Context Matters: Authoritarian Populism and Public Administration Practice,Teaching,and Research

Introduction: Context and Consequences

The work of people in public administration at all levels of government is shaped, directly or indirectly, by the political context of the surrounding society. The use of government to alter social or environmental conditions is a contested concept in the United States, so periodically the growth of government to solve perceived problems is countered by a period of critique and contraction (Schlesinger, 1986). Until recently, decades of neoliberalism made for a relatively stable relationship between the public and private sectors, as neoliberalism's operational partner in government, New Public Management, focused attention on economic efficiency and “running government like a business” (Box, 1999). Theoretical and technical concepts from this period remain important in the field, but events over the past several years have introduced a new level of turbulence and uncertainty to the public sector.

The current narrative of danger to the American constitutional order seems increasingly credible, as news articles, opinion pieces, the U.S. House of Representatives January 6th select committee on the riot at the Capitol, investigative reporting, and book-length treatments discuss the possible end of the U.S. experiment in large-nation representative democracy. A perceived sense of danger to democracy is found in many other nations as well, though here we focus on the United States, in which a party with a base of White people and voters in rural areas uses cultural fear, voter suppression, manipulation of elections, and threats of violence to secure political control as a minority of the population.

This political context can be characterized as authoritarian populism, a governing style intended to restore the White-dominant social stability of the 1950s (or the 1920s or 1890s, for that matter). It involves a specific form of elite influence, renewed public receptivity to authoritarian leadership, dissolution of facts into sometimes-bizarre fantasies, a fading sense of public purpose, and increasing anti-government sentiment. Policies and practices that have accumulated over decades to address issues of public concern are weakened or reversed, so this style of governance may be characterized as regressive (Box, 2008, 2017). At the time this essay was written, national politics were experiencing a hiatus of sorts from the implementation of the authoritarian populist agenda, but this may well be temporary.

In this essay, a description of recent events in the public sector is used to project potential effects on the practice and study of public administration if authoritarian populism is more fully developed over the next several years, especially following the presidential election of 2024. This would involve all-branches-of-government control at the national level (and in a considerable percentage of the states) by the dominant Trumpian portion of the Republican party. This political formation favors illiberal democracy (partial tolerance of the legislative and judicial branches of government and a free media, with manipulated elections) and features of authoritarianism (open hostility to pluralist structures and processes) over traditional liberal democracy. In such conditions, public administration may be quite different from how scholars and practitioners understood it not too long ago.

Some of the recent events described here occurred at a scale that allows for some confidence in predicting outcomes; an example is the potential elimination of civil service protections in the federal government. Some other events are seemingly isolated examples, but taken as a whole they suggest characteristics of a future public administration. The following sections identify characteristics of the regressive context and describe emerging effects at each level of government and in academia. The concluding section examines public administration practice, teaching, and research, identifying key areas of the field that may face accelerating changes and challenges in a regressive environment.

Characteristics of the Regressive Context

Commentators have made the point that Donald Trump did not create racist, xenophobic, violent, anti-government, and anti-democratic conditions on his own, but instead, they were already present in society. They were, but they grew much more prominent during the Trump years, promoted by his crude rhetoric, regressive policies, and support of far-right groups and ideologies. Though Trump is now out of power, the forces gathered around “Trumpism” appear to be regrouping to take control of government at all levels.

Aspects of this phenomenon which are especially important to the future of public administration are identified using the term authoritarian populism, the type of political environment that became familiar at the national level beginning in 2016. Various scholars have called this populism, right-wing populism, illiberal democracy, and, following the rejection of Constitutional democracy represented by the Capitol insurrection of January 2021, neo-fascism (Box, 2021).

Stenner defined authoritarianism as “a general predisposition to intolerance of difference” (2005, p. 325), and right-wing populism is a “revolt of ‘the people’ against the elite and an underclass or scapegoat subpopulation” (Morelock & Narita, 2018, p. 137) intended to “eliminate or otherwise subdue difference” (p. 140). In the American version (also called “white nationalism”), White, conservative Christians are assumed to be the normal, neutral demographic against which others are regarded with varying degrees of skepticism. Fear and dislike of difference, including race, gender, sexual orientation, and national origin is a key feature of the desire to return to an era with supposed societal purity.

An extreme example is the far-right QAnon movement, which incorporates the antisemitism and fixation on sexuality identified in mid-twentieth century Frankfurt School studies of authoritarianism (Rensmann, 2018, pp. 31–34). This is evident in bizarre fantasies that liberal politicians, public officials, celebrities, and prominent Jewish leaders are engaged in pedophilic cannibalism and child trafficking. In various forms, these ideas have spilled over to become central in Republican politics (Zimmer, 2022). A recent poll found that 49% of Republicans believe that top Democrats are involved in elite child sex-trafficking rings (Orth, 2022). It is remarkable that one-half of the members of a major political party find this credible.

Authoritarian populism shares some of the characteristics of fascism, in which power is focused on a single leader who exhibits aggressive toughness and claims to be the only person who can take the nation back to a mythically better time before it was threatened by the cultural decadence of the present (Griffin, 2018). In an authoritarian populist setting, facts, science, public professionalism, and expertise are devalued and suppressed in a “politics of delusion” with “a new virtual, yet loud-mouthed social media mob denouncing facts and promoting prejudice: the democratization of resentment” (Rensmann, 2018, p. 43). An example of the politics of delusion is Trump's “big lie” that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen, a lie believed by more than 70% of Republicans (Cuthbert & Theodoridis, 2022). Citizens who view the world through the lens of authoritarian populism hope they can be kept safe from threatening cultural changes by electing leaders and representatives who are White, Christian conservatives favoring laws that limit gay and transgender rights, voting access for minority groups, immigration, women's control of their bodies, and so on. These desired outcomes may involve pushing aside existing Constitutional and legal constraints.

This situation highlights a paradox: authoritarian populism accelerates the transfer of income and wealth from the bottom of the socio-economic distribution to the top, while at the same time many middle- and lower-income voters support right-wing leaders whose policies conflict with their own interests. These leaders cut taxes for the wealthy, slash social programs, attack unions, and so on. Hacker and Pierson (2020, p. 38) wrote that “Whenever economic elites have disproportionate power and come to see their economic interests as opposed to those of ordinary citizens, they are likely to promote social divisions.”

Fear, delusion, and citizen ignorance of the structures and functions of government divert attention from actual conditions in society and public purpose in addressing them. Instead, the public is led to focus on the imagined slights, dangers, and evils emanating from (among others) coastal elites, people of color, immigrants, university intellectuals, pedophiles, and child traffickers, in short everyone who does not fit the norm of White conservatism. The result is an odd combination in which extreme wealth inequality is supported by those who experience the largest negative impacts; Hacker and Pierson (2020) called this political formation “plutocratic populism.”

Authoritarian populism has historical roots in slavery and Jim Crow, harsh treatment or exclusion of Native Americans and immigrants, and discrimination against gays, women, and other groups. In addition, the United States has an active far right of private organizations whose members are militant, armed, and trained for violent conflict. Some of these organizations played a prominent role in January 6, 2021 storming of the U.S. Capitol, with members believing they were called to the fight by their leader, Donald Trump. In this way, they serve as a paramilitary arm of an anti-democratic party. The Capitol insurrection was an extreme event, but the possibility of violence has become commonplace, in threats against public officials, mob behavior at state capitals, election offices, and public meetings, violent acts during public gatherings, calls for a new civil war, and so on. These actions are intended to damage the law-based governmental order or to terrorize those who support or are protected by the existing rule of law.

Effects at the Federal and State Levels of Government

While in office, Donald Trump was intensely hostile to professionals in the federal government, regarding them collectively as a “deep state” that resisted the President's wishes. Bauer and Becker (2020, p. 26) labeled the Trump administration's approach to the bureaucracy “sabotage,” in effect “nothing short of administrative dismantling.” Agency budgets were cut, political appointees were selected who were directly opposed to agency missions (a tactic also used by the Reagan administration in the 1980s), many professionals were sidelined, silenced, or left the government, and some positions were left unfilled. Toward the end of the administration's term, Trump signed an executive order to reverse more than a century of progress in building a politically neutral professional workforce. It created a “Schedule F” category of federal employment for the professional class that would remove civil service job protections for tens of thousands of people and make them subject to arbitrary removal by administration officials (Stracqualursi, 2020). This would in effect take the federal government back to the spoils system of the 19th century.

The Biden administration reversed this order (Yoder, 2021), but the issue is likely to return in a future Republican administration. Bauer and Becker (2020, p. 26) noted that former Trump adviser Steve Bannon wants to “blow up” the federal government, not just control it. He is already working on plans to occupy federal agencies with “shock troops” of pre-trained teams of thousands of administrators ready to enact a Trumpist agenda and “deconstruct” the state as soon as Republicans retake the White House (Papenfuss, 2021). Sooner or later they will, so Bannon's vision for largely eliminating apolitical professionalism in the national government could well be realistic.

In such a national-level scenario we could expect, for example, federal climate scientists drawn from the fossil fuel industry, infectious disease officials who promote unproven treatments, federal forest administrators hired from the timber industry, financial managers who promote false theories about federal debt and Social Security and Medicare, wildlife administrators who reverse decades of progress on protecting endangered species, attorneys who will not protect minority voters against discrimination, immigration officers eager to inflict inhumane policies and treatment on immigrants, national security officials who favor autocracies over democracies, and so on. Subject to the direct will of either Donald Trump or someone who shares his policy predilections, a federal workforce such as this would produce a very different nation, socially and environmentally, and it would be a dramatically changed workplace environment.

The situation in state governments is related to the national narrative but is somewhat different. Many authoritarian populist actions in states have thus far related to voting, gay rights, and education policy rather than topics more commonly associated with public administration. However, public K-12 schools and colleges are public functions and the sort of policy impacts observed in education are likely to spread to other functional areas as well. In many states Republicans hold legislative majorities and the governor's office, providing opportunities to exercise control over both state and local administration.

Georgia has passed a law limiting teaching about racism from a critical perspective in elementary and secondary schools, and Florida, Idaho, and Mississippi have prohibited it at the college level as well (Burt, 2022; Jordan, 2021; Laughland, 2022; Oladipo, 2022). In Mississippi, “a crucible of the civil rights movement and the state with the largest proportion—about 38%—of Black residents anywhere in the US,” a bill prohibiting the teaching of critical race theory passed in the House of Representatives solely with votes from White Republican lawmakers. When the governor signed the bill to, as he put it, address “indoctrination in our state,” he claimed without evidence that: “children are dragged to the front of the classroom and are coerced to declare themselves as oppressors, taught that they should feel guilty because of the color of their skin, or that they are inherently a victim because of their race” (Laughland, 2022). According to the state's department of education, the teaching of critical race theory is limited to a single course in the law school of the University of Mississippi.

The impacts of such initiatives on public professionals are already becoming apparent. Teachers, school administrators, librarians—and where legislation includes higher education, professors—all could be affected by these measures. A professor of curriculum studies in Florida noted that it is difficult to teach about civil rights or the Holocaust without dealing with prejudice, economic injustice, and racism (Craig & Rozsa, 2022). Professionals in other areas of state and local governments may feel the effects of this political trend in the future, for example, in diversity hiring and training, disciplinary procedures, collective bargaining, public health, medical research, a range of environmental issues, law enforcement, public libraries, and more.

These events suggest an increasing desire on the part of authoritarian populist state leaders to intervene in organizational and local affairs. Given the potential for delusion and ignorance, we might expect some strange outcomes. As an example, consider the recent case of a Nebraska legislator who voiced concern during a televised debate on a bill to help children with behavioral problems. In relation to children expressing their self-identity, this conservative legislator had heard that students were dressing as cats and dogs at school and schools were placing litter boxes in restrooms to serve children who identify as cats. During the debate, he said that students “… meow and they bark and they interact with their teachers in this fashion …. And now schools are wanting to put litter boxes in the schools for these children to use. How is this sanitary?” (Associated Press, 2022).

This idea had surfaced in other places as well, such as Iowa and Detroit. Sometime after these remarks were made, the legislator checked with the chairperson of the body's education committee, who assured him it was not true; he then withdrew his concern (Associated Press, 2022). The relevant point is that in the current politically driven environment, an adult state legislator felt comfortable saying something so absurd in a very visible public forum. No legislation was passed to deal with the cats and dogs story, but as such people enact laws connected with cultural fantasies rather than the role of government in providing public services, the working environment of public professionals may well change accordingly.

Effects at the Local Level of Government

Anti-government sentiment is becoming especially evident in some cities and counties. It can be expressed in different ways, including running for elective office. A recent example is found in Shasta County, California; the county seat is Redding, a city of 91,000 people at the northern end of the Sacramento Valley. Shasta County has always been conservative, but its politics are shifting further to the right. In February 2022, voters approved the recall of a county commissioner who is a former police officer and self-declared Reagan Republican. He was the focus of activists angry that the county had not done more to oppose state vaccine and mask mandates, though the discontent is broader than specific issues. A spokesperson for the recall movement who is a member of the “California State Militia, a loosely organized group of armed para-military members” (Lah et al., 2022), voiced themes of anger and potential violence as he said:

This is a warning for what’s coming. It’s not going to be peaceful much longer. It’s going to be real …. I’ve been in combat and I never wanted to go back again, but I’m telling you what—I will to stay in this country. If it has to be against our own citizens, it will happen. And there’s a million people like me, and you won’t stop us. (Lah et al., 2022)

By the middle of 2022, the effects of the recall had filtered down to the professional staff. The overall director of the county's social service agencies (which includes the response to Covid) had retired, the director of adult services had resigned (saying she was “sad, sad for our community”), the board of supervisors fired the health officer responsible for the county's Covid response, and the county CEO resigned under pressure (Anguiano, 2022b).

A related recall effort is underway in Nevada County, California, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains east of Sacramento. Recall organizers are upset at what they call “crimes against humanity” such as local doctors refusing to prescribe the anti-parasite drug ivermectin for Covid though it has not been shown to be effective. The county commissioners have little to do with this issue, but it feeds a generalized sense of anger against the government. Commissioners have received death threats and a restraining order was issued against three local residents after recall “organizers forced their way through a locked door into the [county] clerk's office, pushing the door hard enough that it hit a staff member” (Ting, 2022). Discussing the disturbing use of language in the Nevada County case, Brian Levin of California State University San Bernardino observed that:

People [might] dismiss it as hypercharged rhetoric …. Calling someone a traitor, talking about crimes against humanity, is part of the way individuals turn the spotlight away from their use of violence-glorifying rhetoric. People labeling their political opponents as traitors and criminals—we’ve seen what the results are in lesser republics than ours. (Anguiano, 2022a)

Mark Swanson, a bank consultant and evangelical Christian, is an example of creating one's own fantasy world as a way of understanding government. He was part of an effort to reorganize a county elections office in Georgia because of his belief that the 2020 election was stolen by Democrats. After watching the election results in Arizona, Swanson had “come to see Democrats and Republicans as partners in a global network of corruption that was intertwined with China and whose end game was world domination” (McCrummen, 2022). He coined a phrase to describe such people in government, including former Vice President Mike Pence, the Georgia governor, and the local county commissioners; to him, “they are ‘STABs,’ subversive, tyrannical, authoritarian bureaucrats” (McCrummen, 2022). Swanson believes that if county employees are not STABs, they are at least pawns of the STABs. He expressed divine inspiration to remedy this situation, stating, “I believe God put me on Earth to do this …. Every time I want to give up, God shines a light on one more piece of information” (McCrummen, 2022).

An extreme incident of anti-government ideation occurred in February 2021 in Colorado City, a small Texas town of 4,000 people, where residents discussed in Facebook posts how the town would respond following the frigid storm that knocked out utility services across the state. Among other things, they wondered whether the town would open warming shelters and how firefighters would cope with a lack of municipal water supply (Farzan, 2021). The town's mayor chose to respond to this discussion by expressing his view that the city, county, and private utilities had no obligation to provide services to the public. He wrote, “No one owes you [or] your family anything…. I’m sick and tired of people looking for a damn handout!” He summarized his view of the role of government in society by declaring: “The City and County, along with power providers or any other service owes you NOTHING!” (Farzan, 2021).

Given his remarkable view of public services, the mayor wrote that residents without electricity should “step up and come up with a game plan,” and people who did not have running water should “think outside of the box to survive and supply water to your family.” In this Hobbesian world, according to the mayor, “Only the strong will survive and the weak will [perish].” Ultimately, “…God has given us the tools to support ourselves in times like this,” and people who expected help from the city were “sadly a product of a socialist government” (Farzan, 2021). As might be expected, the mayor resigned following the controversy generated by his posts; nevertheless, this episode offers an interesting window into a particular perspective on the relationship between local government and its citizens. One can only imagine how the mayor's behavior might have affected the thinking and actions of municipal employees in Colorado City.

These examples of anti-government sentiment at the local level are only a small collection of seemingly isolated events, but they illustrate themes of anger, potential violence, the view that government is inherently “socialist,” the beginning of a trend toward anti-government activists running for elective office, and effects on public professionals. It should be noted that anti-government sentiment is not new at the local level. For example, a decade ago in Colorado Springs, a conservative community of 400,000 south of Denver, voters supported an experiment with radical tax cutting that gutted a number of city services, such as public swimming pools, park maintenance, and community centers. The city eliminated 550 jobs, leaving 1,600 municipal employees, of whom 1,200 were police officers or firefighters (Patton, 2010). The effects of this anti-government experiment were so severe that the city reversed course several years later and returned to a more typical operational environment. An example of the effects of dramatically cutting public services was street lighting. The city saved $1.25 million by turning off street lights, but thieves then stole the copper wiring in the lights and it cost $5 million to repair them (Hannan, 2017).

In the late 1970s, this author served as building safety director in a rural Oregon county. Many local residents resisted the implementation of the recently passed state building code and this resistance could be significant. County-building inspectors carried weapons in their vehicles for self-defense because many residents were well armed, and there was an active local citizen militia group that rejected all governmental authority.

One of the code resisters ran for and was elected to the three-member board of county commissioners, to whom the author answered directly. The commissioner had what appeared to be an active building project on his property, just barely visible from the county road. He would not allow inspectors access to his property and would neither confirm nor deny that a project requiring a building permit was underway. The commissioner made a point of publicly mocking our department as unable to enforce the building code, thus encouraging other county residents to violate the law. These events from more than four decades ago show parallels to the contemporary examples described above, including resistance to a government authority, the potential for violence, the presence of an armed militia, and an anti-government advocate serving on a local governing body. The anti-government sentiment at the local level may be growing, but it is not new.

Effects in Academia

Academia is not completely buffered from the effects of political trends. Nevertheless, given the role of the university in reflecting on the societal context, it is not unreasonable for academicians and the public to assume a degree of separation, an agreed-upon space for intellectual exploration, that offers some protection from the immediate impacts of the rougher aspects of political life. In an era of authoritarian populism, though, dissent from the dominant political perspective is suspect and may be subject to attack and limitation. During the Trump presidency, a primary focus of such attacks was the mainstream media; now, at the state level, attention may be focused as well on higher education.

It is not uncommon for untenured faculty to avoid research topics that could offend senior faculty who will be involved in the tenure decision. Also, the preferences of a major donor to an academic institution could have some impact on faculty choices about teaching and research. However, the current situation nationally is more serious and disturbing than these familiar background conditions in academia, as right-wing political leaders in several states push for limitations on administrative practices and course content in public universities. In an article about universities in red states, Golden and Berg (2022) wrote, “Across the country, elected officials in red states are seeking to impose their political views on public universities,” as they use “the threat of budget cuts to scale back diversity initiatives, sanitize the teaching of American history, and interfere with university policies and appointments.” As an example, they quote a lieutenant governor's task force in Idaho, convened “to ‘protect our young people from the scourge of critical race theory, socialism, communism, and Marxism’ in higher education."

Here, we draw on a story of political intrusion into teaching and research at a major public university in Florida. It paints a disturbing picture of what could confront academia more broadly in a regressive political environment. The strength and clarity of this particular case suggest a possible future for academia that is difficult to ignore. The institution involved in this story is the University of Florida (UF), in Gainesville, a “flagship” state school, with more than 50,000 students and a major medical research, teaching, and clinical care system. This author has lived in the Gainesville area for a decade, and for two academic years (several years prior to the events described in this section) taught public administration and urban studies courses in the UF Political Science department as an adjunct professor, filling in for faculty on leave.

At the institutional level, the emphasis on public statements by university officials over several years was the goal of bettering UF's numerical ranking from a top-10 public university to one of the top 5 (based on U.S. News & World Report reputational rankings). This goal has involved large financial investments; in 2017, for example, the university announced special hiring, over and above normal recruitment, of 500 (!) new faculty as part of the push to achieve the top 5 (Orlando, 2017). From the perspective of someone who has been critical of the neoliberal-era focus on quantification and measurement, the narrowness of this vision for a public university seemed inappropriate, an appeal to donors and politicians instead of the value of the university to students and residents of the state.

This all changed in the fall of 2021, when news broke that the university denied permission for three political science professors to give paid testimony in a voting rights case. The stated reason was that the testimony would be “adverse to the interests” of the university. Republican state legislators and Governor Ron DeSantis passed a law in spring 2021 to restrict voting access. It was blocked by a federal district judge in April 2022 on grounds that it intentionally discriminated against Black voters, and the state will likely appeal the decision to a federal appeals court in Atlanta, where one-half of the judges were appointed by President Trump (Call, 2022). This was apparently the “interest” that would be violated by the professors’ testimony.

The controversy over the university's action prompted the administration to grant permission provided that the testimony was unpaid (Ivanov, 2021), and then to backpedal further, granting permission regardless of compensation (Schweers, 2022a). The university's board of governors consists of large-scale Republican donors and the chairman declared that criticism of the administration by faculty was “disrespectful” and must stop. Because the university's claim to control faculty speech had not changed significantly, the three professors filed a lawsuit, later joined by two law professors and a medical professor who had been denied permission to give testimony on Covid and masks (Schweers, 2022a), another issue central to the Governor's state and local right-wing politics. (His administration, among other things, is denying some state funding to local school districts that defied his stance against masking.)

A faculty senate report found self-censorship and fear of retaliation among faculty who were afraid to do anything that might trigger action by state politicians (Ivanov, 2021). The university's accrediting body initiated an investigation, to which the state legislature and governor responded by passing a law requiring universities to change accrediting bodies every accreditation cycle. (Later, UF's accrediting body approved a revised policy on review of outside faculty work, adopted in response to concerns raised by the accreditor (Ray, 2022b).) The law also requires universities to submit additional documentation about assigned textbooks and instructional materials (Hayes, 2022). In addition, a law has been passed requiring a periodic survey of faculty and students in state colleges and universities about the political views of professors, to be reported to the state administration (Dailey, 2022).

In January 2022, a federal judge strongly ruled for the professors in the case about giving testimony in court, comparing the university's behavior to the anti-democratic administration in Hong Kong (Svrluga & Rozsa, 2022). The university is appealing the judge's ruling. There are more details of interest in this case, but the issues at stake are clear. A far-right Republican governor, compatible legislature, and hand-picked university board of governors have created a climate of politically driven suppression of speech at the university. Paul Ortiz, president of the UF faculty union, put it this way:

When Tigert Hall [UF’s administration building] looks at Tallahassee [the state capital], they are trying to anticipate how Tallahassee is going to feel about my syllabus …. Full professors and deans walking through campus are saying they wonder what DeSantis will think about this program, that syllabus, this diversity training …. We have an administration that believes their job is to adhere to DeSantis’ worldview. (Schweers, 2022b)

Additional, related cases of suppression of speech may continue to appear at UF. In March 2022, a professor of English filed a lawsuit alleging that administrators took disciplinary action against him as the result of conflicting policy guidance about teaching remotely because of Covid. When he chose to follow one set of directions about offering courses online and sent class members email exchanges with the dean about the policy, one student dropped his course and complained to administrators. The professor was charged with insubordination by the dean, placed on administrative leave, and banned from campus. Shortly thereafter, he was ordered to submit to a mental examination and give the results to UF.

The narrative of the professor's lawsuit states in part: “This political abuse of the mental health system to persecute and discredit political opponents is recognized as a feature of autocratic regimes and is the subject of a substantial body of professional literature. It is also a violation of Plaintiff's constitutional rights” (Ray, 2022a). The professor claims the dean told him faculty are not allowed to discuss Covid in classes (apparently because of Governor DeSantis’ political positions against masking, vaccination mandates, and federal guidance). Also, he claims the dean told him they were not trying to fire him but to create a display of discipline because “the parents of the student who had complained of Plaintiff's email were influential political contributors and university donors” (Ray, 2022a).

Florida's governor signed HB7, named the Stop WOKE Act (“Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees”), which took effect on July 1, 2022. This act moves beyond attempts to control the off-campus speech of individual faculty members, to broadly controlling the topics discussed in elementary, secondary, and post-secondary public institutions. President Fuchs of the UF prepared a PowerPoint video for faculty describing what they now cannot do in addressing students, noting that failure to comply could result in the university losing a portion of its state funding. Among other things, faculty cannot suggest that “someone's status as privileged or oppressed is necessarily determined by his/her race, color, national origin, or sex,” or that “virtues such as merit, hard work, fairness, neutrality, objectivity, and racial colorblindness are racist or sexist or were created to oppress members of another race, color, national origin, or sex” (Burt, 2022). The law targets what conservatives believe to be critical race theory, but it extends as well into issues of gender and national origin. The president of the United Faculty of Florida stated that his organization is exploring its options, describing the current political context in the state as “encroaching authoritarianism” (Burt, 2022).

If this is a model, or even an early glimpse, of the future of academia in the America of authoritarian populism, it is worth our attention and concern. When this author taught at UF, some of the topics, materials, lectures, and student presentations in his courses might have conflicted with the current political interventions in Florida higher education. These could include subject matter such as economic inequality, the history and current status of race relations, the history and current status of immigration, social equity, urban power structures, police use of force, and so on. An editorial in the local newspaper commented that after decades of efforts to build UF's reputation, “Republican state officials have shredded UF's reputation and made faculty reconsider whether they would want to work there or at other Florida universities” (Gainesville Sun, 2022).

Implications for Practice, Teaching, and Research

Assessing the extent to which the events described above are predictive of future conditions is highly speculative, but it seems prudent to consider what might happen in the next several years. Research in public administration often focuses on organizational phenomena, but especially in the current circumstances a broader view can be useful and it may not be receiving adequate attention. Moynihan and Roberts (2021) observed that “Our field has proved to be particularly inept at looking at the larger trends in American politics and anticipating how these trends are likely to affect the domain of public administration” (p. 155).

Events described in the sections above suggest that one-party control of the federal government and many state governments may make the societal context especially hostile to a public administration grounded in politically neutral professional service. Assuming such a future context, over several years we could expect: a reduced and politicized federal civilian workforce acting in direct accord with the preferences of authoritarian populist leaders; state governments shaping state, local, educational, and academic administration to suit the authoritarian populist agenda; and cities and counties taking actions to constrain administrative discretion, downsize the role of government, and implement authoritarian populist policies. Because of the large number of state and local governments in the United States, there would be wide geographic variation in the impacts of this scenario—limited in some cases, significant in others—but in the aggregate, the practice of public administration would be quite different from what it is today.

Delusion, ignorance, and the threat of political violence would be spread by political leaders and eventually perceived as expected norms. Facts, reality, and public purpose would become particularly unstable, along with political neutrality and professionalism in the career of public service. Given political intervention in the academic enterprise and because practices in public administration will have changed, the subject matter found in PA classrooms and published work might be narrower and more constrained, with intensified external oversight and disciplinary control. Discussion of democratic forms of governance and advancing professionalism and equity in the public sector could become insider-talk of historical note, a nostalgic echo from a different time. This sounds similar to conditions in autocratic nations, which is not surprising since there are political figures on the far right in the United States who find much to admire in such systems.

Predictably, the daily work life and careers of public service practitioners and academicians would, in many organizations and positions, be limited by role expectations consistent with authoritarian populism. People are adaptable, so what may seem unacceptable today (such as a politically loyal federal workforce and faculty prevented from discussing aspects of public affairs) may appear decades from now to be simply the way things are, resulting in “an uncritical quietism in the attitude toward established and functioning social institutions” (Marcuse, 1964, p. 15).

Many potential changes in daily practice are easy to imagine, such as national park or forest supervisors who favor aggressive resource extraction and recreational use that degrades wildlife habitat, state law enforcement officials eager to pursue legal claims against gay people and women who seek abortions, school administrators ready to ban books and class discussions that offend conservative parents, and police managers whose departments openly discriminate against people of color. In addition, authoritarian political systems often exhibit self-dealing behaviors that impact what would otherwise seem to be mundane aspects of public administration. Examples could include initiation or intensification of practices such as contracting and procurement actions that benefit politically connected actors; accounting and auditing designed to show the administration in a favorable light, regardless of the underlying financial facts; fast-tracking approval of various applications and permits for firms and individuals who demonstrate political loyalty; and recruitment, hiring, and promotion processes that favor politically aligned applicants.

Turning to the potential impacts of a regressive context on teaching public administration, it will take some time for faculty and academic administrators in Florida, and in some other states as well, to decide how to address the intrusion of far-right politics into university instruction. In the meantime, it is easy enough to imagine the challenge facing faculty who teach in topical areas such as urban affairs, administrative ethics, criminal justice, social equity, and diversity. This is a non-trivial challenge to public affairs education and it is not only a vague threat on the horizon, its outlines are evident today. If faculty speech is increasingly controlled by the authoritarian populist agenda, the perspectives of PA students may be shaped by a limited view of conditions in society and their professional relationship with the public. The defiant gaze of the officer who murdered George Floyd as he pressed his knee into Floyd's neck is unforgettable. It is disturbing to imagine that in the relatively near future, in some schools there might be no one to teach a more humane and inclusive perspective on society and the role of public professionals.

The attempted suppression of faculty speech on certain issues in Florida focuses on what is taught in courses, but not—to date, anyway—what academicians write in published research. In an authoritarian populist environment where students and parents closely monitor the content of public administration courses, a distinction between published research and classroom speech could be difficult to maintain. The concept of social equity presents a “canary in the mineshaft” illustration because it directly relates to issues of interest to conservative lawmakers. In a recent article advocating the incorporation of social equity into the PA curriculum, Berry-James et al. (2021, p. 5) began by asserting that “The United States is built on and reinforced by exploitation and oppression” related to minorities. They argued that this situation is a matter of design rather than happenstance, since “For centuries, U.S. institutions have created legal restrictions on the freedom, movement, economic growth, and political success of Black people” (p. 5). A curriculum built around these framing assumptions offers a prime target for complaints about violations of state laws prohibiting discussions of race that include the concept of systemic racism. Though social equity is an especially salient example of the potential conflict between teaching PA and an authoritarian populist context, similar difficulties could arise with more technical, operational material such as personnel management, budgeting and finance, styles of leadership, and so on.

While much of the published research in public administration, understandably, address organizational and operational matters, it also includes macro-level questions about the relationship between the field and the broader society. This relationship is often conceptualized as a balance, tension, or overlapping between politics (or policy) and administration, with literature exploring how these spheres of action can be defined and whether the distinction between them has conceptual value in either theory or practice (Overeem, 2012; Rabin & Bowman, 1984; Waldo, 1980). Another prominent research theme is the place of public administration in the constitutional order, examining whether it is purely subordinate or a co-equal partner in governance (Wamsley et al., 1990; Wamsley & Wolf, 1996). The third stream of research explores connections between the public and public administration, questioning the extent and legitimacy of direct dialogue and cooperation between citizens and public professionals (Cooper, 1991; King, 2011; King & Stivers, 1998).

Should authoritarian populism and anti-government sentiment intensify in the next several years, the effects on daily practice and teaching and research could be quite immediate. Themes of politics-administration, Constitutionalism, and citizen involvement in administration in this context would all be pertinent topics in research and teaching. Observed role conflict between elected leaders and career public professionals could be an especially direct way to describe and analyze events during a regressive shift. The roles of career public professionals are grounded in laws, policies, judicial decisions, job and mission descriptions, occupational norms, and the expectations of peers and elected leaders; this is in distinct contrast to elected leaders and political appointees, whose roles are shaped by their policy preferences and attention to public opinion. The always-present interplay, overlap, and tension between political and administrative roles can be expected to change in character and consequences if the societal context becomes increasingly regressive, thus inviting theory-driven discussion of impacts on the field.

It remains to be seen how practitioners and academicians would respond to a shift toward an increasingly regressive environment. The responses of a number of faculty at the UF suggest that academicians can sometimes take principled action to resist political intrusion. Whether this would be possible for most public professionals is questionable since bureaucratic hierarchies can be effective at suppressing dissent, and the desire to resist organizational politicization may fade with time. Despite these challenges, forewarned by a worst-case image of what could happen, we may find ways to influence people and events in our surroundings, working toward a more desirable future for public administration. In relation to the distinction between politics and administration, for example, Overeem (2012) observed that discussion in the United States and Western Europe “starts from a luxury position” which is “in contrast to failed, weak, dictatorial, and totalitarian states” (p. 185). Participants in dialogue on this issue have wide latitude to debate the validity of theories because such constructs are so deeply imbedded in the realities of institutional practice that their “existence and importance tend to be forgotten,” a situation that “can have serious consequences” (p. 186). Overeem noted that Dwight Waldo wondered “what modern states would be without the politics-administration dichotomy,” suggesting they might be “either utopian or authoritarian” (p. 186). We may well have an opportunity to discover whether Waldo had it right.