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Additionally, at the meta-advocacy level, EA will suffer insofar as the bureaucracy is drained of talent. This will be particularly acute for anything touching on areas with heavy federal involvement, like public health, biosecurity, or foreign aid/policy.^[3]

This may be the one silver lining actually? There is potentially now going to be a growing amount of low-hanging fruit for EAs to hire who are simultaneously value-aligned and technocratically-minded. The thing I'm most worried on the meta-advocacy side is hostile takeover, as we were discussing with @Bob Jacobs here.

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Are US EAs Prepared for Democratic Backsliding?

by GulleyCanyonRavine

Mar 23 min read 17

110

Building effective altruismPolicyDraft Amnesty Week (2025)DemocracyOpinionUnited States

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Written anonymously because I work in a field where there is a currently low but non-negligible and possibly high future risk of negative consequences for criticizing Trump and Trumpism.

This post is an attempt to cobble together some ideas about the current situation in the United States and its impact on EA. I invite discussion on this, not only from Americans, but also those with advocacy experience in countries that are not fully liberal democracies (especially those countries where state capacity is substantial and autocratic repression occurs).

I've deleted a lot of text from this post in various drafts because I find myself getting way too in the weeds discoursing on comparative authoritarian studies, disinformation and misinformation (this is a great intro, though already somewhat outdated), and the dangers of the GOP.^[1] I will note that I worry there is still a tendency to view the administration as chaotic and clumsy but retaining some degree of good faith, which strikes me as quite naive.

For the sake of brevity and focus, I will take these two things to be true, and try to hypothesize what they mean for EA. I'm not going to pretend these are ironclad truths, but I'm fairly confident in them.^[2]

Under Donald Trump, the Republican Party (GOP) is no longer substantially committed to democracy and the rule of law.
1. The GOP will almost certainly continue to engage in measures that test the limits of constitutional rule as long as Trump is alive, and likely after he dies.
2. The Democratic Party will remain constrained by institutional and coalition factors that prevent it from behaving like the GOP. That is, absent overwhelming electoral victories in 2024 and 2026 (and beyond), the Democrats' comparatively greater commitment to rule of law and democracy will prevent systematic purging of the GOP elites responsible for democratic backsliding; while we have not crossed the Rubicon yet, it will get much worse before things get better.
The United States is very likely entering a period of democratic backsliding, and that may result in a hybrid regime, wherein elections are still held and contested, albeit on an uneven playing field, but concurrent civil liberties and protections are not universal. It is also possible that in the event of a GOP loss, it adopts rhetoric along the lines of the 2020 Big Lie, and refuses to concede power altogether.

Some initial thoughts on what this could mean for EA. Overall, EA advocacy areas will almost certainly become much harder, if not permanent nonstarters:

On AI: The United States may see the emergence of oligarchic politics, wherein business magnates are exceptionally politically influential. AI oligarchs would not take kindly to attempts to slow them down and may lean on the state to use state pressure to weaken AI safety advocacy.
On global health and development: The political costs of foreign aid and helping others—especially Black Africans—will be much higher. EA advocacy on global health and vaccines may risk being branded as unpatriotic or "woke" because it is aimed at people outside the US. I worry that for the sake of retaining influence in AI, there might be a temptation to cease the critical work done on this front for risk of incurring the wrath of the GOP.
On nuclear risk reduction: The current administration's foreign policy is in flux and seems subject to the vagaries of Donald Trump. Marco Rubio maintains that we're trying to "peel off" Russia from China. I think that's a post-facto justification for otherwise shocking behavior vis-a-vis Russia and Ukraine, but even so, advocacy for detente or dialogue in any form with China may risk being branded as a Chinese sympathizer. (I'm unsure on nuclear risk reduction vis-a-vis Russia right now.)
On animal advocacy: This may also be viewed as "woke" and suspect. Oligarchic/agribusiness influence may take advantage of the GOP's willingness to deploy state power against political opponents and try to silence or harass civil society groups engaged in animal advocacy.

Additionally, at the meta-advocacy level, EA will suffer insofar as the bureaucracy is drained of talent. This will be particularly acute for anything touching on areas with heavy federal involvement, like public health, biosecurity, or foreign aid/policy.^[3]

Finally, on a darker note, one may reasonably conclude from this that the solution is to keep our heads down collectively, because the cost of even perceived opposition could be quite high in the coming years. Setting aside my immense moral opposition to that, for the reasons outlined above, I think that would not do much for EA: without democracy, space for advocacy seems like it will be very limited within the US. But maybe that just makes earning to give all the more important.

^{^}

I am not the first to point this out by far, but I struggle a lot with not sounding like a completely delirious, partisan hack when describing the status quo. Just to put (some of) it out there: "A bunch of barely-out-of-college followers of Elon Musk, including a 19-year-old with the online alias BigBalls and an blatant racist whose dismissal for blatant racism was reversed because of support from the Vice President, are systematically gutting Congressionally authorized programs and agencies in clear violation of the law. The President has executed a complete reversal of US foreign policy and the US has begun voting with Russia and against its traditional allies at the UN. The US has also entertained invading Canada, which most US elites seem to think is at most a quirky bluster, but has deeply disturbed Canadians. We might also invade Denmark, a NATO ally, in Greenland. The man who runs Health and Human Services does not appear to fully understand or believe in germ theory. The health and lives of millions are on the line as programs like PEPFAR, famine aid, and NIH research are halted."

^{^}

It may end up being the case, for example, that in the next several months actors like the Supreme Court, Congress, and civil society form robust checks on Trump and Musk. Large Democratic victories in 2026 and 2028 could result in reversal of democratic backsliding. There are also plenty of other ways things could go back to more normal, constitutionally bound politics. I certainly do hope I am wrong/overreacting, but I'm not especially optimistic.

^{^}

Autocrats tend to prioritize loyalty over technical competence among elites because elite coups/competition are one of two primary threats to their power (the other being mass uprising). Two influential papers summarizing this line of thinking are Egorov and Sonin 2011 and Zakharov 2016. The dynamic here is a bit different, given that elections are likely to occur in the next few cycles, but seems broadly similar: RFK is a good example of someone chosen for loyalty (and electoral benefit) over competence. It is also clear that the Trump administration largely views the current federal civil service (the "deep state") adversarially. Education polarization in the US means that at least for now there are limits on the number of competent, sufficiently MAGA people who would be able to fill the federal bureaucracy's more technically demanding roles, though the goal is almost certainly not to replace civil servants 1:1 with loyalists anyway.

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Rhyss9d5

Thanks for this post.

Over the weekend, the White House ordered the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, an American permanent resident with an American wife, because he was a leader of pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University. Khalil might have his green card canceled for his role in these protests.

Although it might not get to this point, it's not hard to imagine the White House eventually operating on a new, looser definition of treason in which "aid and comfort to the enemy" could include words that Trump or others in his admin don't like. (They probably can't legally redefine treason, but that might not matter since Trump has already shown he can enforce the law as he wants the law to be as opposed to enforcing the law as it is. Khalil is an example of this, as he might have his green card revoked without it going through an immigration court, which is the required process.)

The Trump admin has a list of universities it might financially punish for allowing Palestinian protests, which include top universities in New York and California, and it's freezing/cutting funding for science research through universities in the US. Even non-science PhD programs in the US are reducing their budgets as a result.

The last point is probably the most obviously relevant for EAs right now, especially if they are deciding between studying at a US university or in another country—although anyone who cares about democracy and freedom of speech has reason to worry.

SiebeRozendal14d8

For forecasts, here's Manifold's US Democracy questions, which I suggest sorting by total traders (and unfortunately, anything n<30 traders becomes quite unreliable) and I also have a Manifold dashboard compiled where questions are grouped a bit more by theme here.

Main questions are:

"If Trump is elected, will the US still be a liberal democracy at the end of his term? (58%, n = 191)" - criticism of the V-DEM benchmark here
"Will the United States experience a constitutional crisis before 2030? (73%, n = 123)"
"Will Donald Trump arrest his political opponents [before 2026]? (41%, n = 76)"
"Will a sitting US President refuse to follow or ignore a Supreme Court ruling by 2032? (55%, n = 68)"
"Will Donald Trump remain de facto leader of the United States beyond the end of his second term? (7%, n = 44)"

Ebenezer Dukakis12d4

advocacy for detente or dialogue in any form with China may risk being branded as a Chinese sympathizer.

I'm skeptical.

Trump praises President Xi, says he looks forward to ‘getting along with China’
Trump invited Xi to his inauguration. He did not invite Ursula von der Leyen.
Trump wants U.S., China and Russia to cut military spending in half

I think we're in a surprisingly good position to negotiate an AI treaty.

River15d3

I don't think foreign aid is at risk of being viewed as woke. Even the conservative criticisms of USAID tend to focus on things that look very ideological and very not like traditional foreign aid. And fundamentally opposition to wokism is motivated by wanting to treat all people equally regardless of race or sex, which fits very well with EA ideas generally and with work on global health and development specifically.

That said, it is true that for contingent historical reasons, ideas that have little to do with each other, or may even be in tension, often end up being supported by the same political party. And at our current moment in history, anti-wokism and nationalism do seem to have ended up in the same political party. I'm just saying it is the nationalism, not the anti-wokism, that is the potential issue for global health and development work.

I also don't see how wokeness would have much to do with animal advocacy. I have found EA animal advocacy people to generally be more woke than other EAs, but that is not because of their ideas about animals, it is because of other aspects of how they conduct themselves. I don't know if that generalizes to non-EA animal advocates. The concern about oligarchy pushing against animal welfare I think is a justified one, all I'm saying is wokeness doesn't really factor into that dynamic at all.

titotal15d14

I don't think foreign aid is at risk of being viewed as woke. Even the conservative criticisms of USAID tend to focus on things that look very ideological and very not like traditional foreign aid.

This just isn't true. Yes, exaggerated claims of "wastefulness" are one of the reasons they are against it, but there are many more who are ideologically opposed to foreign aid altogether.

I can link you to this exchange I had with a conservative, where they explictly stated that saving the lives of a billion foreigners would not be worth increasing the national deficit by 4%, because they are ideologically opposed to american taxpayer money saving foreign lives, no matter how efficiently they do it. Or see the insanely aggressive responses to this seemingly innocuous scott alexander tweet. Or here is a popular right wing meme specifically mocking liberals for having large moral circles.

I suspect that you are in a bubble, where the conservatives you know are fine with foreign aid, so you extend that to the rest of conservatives. But in a broader context, 73% of republicans want to cut foreign aid, while only 33% of democrats do.

GulleyCanyonRavine13d6

I could have been more clear. "Woke" at this point is a slogan, and its connection to any sort of actual social phenomenon is increasingly tenuous. The original definition according to critics on the right might be something along the lines of "the divisive impulse to reduce problems to issues of race and racism and nothing else, at the expense of true racial progress and civic unity." But we're now at the point where anything that touches on race and race relations, and even just anything Trumpians don't like, is being labelled woke. My use of the term here was more a gesture at that latter usage of the term. Regardless, it's not especially relevant—opposition to foreign aid and animal advocacy, etc., will likely be quite strong among conservatives, whether or not the "woke" label is (mis)applied.

River14d5

You missed my point. I agree that foreign aid is charged along partisian lines. My point was that most things that are charged along partisian lines are not charged along woke/anti-woke lines. Foreign aid is not an exception to that rule, USAID is..

titotal14d3

This again seems like another "bubble" thing. The vast majority of conservatives do not draw a distinction between USAID and foreign aid in general. And I would guess they do associate foreign aid with "woke", because "woke" is a word that is usually assigned based on vibes alone, for the things perceived as taking away from the average american to give to some other minority. Foreign aid involves spending american money to help foreigners, it's absolutely perceieved as "woke".

Look, I wish we lived in a world where people were rational and actually defined their terms and made their decisions accordingly, but that's not the world we live in.

River14d4

EA is an offshoot of the rationalist movement! The whole point of EA's existence is to try to have better conversations, not to accept that most conversations suck and speak in vibes!

I also don't think it's true that conservatives don't draw the distinction between foreign aid and USAID. Spend five minutes listening to any conservative talk about the decision to shut down USAID. They're not talking about foreign aid being bad in general. They are talking about things USAID has done that do not look like what people expect foreign aid to look like. They seem to enjoy harking on the claim that USAID was buying condoms for Gaza. Now, whether or not that claim is true, and whether or not you think it is good to give Gazans condoms, you have to admit that condoms are not what anybody thinks of when they think of foreign aid.

David Mathers🔸13d*3

Unfair: he/she did not propose speaking in vibes ourselves he/she merely argued that this is how many other people will process things.

Condoms are a classic public health measure because they prevent STDs, apart from the benefits of giving people control over their fertility.

Obviously rationalists have contributed a lot to EA, and of the early adopters probably started with views closest to where the big orgs are now (i.e. AI risk as the number one problem). But there have always been non-rationalist EAs. When I first took the GWWC pledge in 2012, I was only vaguely aware that rationalism/LW existed. As far as I can tell none of Toby Ord, Will MacAskill, Holden Karnofsky or Elie Hassenfeld identified as rationalists when EA was first being set up, and they seem the best candidates for "founders of EA", especially Toby (since he was working on GWWC before he met Will if I recall what I've read about the history correctly.) Not that there weren't strong connections to the rationalist community right from the beginning-Bostrom was always a big influence and he had known Eliezer Yudkowksy for years before even the embyronic period of EA. But it's definitely wrong in my view to see EA as just an offshoot of rationalism. (I am a bit biased about this I admit, because I am an Oxford philosophy PhD, and although I wasn't involved, I was in grad school when a lot of the EA stuff was starting up.)

David Mathers🔸13d2

"The vast majority of conservatives do not draw a distinction between USAID and foreign aid in general." Not sure I'd go this far, though I do think it is relatively easy to get many elite conservatives angry if they think EAs or anyone else is suggesting they personally are obligated to give to charity. My sense is that what most conservatives object to is public US government money being spent to help foreigners, and they don't really care about other people doing private charity. I know that on twitter there are a bunch of bitter far-right Trump-supporting racists who think helping Black people not die is automatically bad ("dysgenic"), but I highly doubt they are representative of the supporters of a major party in a country where as recently as 2021, 94% of people said they approved of interracial marriage: https://news.gallup.com/poll/354638/approval-interracial-marriage-new-high.aspx My vague memory is also that US conservatives tend to be more charitable on average than liberals, mostly because they give to their churches.

(Having said that, people who read this forum who think liberals just unfairly malign conservatives as racists in general, should look at the data from that Gallup poll and re-evaluate. Interracial marriage had under 50% support as late as the early 90s. That is within my lifetime even though I'm under 40. As late as around the last year of the Bush administration (by which time I was nearly finished my undergraduate degree), 1/5 Americans opposed interracial marriage. By far the most plausible interpretation of this is that many conservatives were very racist even relatively recently*.)

*Yes I know some Black people probably disapproved of it as well, but given that Blacks are a fairly small % of the US population, results of a national poll are likely driven by views among whites.

David Mathers🔸15d*9

"And fundamentally opposition to wokism is motivated by wanting to treat all people equally regardless of race or sex"

I think this true of a lot of public opposition to wokeism: plenty liberals, socialist and libertarians with very universalist cosmopolitan moral views find a lot of woke stuff annoying, plenty working class people of colour are not that woke on race, and lots of moderate conservatives believe in equality of this sort. Many people in all these groups genuinely express opposition to various woke ideas based on a genuine belief in colourblindness and its gender equivalent, and even if that sort of views is somehow mistaken it is very annoying and unfair when very woke people pretend that it is always just a mask for bigotry.

But it absolutely is not true of all opposition to woke stuff, or all but a tiny minority:

Some people are genuinely openly racist, sexist and homophobic, in the sense that they will admit to being these things. If you go and actually read the infamous "neoreactionnaries" you will find them very openly attacking the very idea of "equality". They are a tiny group, but they do have the ear of some powerful people: definitely Peter Thiel, probably J.D. Vance (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/18/magazine/curtis-yarvin-interview.html).

But in addition very many ordinary American Christians believe that men in some sense have authority/leadership over women, but would sincerely (and sometimes accurately) deny feeling hostile to women. For example the largest Protestant denomination in the United States is Southern Baptism, and here's the NYT reporting on them making women even more banned from leadership with the organization than they already were, all of 2 years ago: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/14/us/southern-baptist-women-pastors-ouster.html There are 13 million Southern Baptists, which isn't a huge share of the US population, but many other conservative Protestant denominations also forbid women to serve in leadership positions and there are a lot of conservative Protestants overall, and some Catholics, and officially the Catholic Church itself share this view. Of course, unlike the previous group, almost all of these people will claim that men and women in some sense have equal value. But almost all woke people who openly hate on white men will also claim to believe everyone has equal value, and develop elaborate theory about why their seemingly anti-white male views are actually totally compatible with that. If you don't believe the latter, I wouldn't believe this group either that men being "the head of the household" is somehow compatible with the good, proper kind of equality. (Note that it's not primarily the sincerity of that belief I am skeptical of, just it's accuracy.)

As for sexuality, around 29% of Americans still oppose same-sex marriage: https://news.gallup.com/poll/1651/gay-lesbian-rights.aspx Around a quarter think having gay sex/being gay is immoral: https://www.statista.com/statistics/225968/americans-moral-stance-towards-gay-or-lesbian-relations/

More generally, outgroup bias is a ubiquitous feature of human cognition. People can have various groups that wokeness presents itself as protecting as their outgroup, and because of outgroup bias some of those people will then oppose wokeness as a result of that bias. This is actually a pretty weak claim, compatible with the idea that woke or liberal people have equal or even greater levels of outgroup bias as conservatives. And it means that even a lot of people who sincerely claim to hold egalitarian views are motivated to oppose wokeness at least partially because of outgroup bias. (Just as some Americans liberals who are not white men and claim to be in some sense egalitarian in fact have dislike of white men as a significant motivation behind their political views: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-45052534 There are obviously people like Jeong on the right. Not a random sample, but go on twitter and you'll see dozens of them.)

Literally all of these factions/types of person on the right have reason to oppose wokeness that are not a preference for colourblindness and equality of opportunity (the last group may of course also genuinely be aggravated by open woke attacks on those things yes, it's not an either or.) Since there are lots of these people, and they are generally interested enough in politics to care about wokeness in the first place, there is no reason whatsoever to think they are not well represented in the population of "people who oppose wokeness". The idea that no one really opposes wokeness except because they believe in a particular centre-right version of colourblind equality of opportunity both fails to take account of what the offficial, publicly stated beliefs of many people on the right actually are, and also fails to apply very normal levels of everyday skepticism to the stated motivations of (other) anti-woke people who endorse colourblindness.

River14d6

I appreciate that you have a pretty nuanced view here. Much of it I agree with, some of it I do not, but I don't want to get into these weeds. I'm not sure how any of it undermines the point that wokism and opposition to foreign aid are basically orthogonal.

David Mathers🔸14d3

It's relevant because if people's opposition to woke is driven by racism or dislike of leftist-coded things or groups, that will currently also drive opposition to foreign aid, which is meant to help Black people and is broadly (centre) left coded*. (There are of course old-style Bush II type conservatives who both hate the left and like foreign aid, so this sort of polarization is not inevitable at the individual level, but it does happen.)

*Obviously there are lots of aid critics as you go further left who think it is just a instrument of US imperialism etc. And some centrists and centre-left people are aid critics too of course.

River14d-1

Again you are not making the connection, or maybe not seeing my basic point. Even if someone dislikes leftist-coded things, and this causes them both to oppose wokism and to oppose foreign aid, this still does not make opposition to foreign aid about anti-wokism. The original post suggested there was a causal arrow running between foreign aid and wokism, not that both have a causal arrow coming from the same source.

David Mathers🔸13d2

Having read it again, all I can see them saying about aid and wokeness is that aid is at risk of being perceived as woke. That's not a claim about exactly how the causation works as far as I can tell.

Matrice Jacobine13d1

Additionally, at the meta-advocacy level, EA will suffer insofar as the bureaucracy is drained of talent. This will be particularly acute for anything touching on areas with heavy federal involvement, like public health, biosecurity, or foreign aid/policy.^[3]