Comment by epistasis
7 hours ago
This is a very common thing for corrupt governments. No rules are clear, so that those at the top can dictate whatever they want whenever they want. Which means that the only safe route is to always be on very very good terms with leadership.
Very sad to see the US fall away from the rule of law, into kleptocracy.
See also the way that grants are now being distributed at NCI and NSF. Only very large grants for many many years, to reward those who are in the favored status, and kill those who are disfavored. Decision making is random and capricious, just be sure to bribe those at the top with whatever favors you can.
> No rules are clear, so that those at the top can dictate whatever they want whenever they want. Which means that the only safe route is to always be on very very good terms with leadership.
Exactly. That’s why dictatorships are so adverse to the rule of law, despite many (notably the macho-nationalist ones) being ostensibly for "law and order".
> Very sad to see the US fall away from the rule of law, into kleptocracy.
Yes, it is sad. It’s Hungary all over again, just with a world-spanning blast radius.
To be fair, this has been a long time coming, and a lot of forces have been committed over decades to finally make this kind of thing possible. You're just seeing the next phase of the plan unfolding.
After listening to way too much Rush Limbaugh 30-some years ago, little of what's happening has been surprising, although that doesn't stop it from being distressing all the same.
> Very sad to see the US fall away from the rule of law, into kleptocracy.
This is what is so hard for me to handle, and it really feels like I'm grieving a death. Because no matter what happens, even if some things eventually get better, I feel like the US as I knew it is dead - there is simply no coming back from the fact that it's been laid bare how quickly and easily vast swaths of our political leadership would sell out to completely destroy our Constitutional principles.
I had to laugh when I read a title on the Washington Post today, "President Trump faced a wall of opposition from Senate G.O.P. lawmakers, in part over his plan to create a $1.8 billion fund to reward his allies", with of all people Susan Collins in the header image. Lol, I'm sure she'll release a statement saying how she's "very concerned" and end up doing nothing anyway.
how quickly and easily vast swaths of our political leadership would sell out to completely destroy our Constitutional principles
This is not something done to us by leadership. This is a democracy; we voted for this.
We have another election coming up momentarily. We have the opportunity to put a stop to this. There's good reason to think that the election will not be entirely fair, but there are limits: if people are genuinely against this, they will turn out and say so.
We'll see what happens, but even in the best possible case, tens of millions of people will come out to say "Yes, destroying American science is exactly what I want". This is not a leadership problem. This is an us problem.
It is an information problem. A majority of voters believes in the nonsense that is spread on social media, and are not properly informed about important topics.
3 replies →
The people are fairly irrelevant these days. We just saw this week how Israel and billionaires can just spam AI slop adverts to replace a popular candidate with a complete no one.
Boomers will see the ai generated video and believe it immediately.
> there is simply no coming back from the fact that it's been laid bare how quickly and easily vast swaths of our political leadership would sell out to completely destroy our Constitutional principles.
I think you are right. At the same time it’s also an opportunity to get rid of an outdated constitution and have another go, with the benefit of 250 more years of experience. Just don’t fall into complacency: this government was voted in, partly because of a toxic and polarised culture that sees compromise and consensus as weaknesses (and gerrymandering, and the electoral college, and disenfranchisement, fair enough), but also partly because a lot of people did not bother showing up. Republicans have had a grassroots strategy for decades, where they seized everything they could get, even very modest positions. That’s how they progressively ended up redrawing maps and steering politics at the state or county level. You need a long term plan and a good strategy to counter this. So don’t give up (I beg you, from the other side of the Atlantic). Even if things are bad now, they can get better tomorrow.
I think you would most certainly NOT prefer any Constitution, nor especially any Bill of Rights, that was rewritten by today's version of "We the People".
I don't think they can get rid of the constitution. It would require a near total control of all judges right now and I don't think they have that.
What they will instead do is continually test the boundaries and shift them. They will also put in loyalists. Aka corruption. This already happened in the army by the way. It's fascinating to see how a democracy is turned into a dictatorship.
2 replies →
And the ‘wall of opposition’ was ‘we won’t vote right now because if we do we might vote to stop this!’.
But we need to believe that the USA can come back. The spoils system was eliminated once before. Slavery was eliminated. The USA ‘came back’ from Jim Crow and segregation. From Japanese internment. From the Gilded Age. From the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. From a civil war. Our modern mistake was assuming that anything is ever truly eliminated without constant effort.
I would argue we had a few good years of Reconstruction before President Johnson put an end to it and it took a century for this country to partially rectify this with a few constitutional amendments and Supreme Court decisions(that were cursed by not having time limits) and those changes have been chipped away again so we are close to returning to a pre Civil Rights era federal government similar to Woodrow Wilson except the guys who would be in the KKK are now federal law enforcement in Homeland Security and the Justice Department is trying to equate anti fascism with terrorism. I would agree that democracy requires a constant fight against but my impression is our education system/news media presents government as done deal and “we have democracy and we don’t have to worry about it” and most Americans are too complacent and politically detached - A third of Americans not voting during presidential elections.
> it really feels like I'm grieving a death.
Jimmy Carter's funeral a few days before Trump was inaugurated really felt like the funeral for America. The moral gulf between Jimmy Carter and Donald Trump is just so vast. To imagine that the US elected someone with the integrity of Jimmy Carter in 1976... and then elected someone who is as morally bankrupt as Trump is in 2024.
> there is simply no coming back from the fact that it's been laid bare how quickly and easily vast swaths of our political leadership would sell out to completely destroy our Constitutional principles.
Indeed. Well said. I doubt we'll ever see the likes of a Carter again in the Whitehouse.
But why was Carter elected? Partly it was disgust at Watergate. Could we see someone of integrity elected as a result of a backlash of disgust at Trump? Yes, we could.
Will the Democrats run such a person? I don't have much hope.
1 reply →
The primary system means that nobody with any principles is left in the Republican Party, unfortunately.
But not all is lost. Many are very eager for the reins of power to come back and for laws to be enforced. Sure, the Trump regime may tell itself that it's immune from tax audits ever again, but that's not legal and as soon as the force of law is back there are many eager attorneys with high principles that will be hired back into the DoJ and enforce the law.
We saw this after Nixon's lawlessness too. Those who abetted Nixon in breaking the law were disbarred.
Prosecutions will come. Trumps's key mistake is thinking that his popularity doesn't matter anymore. It does. It means that people with morals and ethics can legally gain power and legally enforce the law.
If Trump was at 60% popularity, I would be singing a different tune. But at 35% popularity and 60% unfavorable, there is appetite left in our democracy to remain a democracy and to go after the crooks. Even if a good 30% of that unfavorable opinion is just about people's own pocketbooks rather than the principles of law and democracy, that's enough for those who care to actually enforce law.
Be concerned, but be ready tk supppprt those who will correct the course of our ship.
I wish I could share your optimism. But just because a voter has an unfavorable opinion, it doesn't mean that they won't vote for them. Many will choose "the lesser of two evils", and the current administration has devoted a lot of effort to convincing supporters that their opponents are even worse.
The President is not in fact on the ballot this year, and quite a few will say "I don't like the President, but I like the local Republican candidate more than the local Democratic candidate". Except that the President should be on the ballot: the only serious question facing Congress is whether they will support his policies or take measures to oppose them. That's going to happen exclusively along party lines. Nothing else that either candidate promises actually matters.
It's all made worse by efforts to put a thumb on the scale. That, above all else, makes this feel like the last chance we'll have to fix this. I'm going to hold out hope that we'll take it.
I wonder, is there an appetite left to remain a democracy, or more like an appetite for an autocrat who pays a little more attention to the façade and doesn't go out of his way to offend even his most loyal followers?
1 reply →
Sometimes you have to die to get back stronger. Ask the chinese.
> always be on very very good terms with leadership
Not a guarantee either.. just a hope
We can go even further: One hallmark of fascist regimes is selective enforcement. They start with making laws and rules so opaque and convoluted that pretty much anyone will break them at one point. But they will be extremely selective on when they enforce them, and who they go after.
EDIT: But, as someone will probably point out, convoluted laws / bureaucracy does obviously not automatically mean fascism or corruption. Lots of weird laws are there to cover all sorts of edge cases.
Not sure if it matters, but that is at least not true for nazi-style fascism. In there, they had a very strong rule of law for most people. But, there was a dual, a parallel system where there was no law at all, it operated outside of the legal system. You could win a trial and be exhonorated, only to be taken away by the gestapo at the door of the courtroom.
It was important for the nazis to keep businesses running, and have most people continue their lives without noticing major changes. Most people would not come into contact with the second system, and barely knew it existed. But if you entered the second system, you often would not come out alive.
This way, they could transit into an authoritarian system without hurting the economy. They knew this and planned it, and it turned out to be correct.
If you can be whisked off to a separate system where you don't have legal rights, you by definition don't have rule of law. Literally the singular, most core principle of the concept is that all persons are equal under the law, whether they are royalty or Jewish. "Strong rule of law for most people" is an inherently contradictory phrase.
3 replies →
The US is trending towards a Russian style oligarchy and these latest moves are just one of a wider pattern of trying to suppress academia, freedom of speech, personal freedoms.
> The US is trending towards a Russian style oligarchy
There's a step after that. There's an article in the current Economist about how the Russian oligarchs are being crushed by Putin's cronies and losing their assets.
> The US is a Russian style oligarchy
FTFY. From the outside, people can easily see it.
Even Russian people?
Anyway, I wonder what comes after the USAA.
4 replies →
This is also very foreseeable for an administrative state, and this slippery slope has been predicted for over a century. Rule by administrators (or bureaucrats) is just as opaque/unaccountable/corrupt, and as the extent of their power grew, it was inevitable that the political leadership would exploit the power (as has already happened many times before). It seems like nobody (at least on the liberal end of the spectrum) really cared about the arbitrary use of power when it was mostly left-liberals making the choices.
The way to fix this is to reduce the power of the administrative state, not to just complain about Trump, but I have little hope of a real solution.
Where do you imagine the power goes when you've taken it away from "the administrative state"?
I can totally understand an argument that says a certain administrative function was not working well and needed to be fixed. But if you're just suggesting destroying these institutions, what fills that power vacuum other than the far worse situation we're seeing unfolding now?
> Where do you imagine the power goes when you've taken it away from "the administrative state"?
Congress. The courts have clumsily dismantled the administrative state. But there are more options than an unchecked executive and unaccountable unelecteds.
2 replies →
> Rule by administrators (or bureaucrats) is just as opaque/unaccountable/corrupt
I don't agree. The division of power is most likely preferable. Otherwise the politician also become the beurocrat but way more arbitrary.
When the administrators/bureaucrats (whatever your preferred terms are) have very limited and defined powers, I agree they are different. When the administrative powers become wide-sweeping and ill-defined, the powers are difficult to differentiate from those of the politicians.
2 replies →
The current path is replacing bureaucratic power with unchecked executive power which is the opposite of what you want. Bureaucrats who must follow the rule of law is what you want.
>Bureaucrats who must follow the rule of law is what you want.
Under Chevron we had the opposite of that: bureaucrats who had ridiculously wide latitude to make their own rules.
What we actually need is for congress to take back control instead of passing all power and authority to the executive branch.
8 replies →
Going for whataboutism in the same week trump establishes a $2B find to pay off his cronies and tries to permanently exempt himself from taxes is laughable.
My points are not whataboutism; I’m saying this was predictable, forecast, and inevitable. Whataboutism focuses on tangential (or unrelated) things.
NCI and NSF recipients getting a taste of what EPA, DEA and ATF was doing to the plebs all along with random "interpretations" and bad-faith presentations of them to judge and jury. Maybe that whole "the academics and bureaucrats are so smart we totally need to cede power from congress to the executive" wasn't such a bright idea after all.
Of course, it's totally lost on the academic-bureaucratic class that the anti-intellectuals wouldn't hesitate to cut off their nose to spite their face by electing a president that would turn around and surprise pikachu the academics with the very machine they had helped build. Now that academics are losing their grips within the bureaucratic apparatus, suddenly they are deciding to rethink their strategy -- but it's not a coming to Jesus moment, but rather just a reactionary response.
Right! Naturally, our Congress is full of technical and administrative expertise and totally has the time, patience, and will to cleanly and carefully craft the wide body of regulation we've grown to require for a smooth and healthy and productive society. No reason for those awful technocrats to usurp such authority when we've got a capable and knowledgable legislative branch capable of doing the work just as well.
24 replies →
>This is a very common thing for corrupt governments.
Seriously, is there any other kind?