Federalism and power in Trump 2.0

Chris Beem 
From the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State University, I'm Chris Beem.

Candis Watts Smith 
I'm Candis Watts Smith.

Jenna Spinelle 
I'm Jenna Spinelle, and welcome to Democracy Works. This week, we are thrilled to welcome back Jake Grumbach, who is an associate professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley, and author of the book Laboratories Against Democracy. We had Jake on the show when that book came out back in 2022. It's hard to believe it's been four years, but time flies when you're having fun. But there's, I think, a lot to talk about within that book and how it's resonating these days, and a newer paper that Jake has about the effects of DEI policies at companies in the wake of a Trump administration executive order, we also talk about democracy in the midterms. So lots to unpack with Jake in this conversation.

Candis Watts Smith 
Jake describes himself as a quant, and he is. He's like his work is incredibly quantitative. There's lots of stats in that book, but it's also beautifully written, and it makes the evidence easy to follow. That book was about federalism, and we know that federalism is not only a system of allocating power and responsibility across levels of governance, but also it's a kind of theory of governance, which ostensibly federalism allows states to experiment with policies. It allows people to vote with their feet, right? So if each state is a little bit different and it creates policies that speak to local culture and needs and preferences. Then, if you don't like the way your place is, you could move to another place. And then, also, I think the kind of bigger one of the other major theories around federalism is that the states get to learn from each other, and the federal government, also gets to learn from the states, and then this other states can adopt or adapt good ideas and toss bad ones. But then we also know that federalism, as it's worked in the United States, is always changing.

Candis Watts Smith 
When Jake was writing Laboratories Against Democracy, trends in federalism were being heavily influenced by the nationalization of political parties, and the parties were also polarizing and are polarizing. And as a result of those dynamics, states were like states were like you have like red and magenta and like lavender and aubergine, but and but states seem to be coming like redder and bluer, and part of that was because policies were adopted top down from national parties and interest groups to state legislators rather than the other way around as we typically would expect it, and we saw that more states were becoming less democratic, and we saw more democratic blacks backsliding in the states, and hence the title of the book. Okay, I say all of that because that was three years ago, and what a difference a few years makes, I would argue that we're seeing another turn in the shape of federalism, and we're almost, I think, like in an upside down federalism, where the national government, particularly the executive branch, which is not being checked by the other two branches, is really pulling out its big guns. It's running roughshod over democratic norms. It's pressuring states to do all sorts of things, and it's doing it through incentives and also through punishment.

Chris Beem 
I just you know every example is a good one that you mentioned. I just want to make the distinction because he kind of makes it too, and actually, its core to this paper is he's not talking about the in this paper he's not talking about the relationship between executive branch and state government so much as he's talking about the relationship between government, executive branch, and corporations, and he talks about corporations as being an example of civil society. And I just want to give a 50 cent definition. Civil society movement was big in the 90s. I wrote a book on it, and it is true. Jenna says in the interview that a lot of people don't look at corporations as being part of civil society, but and you could stretch the definition however you want, but basically, civil society are those parts of society that are organized and are pursuing a common interest, but are doing it independent of the government, right?

Chris Beem 
And so that can be. Anything from a family to a congregation to a Boy Scout troop, a little league team, whatever, but it can also be something as huge as GE, right? It can be something as big as that, and you could argue, and I think a lot of people back in the '90s, did that we need to be more concerned with these face-to-face little organizations because those are really the schools of democracy. A boardroom, not really a democracy, right? And if you're on the union floor, it's even less. But it is also true that corporations are independent and they do create a little society, and it wasn't that long ago when corporations was one of the, and I think it's probably still true, where corporations was one of the few places where you'd have the opportunity to meet and develop a relationship with somebody who was very different from you, right? Someone who was a different race, different color, different sexual orientation, different religion, and you came to interact with them as people and for a long-term relationship.

Chris Beem 
And in that regard, it was extremely important. In fact, it was probably more important than many of these other organizations that civil society advocates would routinely mention, because those were often very segregated by class or whatever, and and so it's not the case that corporations are irrelevant to civil society, but in this case the point is that corporations nobody really cares about the little league in in State College, Pennsylvania, right? But they do care about how Target organizes itself and runs itself, and there are an enormous set of regulations that impinge on the corporation's behavior, any corporation, and as a result, every every place where there are regulations, there is a an opportunity for for getting your way for the federal government to change things in a way that make constrains the corporation to behave the way the president wants it to, and so that's really what he's kind of talking about in this paper. Do you agree with that, Candis?

Jenna Spinelle 
So I think we'll have lots more to talk about with regard to DEI and Jake's paper, Chris. I think you set it up there very nicely, so thank you for that. And listeners will have to stay tuned after the interview to hear Candis response to Chris's question. Let's go now to the interview with Jake Grumbach.

Jenna Spinelle 
Jake Grumbach, welcome back to Democracy Works. It's great to have you back with us today.

Jake Grumbach 
Thanks for having me.

Jenna Spinelle 
So it's been a couple of years since we've had you on the show. You were last on to talk about your book, Laboratories Against Democracy, when that came out. But when I want to come back to that book, maybe throughout the conversation. But I'm curious what you've been up to since then, and your more recent work focuses on corporate DEI policy. So, how that topic came onto your radar?

Jake Grumbach 
Yeah, great to be back on. So, Laboratories Against Democracy came out in 2022, and it was really about democratic backsliding in the states in the 2010s. So, then that was a time when I guess I'd define the first dimension of democracy being electoral democracy and sort of political equality, one person one vote, the things that the Voting Rights Act was meant to solve. Everybody should have equal access to voting. When you cast your ballot, it should count equally, right? And then that was also coming after january 6, 2021. That once votes are counted, you shouldn't be able to subvert an election. And a lot of the threats to American democracy were coming from the state level at that time. Even in the January 6 moment, Donald Trump was pressuring Brad Raffensperger, the Secretary of State of Georgia, to subvert the electoral college votes from Georgia, and that reflects how, in the U.S. Constitution, states really administer elections and run redistricting. But since 2025, we're in a new era, Trump too, and the threats and pressure to American democracy, I would say, is first more acute, and it's different. It's not as much this first dimension of political equality that you're making voting a little more costly for some people, or making some districts and areas in a state less consequential for setting a U.S. House or state legislative majority, which is a really big deal. Like Wisconsin and North Carolina, they're partisan gerrymandering in the 2010 set record and allowed, for example. Some of my work at that time, in conjunction with Chris Warshaw and on my own, estimating that what does look like that political inequality through gerrymandering allowed some states with pro-choice majorities of voters to ban abortion because gerrymandering allowed that anti-abortion minority of voters to set the majority of a state legislature, so it's a big deal. But I would say now that there's a different threat, and it's coming to the second dimension of democracy, which is rule of law, equality under the law, liberal democracy, small l, small d, right? The idea that there's laws that are applied equally to everyone; no one is above the law, and you can't use the power of the state to consolidate your power through sort of Viktor Orbán style Hungarian style mafioso governance. So it's a new era. I think what I wrote in Laboratories Against Democracy is important, but I and I think a number of us in political science have been really surprised. We thought the American sort of system was more robust than what we've seen since 2025.

Jenna Spinelle 
And so, what do you think? I guess why are you surprised, or what led you to think it would be more robust, or what what areas is it not holding up in the way that you would have expected it to,

Jake Grumbach 
There's a few ways checks and balances, and the U.S. Constitution really decentralizes authority. So that was, I did write a lot about how the founders, James Madison and others, really did say that this like federalism, the idea that you have multi-level governments and checks and balances between the courts, Congress, and the presidency would really prevent the consolidation of power in an imperial presidency, and that also resulted in that decentralized system and this large, diverse country resulted in a decentralized civil society. So, unlike if you go back to the comparative varieties of capitalism-style stuff, these coordinated market economies in Europe, especially Central and Northern Europe, were different than these more decentralized liberal market economies like the U.S. and, to some extent, the U.K. where businesses in the U.S. labor unions, religious congregations, other sort of community organizations. All of these are very decentralized law law firms. They don't. They're not in some coordinated employers union like in the Nordic states that bargains with a coordinated labor sector wide labor union for all restaurants. Instead, there's Burger King, McDonald's fighting their own little union battles and things, and that was also supposed to protect against consolidated sort of imperial power and authoritarianism. Because it's not only hard to get over these checks and balances and capture every 50 states and federalism and all the county and city governments, and then also business. You can't if you flip and sort of go after one large corporation to have them be pro regime, and you say, "I'm going to punish you if you don't become supportive of the regime, or if you do opposition. That that would be hard. They're so decentralized; you have to pick them off one by one. But it actually turned out that maybe made it easier to pick them off, and we saw civil society in 2025, especially law firms, major U.S. corporations, some extent labor unions, really fold to universities.

Jake Grumbach 
Like, how did I? That should be out, right? Exactly. So they folded much faster than we thought, and there's been a few political scientists writing about this, but that was surprising to me. And I've been working on projects around that issue. So in the U.S. and particularly Americanist quanks in political science, like myself, we study voters because there's so much data, and the Democratic Party establishment really does the only thing we can do right now is vote in general elections. But no, comparativists really know. There's a whole civil society out there when universities, when corporations and law firms all fold, that is a big. That's a incredibly big deal. That's outside that. How can we marginally change general election votes, and I've been working on that. And one first project out of that set of projects with Hannah Folds, who just finished her PhD at a, I feel bad for her at a school slightly to my south from UC Berkeley that can't even name, but she's now postdoc at Harvard, and we did this first project on the few large multinational U.S. based firms that maintain their DEI programs and that what made them out of step with early Trump administration executive orders. So the question was less about DEI and more about what happens when you're a major civil society actor that's out of step with a push for authority and consolidation,

Jenna Spinelle 
Yeah, and and in fact, you you write at the beginning of that paper that large corporations are the most influential civil society organizations in market societies. I think that might take some of our listeners by surprise. I wonder if you could just unpack that a little bit more.

Jake Grumbach 
Absolutely. So I think I think of comparative political economy, and so Dan Ziblatt of Levitsky and Ziblatt has a his solo book from the late 2010s on democratization and conservative parties as a good example of this. Or the point being, large corporations and the business community in general in market societies has a lot of structural power via how they affect the economy and investment. If a company does bad, it affects the broader economy. And then also they have this instrumental power when they just engage in politics. Both of those make them especially important as a pivot, right? If they align with the small D democracy coalition. Democracy seems happen in societies if they align with the authoritarians or the fascists in a moment when to potentially block the far left, as in early 20th century Europe. Sometimes the business community being more afraid of the communists than the fascists would align with the fascists, and then you get fascism.

Jake Grumbach 
So they're a pivotal organization. It's not a moral judgment I'm making. It's just saying they're incredibly pivotal, and for that reason, then their sort of rush in early 2025 to align themselves with Trump to presidency was a big signal. And our finding in this paper is that if you were out of step with Trump executive orders. If you're a large U.S. firm in the S and P 500, it doesn't really affect your market outcomes. Doesn't affect your stock price and performance. It doesn't affect your revenue. Really large corporations have a lot of leeway in capitalist societies, and it makes it more puzzling why they folded so quickly, and then we can extend this sort of thinking to universities and law firms.

Jenna Spinelle 
Yeah, and it's interesting to think about the contrast between the first Trump term and the second. I remember in the first Trump term, there was Jamie Dimon. He's at Chase, right? He was out there in the the business roundtable. We're making all these statements to stand up for democracy and all these things, there's also the line out there, something like an authoritarian coup is bad for business, right? So companies have traditionally wanted to, or at least maybe talk the talk of wanting to uphold democracy. I'm not in these boardrooms either. We don't know exactly what goes on, but that was at least the lines that they put forward publicly. It does seem like, for at least some, as as you note, there there was a shift at the start of the second Trump administration.

Jake Grumbach 
That's an excellent sort of reference and way of thinking about it. Is it's hard to know how principled and ideologically committed these stances were, right? Firms are profit-seeking. I tend to think it's okay; they're pursuing profit. So when the winds seem to be blowing in a more liberal democracy direction, they'll tend to go with that. Anti-democracy, they'll go with that. But one thing that seems mostly clear is that, in general, the business community, like other civil society communities, would do better under the rule of law, right? It's probably less in the aggregate as a whole community. You do a little worse, and your country performs a little worse when under mafioso governance. When a would-be authoritarian to consolidate power can just go to any particular business and say, "Hey, nice company you got there. It'd be a shame if you were to speak in favor of the opposition party. I might sic the FCC or FTC against you, or do hostile IRS auditing. Right?

Jake Grumbach 
There's so many forms of potential punishment through a weaponized, politicized administrative state in this way, and that's part of authoritarian consolidation is politicizing regulation in the civil service to not be again. That's why it's not the rule of law. We're not applying these standards. It's one thing if in a democracy voters vote for politicians that regulate an industry. We don't want oil companies to pollute as much, right? That's a standard across oil companies. Whether the oil company supports the president or opposes them. It's a uniform rule, not based on your politics. That's not what we're doing now. And overall, the business community suffers in as a whole. U.S. stocks perform worse and so forth. But it's a collective action problem where a classic. This is one thing. Just social science is so good at pointing out these collective action problems, but if you're kind of the last one in musical chairs and you're left without a chair and you're the last target of the regime, you're in a very bad place. Even though the whole pie has shrunk because we're in quasi authoritarianism, the idea it's way worse if you're. Like one of the few who didn't bend the knee. So when we saw early that inauguration photo of the tech elites, Zuckerberg, Musk, and so forth, all Bezos bending the knee, that's a signal. You don't want to be left out. Many of the major players in business, especially tech, are going along with authoritarian consolidation. You better join that or be left out in the cold. That shrinks the whole pie, but it's a classic problem in politics.

Jenna Spinelle 
Yeah, and there have been so many of these executive orders. Remind us what exactly the one that you study in this paper stipulated, or what it was ordering these companies to do.

Jake Grumbach 
Yeah, so there's been many important Trump administration, Trump two executive orders that range from things like on mail ballot procedures that the courts recently struck down, other things around immigration enforcement. What I looked at was a wave of executive orders, and one in particular. There's two major anti-DEI executive orders early in 2025. One targeted other mostly nonprofit institutions and the U.S. federal government itself to say we're going to root out DEI in any form within any government institution, and the other was directed the Department of Justice and within it the Equal Opportunity Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to target large U.S. firms that were upholding DEI, and some firms had already ended DEI, like seeing the writing on the wall around the Trump election. Then more firms after the executive order did so, and a few maintain them, like small number. It depends on how you measure DEI, but Donald Trump was very aware of this. So Apple shareholders, for example, voted against an anti DEI resolution soon after the executive order, and Trump goes on Truth Social and is just all caps railing at Apple and its shareholders in ways that affected its stock price in sort of minor short-term ways. So this was a big deal in boardrooms. Their decision around this.

Jenna Spinelle 
So is that the major lever here? Because I'm thinking about there's unlike in universities, for example, or perhaps other nonprofits that are dependent on federal grants. Right. There's not that lever that the federal government can pull-is it-is the stick here, so to speak, mostly pressure on from investors or whomever, and the the stock price going down? Is that what the companies are worried about?

Jake Grumbach 
Excellent question. I think the companies were worried about a few things. One is that there could be administrative hostile administrative action from the federal government-that's the first. So, like a direct penalty in some way, or like your merger doesn't go through. But these things take some time to do. Another would be consumer backlash. If you remember early 2025, there's this the vibe shift idea. It's like the cruel kids table is the cover of New York magazine, and it's like there's this sense, even though the election was again made modern U.S. elections are very close, but it was this idea of wow, the far right ascendance anti wokeness is just so dominant that consumers hearing the Trump administration's pointing to DI and U.S. corporations that consumers would also backlash against those companies that maintain DEI, and then investors as well. So I'd say those are three mechanisms. But your question was very insightful in distinguishing the fact that I think this is part of why you don't see an effect of being against that executive order as a large corporation, you don't see it affecting the bottom line, but I do think it's a bigger, not necessarily risk, but the the methods of punishing through federal government, punishing universities or law firms is a bit different.

Jake Grumbach 
So I should also mention federal contracting. It's hard to detect an effect there, but it's pretty clear that federal contractors, who are more tied to the federal government, ended their DEI programs a bit faster, right? As because they feared losing more contracts. Also, awarding politicized federal contracting is also part of authoritarian consolidation. But for universities or law firms, universities can have their scientific grants cut immediately? Investigations into admissions; these things are, I think, go a little bit faster and leave them potentially a little more vulnerable than multinational corporations. And finally, law firms can have their security clearances revoked. Major mergers and acquisitions can not go through, and these are increasingly the role of American legal industry activities. So I think that's potentially one reason large firms are protected.

Jenna Spinelle 
Yeah, and so to to wrap the idea of polarization into this a little bit and some of the consumer backlash, there have been economists, folks who study business, have some. Have argued there's one book in particular I'm thinking of called Prius or Pickup that sort of came out several years ago and argued that we're eventually going to move into this place where we have red companies and blue companies, right? And consumers will choose to support one or the other based on their political values. It does certainly seem like the country is continues to become more polarized. I guess I wonder if you think we we will continue in that direction, or could down the road get to a point where we will make choices about where we buy consumer goods based on which political party we subscribe to.

Jake Grumbach 
I think we do see an increase in this sort of partisan consumerism and partisan sort of supply-based emphases that is true, and the same thing we see increased residential moving for political reasons or choices of where to send kids to college and where kids go to college based on the, for example, abortion laws in states and things that is increasing, but we need to, I think, remember that the vast majority, vast majority of consumer or residential decisions and things are driven by those sort of economic fundamentals. So even that increase in this partisan behavior, it's no match for people. Do choose where to live still based on social networks and amenities, and people really-they prefer all else equal to live around co-partisans. But they are totally willing to sacrifice that if it means your kid's in a better public school and your house is better and you got a better deal and all that. Same thing with consumer behavior. People, it some at the margin, select on partisanship and cultural sort of culture war politics, but people really don't have the capacity to look through.

Jake Grumbach 
And there's a lot of hidden. I remember in the 2000s and 2010s as the Koch brothers became major known Republican donors at the state level, especially American corporate structure is very confusing, and it was like this: people looking up. Okay, they partially controlled brawny paper towels, so it just is very hard for this to bubble up to a universal principle of partisan consumerism. At the same time, I'll say the one successful modern era kind of right wing culture war boycott was Bud Light. Yeah, I believe 2023 when they had a transgender person on an at social media ad. That's my recollection. The rest of these attempted right wing boycotts were overestimated in their capacity to move markets, particularly by this vibe shift 2025 era. The Odyssey movie is the classic one now, where it's now the record-setting, grossing movie ever. But there's this internet sense that there's going to be this right-wing backlash. That's the Bud Light one is the one example. But more recently, this idea that Target would do better after getting rid of their LGBT, whatever merchandise just didn't actually come to fruition.

Jenna Spinelle 
Yeah, and especially with how the economy has been going, people are making choices based on price, right? Some of that other stuff kind of goes out the window. So one one last question about businesses here before we move on to some other topics. So you mentioned vibe shifts and backlash as we approach the midterms and the next presidential election. Is do you think it's how how are you thinking about will these companies go back the other way if if a Democrat becomes president in 2028 or if the balance of power in Congress shifts? Like how beholden are these companies to the political winds that go back and forth over time.

Jake Grumbach 
I don't see companies really rebuilding a lot of DEI programming, and that's in part because it's easier to cut than build is kind of a structural thing in general, but also because it wasn't just democratic presidencies and liberalism. Like the Black Lives Matter movement was very culturally dominant, and that led firms to rationally think the profit-maximizing move is to get on board with this sort of movement that's happening in real life and social media and so forth. And I don't see even with potential like strong blue waves and a democratic even trifecta in 2028. It doesn't seem like racial liberalism is at the front of this, and the even within the demo the the Democratic Party is doing this like woke 1.0 was crazy and things like that. For that reason, I see these things taking a different form. But one irony here, one fascinating thing is DEI programs in general were not especially clear. Like some had some forms of affirmative action and things. I have a paper with Abey and Asia, a law and econ professor, where we looked at the implementation of affirmative action programs in municipal governments historically, and there's just no. Local backlash-it's like a general national backlash to this. But it'd be interesting to think about with most forms of affirmative action being ruled by the courts illegal, and a ban in California, for example, in the U.S. in the California Constitution. It's just not clear how any of this would happen. I will say, though, I think people firms may learn that they don't want to go fully not just remove DI but embrace sort of MAGA cultural ascendants. That I do not see happening.

Jenna Spinelle 
I was also thinking too as as you were talking about the part the the branch of the Justice Department going after this stuff, the Equal Opportunity Commission is that right? That sounds like something that would have gotten DOGE'd, right? Is there also a part a part of this where the the administration's policies are going to work against themselves if they're cutting the people in the government that might actually be responsible for trying to do some of this work?

Jake Grumbach 
That's an excellent point. It does take time to staff up and build capacity at this within the state. This is true. Like immigration enforcement, this has been the big thing. ICE major recruitments, and then oh, they didn't vet these people, and now there's some firings. And I would say capacity issues are pretty central to this. At the same time, I think even more than capacity, it was the things that just reduced the popularity of this administration. I do think, sadly, it's the U.S. is very in danger of competent authoritarianism that doesn't that is more truly like America first in that pitch. So the idea of doing combination of tariffs that drove up prices when everybody's talking about price levels in the election, and then doing a war that closes a street that's a major trading route, further increasing prices and getting into Middle Eastern wars like that is just the trifecta of breaking your own coalition. So I do think, unfortunately, a it's not as much capacity as these like this is a particular cultural thing going on in the U.S. far right and in the White House around ostentatiously ostentatiously posting on social media excesses of authoritarianism and going into war and having a weird zero sum mindset about reputation, like we're like old honor culture. Like these are very bizarre things that I think more has to do with the failure of the administration than like that they couldn't staff up enough people, lawyer right wing lawyers, to investigate things. Yeah,

Jenna Spinelle 
So that's interesting because you talked about coordination earlier. I wonder if we need more of those stalemate type of situations, or if there's ways to think about how that situation might apply to other facets of our democratic system to maybe force some of that cooperation.

Jake Grumbach 
Totally agree. It's not as much my area of expertise, but we see similar logic when it's on small l liberal democracy things, rule of law, and free speech, for example, where free speech cuts all directions, right? And what we've seen is it went first the sense of cancel culture from the racial liberalism side, and this was like in all cases, this is often private market actors, but it generalizes here to now like speaking about Gaza has consequences for concerts and whatever, right? And then sometimes state action around this, right? Like particularly around the Charlie Kirk murder and things like that, like there's been some state action to really cancel people. Free speech cutting all directions really means like you should do a coordinate, cooperate, and say, okay, you're not going to arrest me when you're in power for my speech, and I will do the same. Those same mechanisms is how we get standards of the rule of law on gerrymandering. We're moving a little closer to it, but it's really difficult. And I'd say it's taken a long time in the Democratic Party. Those forms of go low have really shifted where it doesn't have a majority of Democratic senators now, or to abolish the filibuster to do some of these national reforms, but it's gotten closer, and I think that's something to really think about now. Is like having universal rules can apply to everybody.

Jenna Spinelle 
Totally. So we're coming to the end of our time here, Jake. Two last questions for you. One: What else are you watching as we head into the midterms? And then we were chatting before. Seems like you always have a lot of very interesting projects going on. Anything else that you're working on that you'd like to help to tell us about?

Jake Grumbach 
Thanks. I'd say I'm looking out for a few things. So I still work a lot with Adam Bonica. On sort of fundraising and thinking about the Democratic Party as a network of activists and groups and so forth and its positioning, so we are still really interested in this this spam packs that relentlessly text everyone, especially elderly Americans, and what that does to a political party as well as big money on the Democratic side, and how that plays out with nominations and the party network. Then I'm also very and how that all plays out this the midterms. And Adam is the one

Jenna Spinelle 
He had a big Substack piece on. That's right. Right. Okay.

Jake Grumbach 
So he had a quick story. Is he had a piece go all the way through the New York Times and then get legal cease and desist orders that were not based on any fact checking or anything, but just this makes the party look bad when we don't want people to hear that we really get all the median donor to these packs is 77 years old when Adam has detected just the same individuals donating like recurring donations 1000s of times via check boxes and all sorts of deceptive tactics that other organizations would in other contexts call elder abuse, so that expose was very dangerous, and I think that's really important stuff. Then I have this other line of work I'm very interested in high end wealth right now. We're in a level of wealth inequality that's never been seen. We've known since Aristotle that heavy wealth inequality destroys institutions. And I have my first game theory paper. Please clap, as Jeb Bush would say. It was very hard, but I my theory is that when you look at CBS owned by the Ellinsons or the Washington Post, owned by Bezos or Twitter, owned by Elon Musk. The fact that they own many other firms in their portfolio gives them a greater incentive under a corrupt administration to use their media firm to ingratiate themselves to this authoritarian regime, and therefore get goodies for the rest of their portfolio. So it's about their level of wealth is so large that because Bezos owns Amazon in the Washington Post, that's worse for democracy than if he just owned the Washington Post. He would have less of an incentive to do corruption or ingratiation with the administration.

Jenna Spinelle 
That's great, and I forgive me. I should know the answer to this, but do you have a Substack or a podcast or anywhere folks can follow your work? It's a rare skill, by the way, that somebody can be as quant focused as you are and talk about these things as eloquently as you do.

Jake Grumbach 
Thanks. That's very flattering. No, I write sometimes with Monica's Substack on data and democracy. We have a piece in the New Republic coming out in the next couple weeks, sometimes Boston Review. And then just look me up on social media. Mostly blue sky these days. Okay, and shows like

Jenna Spinelle 
We will round. I'll round up as much of that stuff as I can and put it in the show notes so folks can keep up with you and link to your social media as well, but always a pleasure, Jake. Thanks so much for talking wit us.

Jake Grumbach 
Thanks for having me.

Candis Watts Smith 
Thanks, Jenna and Jake, for that great conversation. There are so many things that were brought up here, from federalism, wealth inequality, the use of democratic institutions to produce illiberal outcomes-there's a lot to unpack there. But I'll start by talking about the questions about corporations, and also to Chris's question that he asked earlier about corporations being a part of civil society, and I think Chris is right, and so is Jake, to focus on these kind of organizations as part of civil society. And right, so we don't think of boardrooms as being democratic spaces, but these organizations speak to a lot of critical questions around governance, government, the quality of democracy, and also the quality of regular people's lives, and the things that they do radiate throughout communities. And so, some of the things that just come off the top of my brain are like Hobby Lobby and their fight to prevent people from getting contraception if they were have insurance through Hobby Lobby-that was a big deal. Or Facebook being part of being an organization where governments were using Facebook to do anti-democratic things, or the Washington Post, which is owned by a billionaire, and it's a major media organization. What it does matters. Walmart is one of the biggest employers. A lot of the things that Walmart chooses to do or not do influences millions of people. Amazon, same thing. So I think I am not really sure. Why people would argue that corporations aren't partisan civil society, when we see many examples of the ways that corporations are organized, are independent of the government, get people together, but also produce outcomes that influence communities, not even just across the country, but global.

Chris Beem 
Yeah, no, I think that's right.

Candis Watts Smith 
And in the case of Jake's paper, which is okay, what happens if organizations choose to follow along with the Trump administration's efforts to eradicate DEI, or if they choose to resist, what will happen? And we'll just recall that because our attention spans are short, and a lot of things have happened, that this executive order that Jake is talking about was one of the many dozens and dozens of executive orders that Trump has signed since the beginning of his second presidency, and like on the first day that he became president, he signed executive orders to end birthright citizenship, to use the government to punish his political enemies, to withdraw from the World Health Organization to implement anti-DE like transgender policies, and so this kind of ending radical and wasteful government DAI programs and preferences was also one of the early ones, and the way that corporations chose to respond did send signals, I think, to average people, but also to other corporations and other entities like universities, what should we do? Some chose to follow, and some didn't. And Jake's efforts, Jake and his his co-authors' effort, was to determine whether following or not following would produce outcomes and for profit specifically for those organizations,

Chris Beem 
Because the one underlying goal of a corporation is to make money, right? And that's the capitalist system. There's nothing wrong with that. It's just how you go about doing it, and whether your focus is short term or long term. Whether you're concerned about the legality, at least, and maybe even the ethics of your behavior, but it's also true that I think most people, depending on where you kind of come down on this, most people recognize that corporations or the society needs regulation of corporations, right? Because the profit motive is so overwhelming; it's so primary. You don't care about if you're putting pollution in the river, because that's not your problem. Your problem is to make money, and so there's a need for for government regulation, but in this case, it's not a universal. It's not a law. It's government going after a single entity, and that is a a distinctively new and I think powerful strategy because of the decentralization of our society, the last thing you want as a corporation is to be the center of Donald Trump's attention, and to be the center of his animus, right? And so he very cleverly picked out a few law firms, a few universities, a few media examples, and a few corporations to go after. And if you are interested in profit, if that's your motivation, then you are going to evaluate the question of how you respond to this action of the president, primarily in terms of how is this going to affect our bottom line? How is this going to affect our stockholders? And I think that kind of speaks to why you've had so many in all all of those domains acquiesce, bow down, bend the knee to whatever Trump demanded.

Candis Watts Smith 
The thing is that if I were gonna hindsight is 2020, part of the problem initially was that this picking out of organizations, universities, law firms was just so unusual, right? That nobody knew what to do. It was not like something that we practiced. It's not like a fire drill. You know what to do in a fire drill. You do not know what to do when the president uses the power of the federal government to try to crush you. It's a there's no there's. Probably some playbook out there about that, but it's not one that is been in the American canon. It's not something that we've necessarily needed. So I think that's one part. I think the issue it be it became an issue when it's like, okay, we're smart. We see that there is a pattern here. I think that organizations are starting to realize. Wait a second! It doesn't have to work like this.

Candis Watts Smith 
If we see that one of us could be any of us, rather than one of us being one of y'all over there, then we have an opportunity to solve the collective action problem. So maybe we're moving along in that direction, but I think the point what Jake shows is that resistance is not always fatal, and in this case of corporate profits and DEI, that if they chose to do the DEI thing, it went fine for them, and if they chose to be on Trump's side and go anti-DI, it also worked out for them. And there's multiple ways to read that conclusion, but I think the argument that Jake and his co-author would like us to take away is that some of the kind of fears around the ramifications of not abiding by an authoritarian's demands are are overestimated. What we're learning is that it's important to know history, and also that we're playing a different game now than we have had traditionally, and so the the strategies also must change. That doing the same things that people were doing before are not going to work when we are led by a person who has authoritarian tendencies.

Chris Beem 
Yeah, and the only thing I would add to that is that courage is a virtue. It just is. Anyway, all right, this really good conversation, a really interesting paper, worth your time. So is the book, and yeah, that's good. All right, for Democracy Works, I'm Chris Beem. 

Candis Watts Smith 
I'm Candis Watts Smith. Thanks for listening.

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