Remaking the State

American democracy is in trouble—but not only for the reasons we think. Beyond polarization, money in politics, or the distortions of electoral democracy lies a quieter, more dangerous failure: Government itself has stopped working. Even before the current attacks on government, the old administrative state was built as a technocratic, expert-driven black box: distant, unaccountable, and ultimately unable to deliver. Policies stall, unravel, or never arrive. Others deepen the very inequalities they are meant to solve. American democracy will survive only if the government can function and serve genuinely democratic ends. K. Sabeel Rahman, who helped lead the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs under President Joe Biden as one of the administration’s top regulatory officials, offers a bold new blueprint: a moral vision of the administrative state as a vehicle for democratic freedom. Government, he argues, must protect against harm, secure basic needs, confront deeper structures of inequality, and build firmer checks on autocratic power. Urgent and clarifying, Remaking the State is a bracing case for transforming the American government before it is remade against us.