before Trump. It accumulated decades of overlapping programs, cumbersome processes, fragmented responsibilities, and political compromises that sometimes made coherent administration extraordinarily difficult.

Recognizing those problems does not justify taking a chainsaw to the institutions responsible for protecting the public.

But neither should opposition to Trump's methods require pretending that every preexisting agency, program, and process was perfect.

A thoughtful reconstruction could produce a government that is more effective, more accountable, and more resistant to political manipulation.

That would be a considerable accomplishment.

And perhaps the coalition's disagreements could even be useful, provided its leaders are capable of converting those disagreements into a workable settlement rather than an endless ideological food fight.

The catch is that someone has to lead that effort. Someone has to establish priorities, negotiate constraints, make difficult tradeoffs, and insist on meaningful measures of success.

I'm not convinced the current political leadership is prepared for that task.

But I would be delighted to be proven wrong.

Because the alternative is something I know all too well from the corporate world.

A sprawling, expensive, perpetually unfinished restoration program. Lots of activity. Plenty of executive presentations. Everybody claiming progress against their own objectives.

And five or ten years later, we discover that we've spent enormous resources rebuilding the government without addressing the vulnerabilities that made it so easy to damage.

A zombie program.

Only this time, instead of burning through a corporate budget, we're gambling with the future of the country.

So before we begin the grand project of rebuilding America, I'd like the prospective sponsors to sit down together and answer one question.

What does success look like?

And please, for the love of all that is holy, don't tell me it's simply getting back to normal.

If you have thoughts, I would love to see them in the comments, or just hit reply to this email and share!