The Private Sector Imperative

The non-governmental solution to rebuilding credible institutions and saving the Union

Several years before Trump’s second term, I wrote about what seemed a plausible outcome of the deep dissatisfaction of majorities in Republican-led states who faced the potential of another Democratic administration in the White House.

Republican governors, attorneys general, and think-tank operatives in states like Louisiana (my home), Texas, Florida, and a politically unified raft of other Southern, Mid-Western and intermountain Western states were already meeting regularly to draft “trigger laws” assuring maximal response to the Supreme Court’s pending abortion ruling, and state legislation to counter “leftist” Federal policies on immigration, gender identity, criminal justice, climate change, healthcare, and etc.

To me, this effort looked like a soft secession, and extrapolating a little beyond that notion gave me the fictional “Confederate Dispatches”—twenty local news stories from a re-constituted Confederate States of America.

What actually happened, of course, was something else.

Today, Republicans aligned under President Donald Trump control the White House, both houses of Congress, the Supreme Court, the military, and the budgets and leadership of every Federal agency (most of which they have decimated). With this power, they have also weakened non-governmental institutions of higher education, medicine, law, the Press and broadcast media, and have seriously impinged on individuals’ rights previously protected by the U.S. Constitution.

In effect, the Democratic-led states are now in the position I once imagined for the Republicans: facing an existential crisis of governance and the need to defend, rebuild, or create institutions independent of Federal control.

State governments are trying to stand up to this need. But unlike my imagined Democratic administration after the 2024 election, Trump’s Federal government is in no way supportive, and in fact has sent Federal troops into non-compliant states in a show of force unprecedented since the Civil War.

And just as before, the might of the U.S. Federal government is difficult to deny. It’s unclear what, short of a replay of our greatest national disaster, Democratic-led states can do to counter the full effect of Trump’s institutional power.

But outside State government—and indeed outside the Federal government—the private sector (including both for-profit and nonprofit organizations) holds immense potential power.

The power, in fact, of The People.

With yesterday’s latest Presidential fit of pique, in which Trump swiftly and angrily fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after she accurately reported huge recent drops in private sector hiring (an indictment of Trump’s capricious and chaotic economic policies), we may have turned a corner in which American citizens, working through existing and new private institutions, have to replace all of what’s been destroyed by the Federal government.

The needs are critical now in every aspect of civil society. We need reliable economic data; and accurate weather prediction (plus alert systems); science-based medical advice; impartial judicial review and legal services; a free and independent Press; secure investment, banking and financial transfer mechanisms; a localized, robust food system; responsive emergency management; and perhaps soon, sustainable energy production close to where it’s needed.

These are familiar, obvious needs. Most successful modern democracies provide for them through a vibrant partnership of public and private institutions and the general commitment by citizens and leaders alike that these needs must be met and without bias.

Such mutually beneficial partnerships are fast imploding in Trump’s America, on purpose and by design. It’s as if a handful of ultra-wealthy, literally sociopathic people could possibly manifest and capably operate the once great engine of American potential with their cell phones.

It’s time to look past the pile of rubble our government has been reduced to and start investing in ourselves, our neighbors, our local institutions and their national partnerships. Time to stop waiting for help from Washington D.C.

Think of it as a sort of soft secession. A re-constitution of the Union.