Comment by veidr
8 months ago
I think your normalcy bias might be showing here:
> In reality, the US government is one of the most static, unchanging organizations on the planet.
The changes in that past couple of months are, objectively, enormous disruptions to the previous status quo (of the last 50+ years).
NATO may still exist on paper, but not in the world. The US has estranged almost all of its closest allies that it's had for my entire lifetime — I'm 50 — and in ways that are offensive, threatening, and simultaneously weirdly petty, and which would take a decade or more to repair even in the unlikely event that somehow the current administration was somehow replaced today, and efforts began immediately.
The US president has also opened up avenues for corruption and out-in-the-open bribe-taking (meme coin, banks of hotel rooms, his wife's vanity projects, etc etc etc) that are absolutely unprecedented in US history, of the ilk historically seen more in places like Malaysia, Peru, or the Philippines under Marcos. (Even Silvio Berlusconi was substantially more tactful and less obvious about it.)
At the same time, the administration is performatively flouting the rule-of-law, in ways completely unprecedented in the past 50 years. Openly defying judicial orders. Disappearing people without due process (yes, like all fledgling autocracies, they are starting with the already marginalized; purported gang members, brown-skinned or Asian permanent residents).
The childhood parables like "The Emperor's New Clothes" never actually, like, literally occurred in the America I knew, until this guy. Last time it was just "my crowd was bigger than Obama's" but this time it's "Ukraine started the war" (somehow arranging to be invaded by a murderous dictatorship waging a campaign of rape, torture, and mass child abduction).
> Nothing is going to happen in the next 4 decades let alone the next 4 years.
Way more than "nothing" has already happened. More substantial, self-directed change has already happened in 2-3 months than in Trump's entire first term, or any term of any president, in 50-100 years. I strongly suspect this trend will continue.
As you can no doubt infer, I am not a huge fan of this administration. But neither am I a partisan; I would characterize this administration as worse than any administration, Republican or Democrat, of my lifetime — and by a lot. (I include Trump's first term in that, but only because that static, glacial-pace US government you think still exists did still exist then, so even though the graft and weird dictator-fetish/emulation was present then, too, it didn't have the impact that it's already had in this term.)
Whether you think it is worse or better, I mean, we all have different priorities but it is unarguably very different — and has already made the US government very different — than anything seen in the past 50+ years.
A whole lot of words to justify an emotional feeling that's going to change in less than <2 years when the mid-terms inevitably flip the senate and house towards the democrats, as always happens when the pendulum swings one way in US politics.
Washington is and always has been corrupt, and political battles no matter how hilariously trivial in context to history have always been "the most important of our lifetimes."
Everything is fine and going to be fine.
Well, I hope you are right, but I suspect your hypothesis will be disproven, and that you might, in fact, be the one who is confused by the hysterical American media that you decry, conflating its ratings-driven amplification of every conflict to existential crisis level — the informational version of the "loudness war" in music production — with actual events.
Sure, the TV and social media will tell you that every year's crisis is "the most important of our lifetimes", and that isn't true. But obviously, it sometimes has to be true, right? I mean, at least once, and probably several times, depending from when to when we are alive.
"Important" is a matter of perspective, and also desired outcome, so YMMV but in my 50+ years of life there have been 3 such events driven by or pertaining to the US government:
- the collapse of the USSR and the end of the Cold War
- response to 9/11 and the aftermath
- 2025 US table-flip of the post-WW2 world order, pursuit of autocracy, and assault on the rule of law
Every government is corrupt; it's a matter of degree, and the reason you can't name a US government as corrupt as this one is because there hasn't been one. Watergate? Iran/Contra? B.J. Clinton? It's not close to the same degree.
Lesser disruptions have included the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2007 financial crisis, the internet, AIDS, maybe crack cocaine in the 80s, ... but those are more emergent side effects of human behavior than things done with intent. Things we deal with, not things we do.
Everything is fine? Disagree. Everything is going to be fine? Well, whew, good to know.
But I understood your point to be that everything is the same, and will be the same, broadly speaking, as it's been for the past 5 decades.
But it's not. It's wildly different, already. And even if, as you suggest, the 2026 elections somehow happened without egregious interference from the ruling administration (unlikely), and flipped control of congress to the opposition (maybe) — there's still no way to go back to the "before" times.
> Every government is corrupt
I think it's also important to say every public company is corrupt. It's a consequence of size.
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> when the mid-terms inevitably flip the senate and house towards the democrats
Very unlikely, just based on the math. Even less likely now that Trump is overhauling the federal election system.