The Meaning of “Public Service” in Times Like These

We need to reimagine what it means to serve the common good.

now all heroes don’t wear capes
And all villains don't get away
But all limits eventually fade

—Joey Badass, “For My People” (2017)

Sunrise during my trip to Monterey, 2024

When I was coming up, popular culture led us to believe that working in government was the ideal way—maybe the only way—to do “public service.”

Aaron Sorkin’s West Wing played an outsized role in this phenomenon.¹ But even before Jed Bartlett and Sam Seaborn birthed a generation of Obamians, you had the action-dad thriller movies like Air Force One that dominated the box office, priming us for reflexive patriotism. The message I got from this then-aspirational culture blending hyper-nationalism with cosmopolitanism: To serve the public was to enmesh your existence with the federal bureaucracy in some way.

Not only was that untrue all along—there were many ways to work for your fellows, then and now. The real problem, in hindsight, was that Washington’s political class was able to do horrible things around the world by exploiting our willingness to serve. And we can’t put all the blame on self-interested politicians, unfortunately.

We who served also never questioned whether or how often the state actually worked in the public interest, the common good. “Trust the process” was very much a belief system—one that made Washington uniquely unprepared for Trump. Clinging to process as if it were rosary beads in The Exorcist alleviated the need to think critically about who benefited and who was harmed by the choices we were helping the state make.

The Iraq War? A one-off mistake. The Global War on Terror, extraordinary rendition, black sites, torture programs, and drone strikes? Good intentions. Barreling toward a nuclear war with North Korea? Trump did it.

Insane. Insane. But such is the power of American exceptionalism—an almost impressive inability to see the world in a way that would implicate Washington’s exercise of state power in the global worsening of extreme inequality, racism, and militarism.

More Than Vibes Have Shifted

These days, everything has changed and (almost) everybody knows it.

Shortly after Trump got re-elected, I wrote about the #resistance vibes that prevailed in the national security establishment during Trump 1.0, and I predicted/lamented that Trump 2.0 would not face nearly such resistance from the bureaucracy and think tanks as he did before.

I would love to be wrong about that. But I just read an interview with an anonymous staffer at the Department of Labor (DOL) and it lined up a little too perfectly with my expectations. A couple key quotes:

On the fears that DOL employees have:

The job stuff, obviously. Employment. Fears of protecting each other…

On how this time feels different from Trump’s first term:

It doesn’t feel the same. I mean, there was outrage then. I didn’t know what to do with myself. We were all going to marches. We went to the Women’s March. And even being on Twitter all the time then, and not being on Twitter now…

On the prospect for some form of organized resistance from agency employees:

I don’t think there’s going to be a lot of appetite for that among career agency staff. Even last time, there was a level of distrust that made it hard for people to do anything…There’s a lot of complacency.

Ugh.

I mourn the national security #resistance a bit, but also advise against mourning it. The world was worse off in many ways by the time Trump’s first term had ended, and most claims that “It could’ve been much worse!” if not for dutiful liberals resisting Trump from within the Blob are based on speculation, third-hand anonymous quotes, and counterfactuals that you either vibe with or you don’t based on nothing but your priors.

A Solidarity of Position, Not a Solidarity of Strategy

I also question whether #resistance history is even worth litigating.

I read a column by Jamelle Bouie this weekend—a guy I generally like but whom I think sometimes steps wrong on issues of justice. Jamelle was trying to offer some equanimity to himself and his readers in the face of the deliberate “shock and awe” of Trump’s return to power. He’s correct to note that MAGA wants us to feel terror. It actually brings to mind Machiavelli, which I read and re-read during 2016 and 2017:

when taking hold of a state, you must assess how much violence and cruelty will be necessary and get it over with at once, so as not to have to be cruel on a regular basis. When you’ve stopped using violence, your subjects will be reassured and you can then win them over with generosity. If you don’t do all it takes at the beginning, because you were badly advised or didn’t have the nerve, then you’ll always have to be wielding the knife; and you’ll never be able to count on your subjects…get the violence over with as soon as possible; that way there’ll be less time for people to taste its bitterness and they’ll be less hostile.

Jamelle counsels that rather than disorienting his enemies with his “flood the zone” approach to overwhelming everyone with tyrannical bullshit, Trump might be:

…galvanizing them. Consider the administration’s targets: the entire federal work force, the F.B.I., the intelligence services, and anyone who has a direct interest in a rational, consistent and nonpartisan federal bureaucracy.

Perhaps they will slink away in defeat, or perhaps they’ll attempt to fight back using whatever tools they have. Some appointees have filed lawsuits contesting their dismissals. And then there’s the extent to which anger at these maneuvers have kindled, in some Democrats at least, the fires of resistance. On Tuesday, for example, a large group of congressional Democrats were joined by ordinary Americans demanding to know why Elon Musk has been allowed to ransack the Treasury Department and other government agencies.

It’s true that Trump is creating a solidarity of position between the immiserated working class and the technocratic class that manages state functions. As sometimes happens with revolutionary forces, the MAGA Leninists (they refer to themselves that way) surrounding Trump are overreaching. Attacking everything, everywhere, all at once invites a balancing coalition at home and abroad.

But balancing—fight back—is difficult. The technocratic class has limited ability to defend itself, to say nothing of defending the public generally. The examples Jamelle points to are small-scale protests and lawsuits—no doubt worthwhile challenges to Trump’s power (this is an all-hands-on-deck moment), but we shouldn’t kid ourselves about the effects of such tactics against the sheer overwhelm of the MAGA revolution.

There is also a lack of unified consciousness bridging class divides. The good liberals I see charging hard at Trump’s attacks on USAID and other agencies of the federal government do not seem to be connecting their struggle to either the struggle against a legit counter-revolutionary project or to that of the American worker generally. And for every ten things Trump breaks, maybe two have a shot at reversal.

The weakness of the working class, meanwhile, is literally and directly why we find ourselves in this situation. The absurd imbalance between capital and labor favoring the former at the latter’s expense is what fuelled the grievance-politik that Trump exploits.

We should remind ourselves that the reason why Trump’s attacks on the administrative state matter should be because of what that state itself does for workers generally. But where people feel a lack of solidarity with the technocratic class’s defense of agencies under assault, it’s because they don’t see the value. Nobody I know is gonna shed a tear over Trump’s purge of the intelligence community, for example, even though he’s likely to stock it with monsters before he departs.

Service Takes Many Forms

Gen Z—and all the generations that come after—are facing a radically different, and more daunting, situation than their elders. For the most part, they didn’t grow up on Jack Ryan movies. Professionally, they have no incentive to believe in a theory of saving democracy that relies on deep-state heroes.

At any rate, there’s a certain intellectual and moral poverty in depending on cliques of well-educated, unelected elites to save our way of life, and I say that as someone who both very much thought that way circa 2017 and does not want to demobilize anyone who is doing the resistance thing inside the machine. If you’re a well-educated, unelected elite quietly working to save democracy, by all means you do you.

But the thing is, if you’ve ever worked in government, you know 1) how extraordinarily difficult it is to change anything, and 2) that the intellectual and political pressures to conform to the going concerns of those around you are immense.

The system needs good people in it…even if the system no longer lets good people in it. So if working for the national security state is your fate because of decisions you made earlier in life, when the government wasn’t run by an idiot mob boss and billionaires, then be a speed bump to Trump. Throw a wrench in the policy works. Advocate for sanity on the margins. Unless you truly believe in whatever the state is doing, being an internal disruptor is really the only justification for continuing to serve the state and collect that GS-paycheck. Only you know whether the specific function you’re serving genuinely, concretely serves the common good.

Increasingly, though, the civil service is not even an option. Imagine being a newly minted Georgetown School of Foreign Service grad who attended ceasefire protests the past 12 months. It’s one thing to nudge such a student toward government life, all else being equal; it’s another thing to think they even have a chance of getting into the system without swearing a loyalty oath to a king and spying on their co-workers’ use of gender pronouns. If there’s any digital evidence in this world that you have sympathy for the victims of American power or believe in equality in any way, I’d say there’s an 80% chance you’re going to be blocked or purged from government—not unlike progressives and socialists purged from government during the first and second red scares.

The urgency of this moment, therefore, requires us to reconsider what it means to serve, and to not fetishize government service in the way that I had taken for granted.

Like many of the people I’ve worked with in a past life, and like many new college grads, I’ve always been driven by some intense but vague need to serve the common good. Some of us are just built that way. Yet, my thinking about what that means and how to do it has evolved.

I no longer believe you can do good in this world simply by committing yourself with blind faith to serve those who rule your society. The state is not inherently good or bad. It depends on us—not only those who do the serving, but those on the outside who demand the state be better than it is. Democracy cannot exist if people lack the capacity to think critically about power, politics, and what actually is in the common good.

And there’s a strong case to be made that the best way to serve the public in times like these is to deny the system your labor, your legitimacy. To actually resist—to engage in civil disobedience, direct action, community mutual aid, and working-class power-building—might be the greatest service anyone can render the public.

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Want to Help Your Fellows?

Here is a spreadsheet documenting immigration advocacy, protection, and sanctuary orgs state by state. Helping them is one way of helping our brothers and sisters confronting the ICE and DHS end of the national security state. (thanks to Lester Spence for sharing)

Trans Rescue is an international org that helps LGBTQI+ folks shelter and escape to safety in general, including when faced with criminalization of their sexuality.

The Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee is a fantastic resource for organizing your workplace.

A Practical Guide to Unionizing Your Workplace, which includes a list of major unions in the US.

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1. An essential antidote to West Wing-brain is the The West Wing Thing podcast by Dave Anthony and Josh Olson.