NCAR, Trump, and Democratic Failure: Why We Need Parallel Infrastructures

NCAR, Trump, and Democratic Failure: Why We Need Parallel Infrastructures 

The plan to dismantle NCAR is a warning: climate research, public knowledge, and disaster preparedness are vulnerable to political capture. The answer is parallel infrastructure—redundant, decentralized systems that can’t be erased by regime change., climate research, and the case for resilient public goods beyond the state

In a recent segment on Democracy Now! about the Trump administration’s plan to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado—one of the most important climate and weather research hubs in the United States, and a major node in global atmospheric science.

NCAR isn’t some abstract “policy target.” It’s part of the scaffolding that helps societies predict hurricanes, model wildfire risk, understand drought, and build the basic knowledge that lets communities prepare for a worsening climate future. Scientists and public officials have warned that breaking it apart would damage weather and climate forecasting capacity, disrupt research collaborations, and weaken disaster preparedness.

And that’s the point. If the ability to “break up” a cornerstone of climate knowledge can be concentrated in a single administration—announced by a budget director on social media, framed as a fight against “climate alarmism”—then we are living with a political system that has built single points of failure into the survival systems of society.

That is not a glitch. It’s the predictable outcome of a democracy that has hollowed itself out.


Let’s stop pretending this is “rule by the people”

Yes, people vote. Yes, elections matter. But in the U.S. system—especially—politics is structurally shaped by money, lobbying, media ecosystems, donor capture, and the professionalization of representation. “Democracy” becomes a rotating cast of elites managing institutions that are already wired to serve capital and state power.

And even beyond the United States, the pattern is familiar: majoritarian systems produce winners and losers in ways that leave huge segments of society permanently outvoted, permanently “represented” by people they didn’t choose, permanently distant from real decision-making. Party politics becomes its own machine. People become spectators to governance—occasionally invited to place a ballot, then told to be quiet again.

Meanwhile the material world doesn’t wait. The climate doesn’t pause for an election cycle.

If climate infrastructure can be targeted, defunded, erased, and politically reframed overnight, then the lesson is simple:

We cannot outsource the protection of essential knowledge and public goods to the electoral stability of states.


Czech dissidents from the communist era already solved this problem—under worse conditions

There’s a reason my mind went straight to Czechoslovakia.

Under state socialism, dissidents didn’t “win elections.” They didn’t wait for a benevolent government to arrive. They didn’t waste their limited energy pretending the regime would suddenly start acting in the public interest. Many who confronted the state directly were surveilled, jailed, neutralized.

So dissidents developed another strategy: build what you need alongside the official system—cultural life, education, information networks, and community institutions that could survive repression because they weren’t dependent on state permission.

Václav Benda called it the “parallel polis”—the creation of parallel institutions and social structures that allow people to live in truth and maintain civic life even when the official system is hostile. Václav Havel, in The Power of the Powerless, explicitly reflects on these “parallel structures”: parallel information networks, education, unions, even the beginnings of a parallel economy.

This matters now because we’re entering an era where democratic systems—liberal, electoral, constitutional—are increasingly volatile. Governments flip. Funding disappears. Programs get canceled. Research gets politicized. Public institutions are re-engineered into ideological weapons.

So the question isn’t only: How do we reclaim the state? It’s also: What do we build that the state can’t easily destroy?


Parallel infrastructure is not resignation. It’s resilience.

Some people will hear this and think: “So you’re giving up on democracy?”

No. I’m describing a reality: democratic life is bigger than the state—and democracy cannot survive if everything people rely on is held hostage by state power and political turnover.

Parallel infrastructure is not a substitute for protest, voting, litigation, labor organizing, or institutional reform. It’s what you build so that when those battles are lost—or delayed—society doesn’t lose irreplaceable capacities in the meantime.

If NCAR can be broken apart by political decree, then we need redundancy. We need decentralization. We need systems that don’t have a single kill switch.


What “parallel” looks like in 2025

If we take the parallel polis seriously today, it can’t be nostalgia. It has to be operational. Here are some concrete directions—starting with climate knowledge, but extending far beyond it:

  1. Distributed public knowledge, mirrored by design
    Critical datasets, models, and tools should not live in one institution, one jurisdiction, one funding stream, one server, one legal regime. Climate and weather science should be mirrored across universities, libraries, NGOs, and international research consortia—using redundant storage and open repositories, designed so that “deletion” in one place doesn’t erase the collective record. (A modern equivalent of samizdat: not secret, but resilient.)

  2. Transnational governance for essential research
    Some institutions are too important to be purely national political property. When a research center functions as global infrastructure, it should have governance structures that reflect that: independent boards, multi-country partnerships, legal anchors in more than one jurisdiction, and charters that make political capture harder.

  3. Cooperative funding systems that don’t depend on electoral moods
    We keep begging billionaires to be benevolent while simultaneously watching money purchase political outcomes. The alternative is not fantasy—it’s collective finance: membership-based funding, diaspora networks, cooperative endowments, municipal partnerships, solidarity grants, and long-term pooled support that can survive a government collapse.

  4. Parallel education and civic training
    Benda emphasized parallel education; Havel pointed to private universities and independent learning spaces.
    In our moment, this means community-rooted field schools, independent research networks, civic learning hubs, and public scholarship that can operate even when official education systems are stripped, privatized, or ideologically policed. (e.g. aibia.org)

  5. Parallel communication infrastructure
    If the channels of communication are owned by corporations, mediated by opaque algorithms, and easily pressured by states, then democratic life becomes dependent on platforms that do not answer to the public. We need our own domains, independent publishing pipelines, federated social networks, and resilient communication tools—so movements and communities can coordinate without asking permission.

This isn’t a tech-bro fantasy of “exit.” It’s a political ethic of shared capacity: build systems that keep people safe, informed, educated, and connected even when states malfunction or turn predatory.


The NCAR lesson: treat essential functions as “too important to centralize”

In the Democracy Now! segment, the focus is understandably on outrage, protest, and immediate resistance. People in Boulder have been protesting the plan, and scientists are sounding the alarm.
That matters.

But I want to underline a deeper point: this should not have been possible in the first place.

A society that allows a vital climate research institution to be dismantled through political whim is a society that has mistaken “elections” for “democracy.” When public goods are structurally vulnerable to regime change, democracy becomes a gamble with the foundations of collective life.

So yes—fight the dismantling. Fight the capture. Fight the corruption.

And at the same time: build parallel infrastructure. Build redundancy. Build networks that cross borders. Make essential knowledge harder to erase. Make public goods less politically fragile. Make the future less dependent on whether the next election goes your way.

Because if the survival systems of society can be switched off by politics, then we don’t just have a climate problem.

We have a democracy problem.

And the only serious response is to start building the world we need—now—so it cannot be taken away later.


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