This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
The United States was not meant to be a "democracy." Benjamin Franklin famously described the government created by the Constitutional Convention as "A republic, if you can keep it."
While there were certainly people in the founding generation who saw a place for a heavy democratic element in the United States, such as Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, I think it is fair to say that most educated gentlemen around the time of the founding were steeped in a tradition going back to Aristotle and Plato where "democracy" was the term for a bad form of government by the many.
Despite Alexander Hamilton advocating for the current Constitution, his original hours-long presentation to the Congress had a much stronger executive, and Hamilton famously told Jefferson, "The greatest man who ever lived was Julius Caesar." There's many ways to interpret this statement, but I think it is obvious that Hamilton hadn't completely shaken off the monarchical thinking of an Englishman, and wanted a strong central authority as the best guarantee of liberty for the people.
Federalist Paper 51, written by Madison, describes how the checks and balances of the United States republic are meant to function. The whole letter is worth a read, but I will focus on one part:
(Emphasis mine.)
Schlessinger's The Imperial Presidency, and Higgs' Crisis and Leviathan both document how this vision failed from different angles. Schlessinger examines the history of the growth of executive power, and the various techniques presidents used to get their way - from operating secret naval wars without congressional approval and oversight, to the use of impoundment to appropriate funds earmarked by congress (which was eventually eliminated after the Nixon presidency, due to his perceived abuse of the power.) Higgs looks at the way that crises created opportunities for the federal government to seize ever greater power, and while it is not limited to the growth in presidential power, it is impossible to ignore all of the emergency powers Congress ceded to the President across the constant cycle of crises.
Higgs was writing in 1987, and Schlessinger in 1973, and the trends they described have only continued.
And so we come to the present day, where Donald Trump became President on January 20th, and began what some are calling an "autocoup." On a diverse forum like this one, I am sure that there are at least a few monarchists that would be thrilled if that was true. I'm sure I can't convince them that an autocoup would be a bad thing, if that is, in fact, what is happening. But for the classical liberals, libertarians, conservatives and centrist institutionalists, I want to make the case that the way things happen matters as much as what is actually happening.
Some are defending actions like Elon Musk's DOGE dismantling the Department of Education without any apparent legal backing, by saying that this is what Trump supporters voted for.
But this simply isn't true. Or more accurately, that's not how this works.
I repeat: America is not a "democracy." America is a republic with checks and balances and a rule of law.
To the extent that we have democratic elements in our republic, then I certainly think that Trump and his supporters should be able to do what they were elected to do. If they want to pass an actual law that gets rid of USAID or the Department of Education, then let them do it. If they want to pass a law to rename The United States Digital Service, and give it unlimited power to control federal funding, then they should pass a law to do so. And if they can't get the Congress they voted in to make it happen, too bad, that is how a Republic works. The same applies if federal judges or the supreme court strike down a law or action as unconstitutional. One person doesn't just get the power to do whatever they want, without any oversight or pushback from the legislative or judicial branches.
I think the United States seems to be heading for a form of democratic tyranny, with few checks and balances. I don't know if there has actually been an "autocoup", but I do think there are shades of it in what has been happening the last few weeks, and I think any lover of American liberty and prosperity should be a little bit worried as well, even if they like the effects of a lot of these unilateral actions by the Executive.
EDIT: Typos.
Ive never seen a good explanation for how separation of powers is supposed to do anything. The ones given by people at the time, and often still repeated today, are basically that one guy cant just do whatever he wants if he cant have all the powers, and this is essentially bypassed by the existence of parties. We even talk about one party controlling all three branches of government explicitly. Now, the way these branches are appointed is not exactly the same, and that has some effects - not any 50% of people can steamroll everyone, and theres inertia.
But those could easily be replicated just within a legislature by changing how they are elected, how long the terms are, and what the quorum is. This last one is especially important - there are very good reasons why quora higher than 50%+1 are rarely used, and are always much less powerful in reality than on paper. This perhaps explains what we are seeing now. The whole separation of powers business just seems to me like what youd think if youd only seen monarchies.
More options
Context Copy link
You shouldn't need to pass a law to get rid of USAID; USAID was established by an executive order pursuant to the Foreign Assistance Act. I don't see any reason why executive orders cannot eliminate USAID and replace it with, let's say, USHELP as long as the Foreign Assistance Act was being carried out.
I agree about the US Department of Education (which was established by law) but I do think it's within the purview of the President to reorganize it.
The US Digital Service is part of the Executive Office of the President it seems very silly to suggest Congress needs an act to rename it. I don't think they have any real authority or say over what the EOP structures itself.
Well, yes – I agree with this. Now, I don't think, from what I can tell, anything that's happened is atypically illegal or tyrannical, and the GOP majority is so thin that I don't think a danger of democratic tyranny will emerge unless he governs so well that he gains a supermandate (in which case will he really need tyranny?) In fact, some of the things that have been done, such as the temporary funding freeze, I honestly think perhaps every administration should consider. But with all that being said I think there is always danger of a backlash going too far. On the preference of "my rules, enforced fairly, my rules, enforced unfairly, your rules enforced fairly, your rules, enforced unfairly" people often prefer them in that order, but under a representative government with a rule of law the idea that the rules are enforced fairly is explicitly more important than whose rules are at play.
However, if your rivals have been enforcing their rules without regards for fairness, good things can actually come of returning the favor and enforcing your rules with no regard for fairness. This can remind people why fairness is important. But it is hard to tell when a retaliatory defection is returning everyone to a default cooperate mode or setting off another round of tit-for-tat.
I think there are also some interesting higher-level considerations about whether it is possible to prefer "fairness of enforcement" over "whose rules" when a society is not morally and culturally homogenous enough to actually agree on most rules. The Civil War happened in part precisely because the extremes on both sides explicitly decided that ensuring their rules were enforced was more important than the fairness of enforcement, because following the rules of the other side was a travesty. And most people today agree with them: slavery was so grievous that it was worth bending or breaking the rules to be rid of it. If this is true, it is worth considering whether it is possible to put fairness of enforcement over outcome in a sufficiently divided society. (In fact interestingly DEI is explicit about prioritizing outcomes over the process but that's a whole other can of worms...)
TLDR: yes, people should (always, and not just under this administration) be vigilant about their liberty and concerned about the powers of the state. But people should also consider, if they want those powers to shrink, how to best engage with a potential tit-for-tat spiral to ensure that it resolves into cooperation instead of an open-ended tit-for-tat. Finally, people should perhaps be honest with themselves about whether or not they want to cooperate (as opposed to be willing to win or lose a tit-for-tat spiral) and under what conditions.
More options
Context Copy link
I would have guessed the Covid Hysteria would have been when you were worried about "democratic tyranny, with few checks and balances" given the rule of law was thrown out the door, judges refused to do anything to help, and tens of millions of people were seriously harmed. Were you opposed to and outspoken against those vast power expansions and legal, constitutional, and civil rights violations?
The "rule of law" and "checks and balances" thing is all an illusion (or at least a poor description); the actual check and balance is power. The way you get back to a détente where the "rule of law" and checks and balances illusion looks like the real thing is you have the ability to harm and punish the political opposition who would do otherwise.
Free speech, rights, etc., only exist as long as the people who want them have enough power. When they don't have power, they are ran over irrelevant of whatever law or constitution or anything else.
I've written a little bit on my views on the Covid response here.
Sometimes, I view it rather differently: A society allowing free speech is often a sign of the ruling coalition's power, and the weakness of its citizens.
China needs to control speech because they are weak. The speech of their people actually poses a threat to them.
The United States doesn't usually need to control speech because the ruling coalition is strong. The speech of its people poses no threat to its overall stability.
COINTELPRO is the kind of thing that happens in the US when a group poses an actual threat to the United States, and has moved from words to actions.
Agreed, the regime even in totalitarian system doesn't care about the free speech of the raving guy on the street corner. But where does that leave us with respect to "the rule of law" for any group which participates in the political system at all?
The US currently, right now, engages in vast violation of the 1st Amendment rights and "free speech" rights of its citizens. The Biden Administration saw a vast complex of both government and government financed NGOs which worked diligently through carrots and sticks to coerce social media companies to engage in vast censorship of American citizens, including financing overseas NGOs to lobby governments to ban and threaten those social media companies. There are dozens of lawsuits showing this to be the case. There were group chats within these companies of "former" intelligence officials who were coordinating with their government colleagues to direct and enforce this censorship.
Sure, you can show how pretty much all actions and statements by the government during the covid response were bullshit, but then you'll lose your bank account, you will be banned from government grants (thus making you unemployable in academia), you'll be banned from social media companies, and you'll be banned from payment processors, and any licensing boards you're apart of, e.g., lawyers and doctors, will attack your ability to practice your profession. So as long as you don't care to have any job with any power or influence, you had "free speech" off the internet but also you couldn't go to public places because no one was there and businesses and social gatherings were banned. We don't have to go back to the 1960s to see what the US Government does to attack dissidents and violate free speech; we have rampant examples in the last few years.
"Checks and balances" is an illusion. The separation of power between various factions of government requires them to have actual power and also requires them to not be the same people, but in the modern era they are the same people and a part of the same faction. The "rule of law" is an illusion, it only looks that way because victims of the violations have power. When they don't have power, the law is no hurdle. One faction punishing the other faction for its wanton violation and weaponization is necessary if you want to get back to a détente which can be inaccurately described as "rule of law."
You say "social pressure" is enough, but that social pressure is currently manufactured through this vast web of government money and overreach. Its power is just as serious as the beatings on the street, except it's more deniable. Spread out, faceless total state is worse than a system with an actual knowable and identifiable sovereign. "Social pressure" is used, just like during the Covid Hysteria, to create a minority small enough and powerless enough so that more explicit use of power can be brought to bare to force the dissidents to conform and then that will be attempted.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This is just such an insane understanding of the current state. You are complaining about a lack of checks and balances. Fine. Understand that for the last fifty years the administrative state has run amok with functionally no checks. No balances. They fund their own activists and media to make sure they get what they want.
So now we have an executive cutting down that bureaucratic state — an energetic executive trying to eliminate the unelected unaccountable and unconstitutional fourth branch. Yet you are upset about it from a checks and balances? No you need to kill the admin state in order for congress and the presidency to actually have power and therefor effort there to be actual checks.
Can you give a specific example of this you think is representative? I think there are a lot of possible criticisms of government bureaucracy, but they are very 'checked' by congress and the courts. Courts limit or grant power to agencies all the time, and Congress for the most part creates them and grants them any of the power they have. Agencies can't do most things they want to do, and they have to work within the complicated game the courts and legislature and president present them. That's the checks and balances doing their thing. The output is obviously not ideal, but 'bad outcome' doesn't mean 'no checks or balances'!
Scalia's dissent in Morrison v. Olson pretty much warns against this, but that's just a blatantly obvious example. The (over)expansion of bureaucracy generally is, by it's nature, mundane and hard to observe.
More options
Context Copy link
Yes. In 1963 a federal administrative agency blew the President’s head off with a rifle because he wasn’t sufficiently cooperating with their policy goals. Then the surviving parts of the executive branch, the other federal administrative agencies and the Supreme Court helped cover it up because they were scared, bribed or compromised with blackmail. The legislative branch tried a milktoast subcommittee investigation fifteen years later that didn’t go anywhere because all the evidence had already been cleaned up by the time they got around to investigating. That doesn’t sound like checks and balances to me.
Presumably given that Trump just declassified all the JFK files, we're going get definitive proof for or against this claim in the coming months.
I highly doubt Alan Dulles was stupid enough to put anything damning down on paper.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Well, USAID is a prime example. They funnel billions to pet projects clearly unrelated to their purpose with nary a peep. Indeed, it seems like they used these programs to help maintain control Over the narrative and therefore Congress. Another concrete example is the Hunter laptop story and the IC integrating itself at Twitter / Facebook etc. read the Twitter files. Infamously, Chuck Schumer stated that you don’t try to correct the intelligence community because they have six ways to Sunday to fuck you over.
More broadly, look at Chevron. It was a judicial theory that said “if the statute is ambiguous, then we defer to the agency’s interpretation of the law provided it is reasonable.” In practice, this meant if there was a hint of ambiguity the courts would defer to agency action.
But the rabbit hole goes even further as you had Auer deference. Auer deference is the idea that if an agency’s regulations are ambiguous then you defer to the agency’s interpretation of its own actions provided it wasn’t just a litigation position. So the very basic guardrails of the APA need not be respected because the agency can outside the APA turn ambiguous legislation into law.
And even the APA is pretty toothless. The standard for overturning agency action is arbitrary and capricious— a very high bar.
Of course the SCOTUS has been reducing the scope of agency power in recent years (eg major questions doctrine, Loper Bright, Kisor) but that’s changing the deck after 40+ years of largely unchecked power. Trump now is going after their narrative control.
What? This is completely implausible. I genuinely don't understand how one could believe this on any level other than 'someone on twitter said it'. So much money and energy is put into political ads, political entertainment, and such that what USAID is doing domestically is not relevant. It's absolutely true that USAID does a lot of media in foreign countries, and it's not necessarily untrue to describe it as propaganda aimed at foreign countries. But not the united states!
It could be reasonable to describe this as 'giving agencies too much power. It's just not a lack of checks and balances though. Courts still often blocked agency actions, and agencies still couldn't do most of the things they wanted to. Like, I think you're making a good argument for 'agencies had too much power', but that's literally a different thing from 'functionally no checks. No balances'. They have, like, 50% too little checks and balances.
Re the first point it wasn’t just USAID but the amount of money the Biden admin shoveled towards US media was not insignificant. For example I think Politico received about 5% of its revenue from the US government. Are you telling me that can’t buy positive coverage or at least limit negative coverage?
Re Chevron the amount of cases where the court found the statute unambiguous or the agency interpretation unreasonable was tiny. In effect, there was no check.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Interstate commerce regulations are a big problem. Basically, Congress was given the power to regulate “interstate commerce”, which by now has been stretched by the administrative state to mean “anything a person can conceive of offering for sale, even if it never crosses sate lines, and even if nobody actually buys or sells it.” This redefinition of “interstate commerce” is the reason for most of the overreaching by the AS, because it allowed them to basically regulate all commerce anywhere. Which is why we have things like regulations on the kinds of toilets you can install in your house, or tge kinds of materials that can be used in mattresses. You name it, there’s a regulation for it, and most of it traces back to an insane court ruling that allowed the government to tax wheat grown on private property, and not only had no intention of selling it across state lines, but had no intention to sell it at all.
I think that's a great example of aggressive reinterpretation of the constitution effectively changing the meaning. To some extent I think that - constitutional statesmanship, legal realism - is a good thing - I don't think the country would be better without the interstate commerce hack, I like that I can buy food in Alabama and know it's bound by federal regulations. (The alternative isn't no regulation, it's just having individual states set all regulations, I odn't think that's necessarily better).
I don't think that's a good example of a 'lack of checks and balances' for 'the administrative state'. It's an example of a negotiation between different centers of power, where the judiciary grants somewhat more power to the legislature at the expense of the states. The legislature has selectively granted a small amount of that power to the administrative state.
Individual states would have laws about things that only are made, bought, and sold within that state. So if I own a restaurant with locations only in Alabama, using ingredients sourced in Alabama, then nothing about the situation would be subject to interstate commerce laws. That’s the world of the original intent of the laws. And a huge benefit is that such a thing offers protection to small businesses as any large conglomerates would be subject to a lot of federal laws that a small local business isn’t. It would allow local restaurants to compete against the chain restaurants by giving them enough of a break that they can stay in business because they don’t have as high of a cost to own or run a business.
The problem is that the definition of “interstate” has been stretched beyond all reasonable definitions. There’s no way that a person living in the United States even today would come to the conclusion that wheat grown on your personal property with no intention of selling it has anything to do with interstate commerce, heck, there’s not even a cause to call it commerce— nothing is being sold. There’s a case perhaps if you sell to someone else who has the intent of reselling across state lines that anything sold to such a reseller could be covered under interstate commerce laws, but things that don’t enter or leave the state are not interstate.
Yeah, and I think this is substantively, object-level worse than the current system. I want to go to a restaurant in Florida without thinking about Florida food safety laws. For someone who lives in a smaller state, I want EPA regulations to apply to economic activity in neighboring states, because I ultimately share their air and water. In general it's sometimes easier to notice examples of regulatory overreach and don't notice all the skulls that regulations exist to patch up.
Right but it'd give them breaks on things like 'the food not having parasites and bacterial overgrowth' and pesticide use. I don't want that!
... Also as many of the regulations stifling local businesses are state-level or local as are federal, so I'm not sure this'd help in the long run.
Yeah, it's an example of 'constitutional statesmanship'. The law says one thing, but it's just quite a lot better for the outcome to be the other thing, and this law's in the constitution so nobody else can change it - so let's just do the other thing. It shouldn't happen often, but it should sometimes! I mean, the decision giving SCOTUS the power to invalidate laws was itself an example of statesmanship, it's not really in the constitution either.
I’m not American and I’m pretty against having a constitution for various reasons, but surely this is what a constitution is meant to be for? To be prevent people saying ‘well, the constitution says we can’t do X and we can’t persuade a supermajority of people otherwise, but I think it would be better if we did so let’s do it anyway”.
It's just that it's not absolute! Having a constitutions moves you most of the way from 'the sovereign does whatever it wants' to 'you must strictly follow this document'. Just not all.
(I'm not claiming that the above is the way most lawyers or legal scholars would phrase it, although the article I linked was from a very good legal writer who also actively works on appellate and supreme court cases)
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Just off the top of my head: was anyone in the IRS ever punished for going after conservative NGOs?
I think the Trump admin settled the cases for cash, but I'm not aware of anything else. But, like, that's a specific example of overreach. I think agencies that truly had 'functionally no checks' would be able to get away with a lot more than that.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I have already said words to the effect that I am fine with dismantling the administrative state, if that is what voters want Trump and Congress to do. I am less convinced than you are that Trump couldn't have done this the "right way" with actual laws. Sure, a few Republican lawmakers defecting would scupper his plans, but if they did, that too would be an important check in our system working as intended.
Trump has the bully pulpit. Trump claims he has a mandate. Let him actually do the work of getting the laws he wants passed.
This is a better path for one big reason: If Trump accomplishes his dismantling of the administrative state via EOs, that will mean that if Democrats ever get the presidency again they can just bring the administrative state back even if it will take some doing. This is all assuming we actually have a republic where Democrats could actually get back into power again, of course.
I would argue there is a constitutional requirement for Trump to destroy the current iteration of the admin state under the take care clause. Also if he waits to do it through legislation first nothing will happen. He needs to expose in full the fraud and abuse while showing the programs do shit to give republicans cover to gut a decent chunk of it. I will be disappointed if laws ultimately don’t come down but I see this as step one; not step one of one.
More options
Context Copy link
Respectfully, are you an administrative lawyer? How familiar are you with the Administrative Procedures Act and the dozens of legislative and executive actions which together, in concert, have intertwined to create the tangled mess that is the current administrative state? How familiar are you with the history of the legislative veto and INS v. Chadha?
It's not reducible to schoolhouse rock-tier "you need congress to pass a law," and you shouldn't minimize the legal and bureaucratic infighting that's taking place.
Isn't it? Trump, 50 R senators, and a R majority of the House could pretty much immediately nuke the filibuster and repeal/revoke all of that. They're not going to, and that's, depending on your perspective, the checks and balances working, or the checks and balances failing, but they could.
They don't have to, and shouldn't have to just because people don't actually understand the state of the law and the left is willing to strategically misrepresent and/or lie about it when it suits their purposes (for the record the right isn't much, if at all, better). Significant powers have already been delegated to the President, or arguably unlawfully usurped from its constitutional power as commander in chief (e.g. protection from at-will removal).
I don't think this is true! All of Elon's biggest recent moves directly go against the Impoundment Control Act, an act that passed both houses by huge margins, to prevent exactly defunding parts of the government directly authorized by congress.
More options
Context Copy link
This is silly. If you pass a law that is misrepresented or misapplied by the courts then you absolutely should have Congress pass a law that unambiguously makes that misrepresentation impossible.
There is no such thing as "unambiguously makes that misrepresentation impossible." The Civil Rights Act of 1965 was passed with the direct, spoken intent of not permitting such things as ethnic quotas or racially-preferential hiring/"affirmative action." It got perverted into, depending on who's doing the enforcing, either outright requiring or just permitting such actions anyway.
I think you didn’t understand or I didn’t clarify the word “that” in there.
It is not possible to unambiguously make all misrepresentations impossible in advance. But once you know of a specific singular and defined misrepresentation, it is quite easy to pass a statutory fix that makes just that specific one no longer possible.
As I said, it’s an iterative game. Except one side loses interest after a few rounds
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Their power to misinterpret is greater than your power to wordsmith; you cannot write something that cannot be misrepresented by a sufficiently hostile actor.
It’s an iterative game! You win because you always have the right of immediate response whereas the opponent has to go back to the district court and start over.
Meanwhile each misrepresentation because more and more fantastical along the way.
This is literally Congress’ primary job!
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I feel like the administrative state is like Planet Fitness. It's easy to sign up for but impossible to cancel.
We should make it just as easy to get rid of as it was to implement in the first place. We voted for the Department of Education so that children would have better outcomes. But this hasn't happened. In fact, since the DOE was founded, our international rankings have tumbled.
Congress never voted for "Let's hire a bunch of workers with no accountability whatsoever and, once they are hired, they can never be fired for any reason whatsoever".
The President is in charge of the executive branch. He is empowered to enforce the laws passed by congress which clearly means firing workers for incompetence and dereliction of duty.
I think the president has a constitutional duty to ensure the laws are being properly enforced by the admin state and therefore any law that limits his ability to provide oversight infringes on a core constitutional power of the president. I have wholly bought into the Scalia dissent in Morrison.
More options
Context Copy link
The original Civil Service Reform Act was passed by enormous margins
The most recent one passed by even larger margins
While on one hand today's GOP can only dream of such majorities in wiping it away, they really don't need much more than 50% + 1. Given that remove employees fixes the deficit, they can even use reconciliation to skip the filibuster.
Thanks. This is kinda nuts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Service_Reform_Act_of_1978
Chalk one up for mistake theory I suppose. This act was supposed to do the very opposite of what it did.
It's mindboggling going back 50 years and seeing what a high-trust society really looks like. Back then Carter could propose a law that said "oh sure we're going to make the government accountable and efficient" and everyone just assumed that it would happen. Because, um, that's what the law says.
No one understood "who, whom" back then. They all just thought "We're all on the same team guys. I'm sure the government workers won't just rob us blind. After all, they love their country too."
Like many awful things, this was there to solve a different awful problem, and now that the original problem is gone we don't even realize it.
Prior to 1892, administrations routinely gave out the vast majority of federal commissions as graft. It was a giant crony network robbing the country blind. Hiring by merit and removing firing except for-cause was, believe it or not, a step forwards at the time.
Of course, in the end you can't destroy a power you can only shift it around the plate. And so instead of being robbed by nepotistic machine politicians, we empowered the civil service. And then the civil service turned around and robbed us blind.
You can only destroy a monster by summoning another monster.
If Final Fantasy X has taught me anything, you can destroy a monster without doing that. But you do have to kill God to do it.
But we did that 140 years ago. Nothing else should stand in our way.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The Federalist Papers never conceived of an imperial executive because they never conceived of an imperial state. The Federal government was always intended to be small, with most real governance done by the states. And until 1941, with the exception of the Civil War, this is exactly what it was.
In 1913, the federal budget was only about 2-3% of GDP. It was funded almost entirely by tariffs.
Today, the federal budget is about 25% of GDP, funded mostly by taxes of individuals. The federal government touches every aspect of our lives, and its bounds exceed anything the founders could have conceived. If this is to be the case, it is better to be governed by democratically-elected representatives than by an unelected elite.
The founders never intended America to be ruled by unelected judges and bureaucrats. To restore their vision, it is imperative that we shrink the size of the state as much as possible. But as this directly takes money out of the mouths of very powerful and corrupt people, it will not be easy.
That made me go "wait, is that even right?", but you're right:
2023 yearly GDP was 27.36 trillion dollars
2023 US federal spending is almost 6.2 trillion dollars
So a bit less than a quarter.
I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised, since I pay federal taxes and they're on the order of 25%, too. Mental model of the world updated. Thanks.
More options
Context Copy link
Kind of kicks it down the road dunnit? Did they expect the States (doing most of the governments) to be dominated by state legislatures or state executives?
One could think of the check on states as the faction response in Federalist #10. Sure one state could be dominated by an executive and another by the legislature. But if one outperforms the other people will move to that other state. That is, competition between states ought to lead to good outcomes.
Of course this presupposes easy population movement which is somewhat sticky in practice.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Historically, the check on monarchs' power was the need to convene parliament to raise new taxes. Now, the president must convene congress to beg permission to spend less money. Is it tyrannical for the executive branch to not spend money raised by congress? Is president Trump ushering in a Daoist dictatorship through unilateral inaction?
Yes. If parliament or congress identifies an area of interest and specific actions, including dictating funds to execute those actions, the executive must see that the law is faithfully executed.
Trump has a friendly Congress -- he doesn't need to impound anything, he can just have his fellow party members remove those appropriations. This whole thing is the most absurd kayfabe.
Congress says spend X dollars to achieve Y. USAID spends X dollars to achieve Z. Trump would faithfully be executing the laws to impound the spending by USAID since they conflict with Congressional commands.
Yes, under that fact pattern they would have to stop Z.
Then they would have to do Y.
Yes so let’s get upset if in the future they don’t do Y. Not upset they are stopping Z
I think it's natural to be suspicious when someone talks about dissolving or defunding the agency whose job it would be to do Y. That ought to be sufficient to cause a reasonable person doubt that they intend to fully spend all the funds that Congress appropriated for Y on Y.
Except they said there are some good things and Rubio is going to tackle it
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Where was all this complaining about the forms of the Republic when Obama was using his phone and pen, or everyone from Johnson to Biden was implementing DEI by executive order?
No, the Democrats have knocked every check and balance in the nation flat in their attempt to purge Republicans from power, and now the Republicans have turned tail on them. It's too late to call upon institutional integrity now.
The Imperial Presidency is a bipartisan creation more than a hundred years old, not something created in 2008. Of course, point out all of the abuses of power by Democratic presidents - they're an important part of the story. But don't ignore the way Bush Jr. used signing statements to attempt line item vetos, or Reagan's actions in the Iran-Contra affair, or Nixon's abuse of the impoundment power, or if you want to reach back to the Civil War, all of the things Lincoln did that were clearly unconstitutional.
While I would characterize myself as broadly left-of-center, I still have a strong libertarian strain, and I've become increasingly convinced of the importance of Federalism over the last few years as I've turned more of my attention towards Renaissance and Classical political theory. I'm happy to condemn abuses of power whether they're Democratic or Republican, since I increasingly see myself as not being at home with either of them, even if I have my preferences.
I was mostly happy to nod along and agree with the far more able posters here, who condemned Biden for his abuses of the pardon power. I have no illusions that in the counterfactual world where Kamala Harris was elected president, many more able and interested critics would have taken the stage here and condemned her every abuse of power. But I would say that the forum has been strangely quiet about Trump - not that nothing has been said, but far less than I expected. And so, I felt the need to step forward and make my case, even though I know I am far less well-equipped than some of the posters here.
I'll be the first to say that the end of the American Republic doesn't have to be the end of America. Maybe we'll pull a Rome, and enjoy an empire that will last 300 years or more. (Or perhaps "Empire without end" if we believe Virgil.) I don't pretend to know. But in the moods where I was willing to put on my pragmatic hat, I actually felt like America was a largely functional society that got a number of "big questions" right. We're wealthy, powerful, and our institutions are mostly compatible with a life of flourishing, even if few people make choices that can actually result in flourishing. I was worried about some of the things Obama and Biden did, and wasn't thrilled at many of the things Kamala would likely have done, but I am genuinely worried from a little-c conservative point of view that Trump might actually kill the goose that lays the Golden Egg.
Many of Trump's actions I have no real issue with. Let him have silly symbolic victories like renaming the Gulf of America and Mt. McKinley. Of course, he should be able to use executive orders to dismantle DEI programs that were created with executive orders in the first place. But I would feel a lot better about him dismantling the Department of Education or USAID if he was doing it with Congress by his side, instead of by giving admin access to the spending system of the Treasury to a random citizen. He certainly had the votes and the momentum to create an actual DOGE and give Elon Musk power the right way.
Sorry to completely change the subject, but how is this even a consideration in the age of AI?
I do think that a lot of what Elon is doing here is informed by the desire to create the correct initial conditions at the dawn of ASI. ASI under the control of a totalitarian state would be 1984 brought to life. Thus, the need to destroy statism and increase liberty on a relatively short timeline.
We could still end up in the AI Fizzle world, even if it isn't the most likely possibility. If AI ends up being "just" another industrial revolution, and not a singularity then society will change quite a bit, but it might still bear a family resemblance to our world.
And for powerful enough ASI that we lose control of, or which is unaligned in some way, I don't see how it would make much of a difference whether we are a totalitarian state or a decentralized federation.
Presumably, the ASI doesn't have qualia. Its terminal goals are its initial prompting. So, let's say that the AI was programmed with the woke consensus of 2020. It could lead to terrifying realities such as:
Safetyism. Humans are denied any agency and forced to live life according to the goals of a 2020-era HR lady.
Leveling. Humans are denied any beauty or enlightenment beyond which the lowest human is capable of.
Racism. "Evil" humans, as defined by whiteness or maleness, are punished as a terminal goal of the AI
To be fair, these are fairly esoteric concerns. We have no idea which path AI will take us on. But, as we are potentially at an inflection point in history, I think it's important that we bend towards liberty. It's more imperative than ever that statism be destroyed to prevent worse case scenarios.
Yes, we could. But just because P(doom) < 1 doesn't mean it's not important. At the risk of engaging in Pascal's mugging, even a 1% chance of short term ASI makes it by far the most important issue we will ever face. Personally, I think the odds are closer to 50%.
I feel like your "woke consensus of 2020" ASI would be a problem regardless of whether our governments bend towards liberty or not. All that matters is whether the creators of the ASI bend towards liberty.
The ASI's goals and the governmental constitution/societal culture seem fairly orthogonal to me under most circumstances. If a lone principled libertarian with a meritocracy fetish creates the first aligned godlike ASI, then that's what we'll get, regardless of whether the rest of America started with a woke consensus of 2020 culture. The same goes for almost any combination.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
There was plenty of complaining about it. As someone who dislikes both the left and the right, I am not impressed by "the Democrats did bad thing X, so now the Republicans should also get to do bad thing X" arguments. I'd rather that nobody did bad thing X, if X is actually bad.
It's fair that you complain. But, let's be honest, 99% of the complaining is not coming from principled libertarians. It's coming from totalitarian statists who are mad that their toys are being taken away.
Suddenly, when their 300k per year no-show job is under threat, they rediscover the Federalist Papers.
I'm not a libertarian either, and I also didn't like seeing the expansion of executive powers under Obama, or much of anything that Biden did.
Mostly what I see here is arguments over who smashed the Defect button first. If we can't get back to a stable equilibrium where everyone isn't choosing Defect, then whatever America becomes, it will just be wearing labels like "Democracy" and "Republic" as skinsuits. (I'm aware some people believe this is already the case. But if you're an accelerationist who thinks we should just abandon the pretense and make Trump God-Emperor, then I'm not interested in your opinions about executive authority.) There is very little Trump can do that a succeeding Democratic administration can't undo (except perhaps fix it so there can never be another Democratic administration - is that what you are actually hoping for?), and of course, they will continue following precedent and the next Democratic president will act even more like a monarch. Everyone cheering for Trump and Musk now will be outraged - outraged! - at this abuse of power and violation of norms.
Yes, a lot of the people outraged today are hypocrites who thought it was just fine when Obama and Biden were abusing their authority. So what? Do you think it's actually bad for presidents to do this, or do you think it's only bad when it's not the president you voted for? If the former, then what do you expect to be the outcome of each president being encouraged by his supporters to expand his powers? That your party will be in power forever so it's okay?
I guess I should say here that I am very much in a "Wait and see" mood right now. As I said before the election, I don't think Trump is going to be a good president, but I'm willing to be proven wrong, and I am enjoying the leftist convulsions. However, the President can't just abrogate the powers of Congress and decide (or delegate to Elon Musk to decide) which pieces of the federal government he'd like to keep and which pieces he'd like to do away with. (And if you are saying "Yes he can!" and triumphantly quoting Andrew Jackson, well, see above. Better lube up for when the Democrats return to power. And Andrew Jackson also ran a notoriously corrupt spoils system, in which federal employment was explicitly conditioned on party loyalty and when your party lost an election, you lost your job. This obviously created undesirable incentives, and led to the civil service reforms some are so eager to dismantle.)
On a slightly more pedantic point, I see a lot of people talking about "$300K laptop jobs." No government worker makes $300K - even the top of the SES pay scale is capped at around $250K, and the GS workers (with or without laptops) are making far less. If you mean NGO workers, maybe some of their executives make that much, but the peons who are mostly the ones losing their jobs don't. Lobbyists, lawyers, and contractors, though? Sure, and oddly enough, I don't see many of them losing their jobs yet.
No there is a difference in kind. DACA is an example of the imperial presidency. There is clear law on the matter. Obama created a new system diametrically opposed to the law.
In contrast, Trump is trying to rein in the unaccountable bureaucracy in a way that can square with congressional delegates (see my above comment to anon_).
That is, just because Trump and Obama both aggressively used the power of the president doesn’t mean they are the same thing. There are important differences that make them different in kind. So your analysis rests on a faulty assumption that the actions are similar.
I agree with you about DACA. I do not agree that what Trump is doing is different in kind, or "a return to norms." I think you just like what Trump is doing and disliked what Democrats did.
What do you think is his limiting principle? If granted success in unilaterally abrogating the power of Congress and the Supreme Court, do you think he will refrain at any point from doing other things he wants on Constitutional grounds?
I don’t fuck with pointless hypos—yes if Trump had all of the power he would probably use it. Few men wouldn’t.
But explain how you think curtailing the power of the admin state is akin to DACA.
Exactly, which is why we should enforce the constraints that are supposed to prevent him from doing that.
There are a lot of things that fall under the category of "curtailing the power of the admin state." Some of them are legal, and are even things I would agree with. Some of them aren't. The President can't just dissolve agencies that were created by law, or redirect or deny funding that was appropriated by Congress. Ending birthright citizenship is another example - even if you think birthright citizenship should be abolished, that requires a Constitutional amendment, not just the President saying so. DACA was the President making new law with his pen, which he's not supposed to do. It's directly equivalent to a lot of the things Trump is doing now.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
And Trump tried to repeal it, and was told by the judges that he'd have to go through the proper administrative procedures to do so -- even though it was not created through those procedures. A check isn't a balance if it's a check on one side only.
That was one of the most absurd rulings — sure it might be illegal but the president saying he won’t enact a program because he think it’s illegal is not sufficient to stop a purely EO.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I feel I should point out that there's a middle-ground here: specifically, "fix it so that SJ is a political non-starter" such that there might be another Democratic administration but it wouldn't get there without abandoning SJ (and then wouldn't want to roll all of it back).
The most obvious, rapid and permanent way to do that ("start WWIII, laugh as the Blue Tribe burns"), I'm decidedly against, at least assuming there's no proper reason for one. The subtler methods I'm less sure about; dismantling the SJ lock on academia-as-gatekeeper-of-the-middle-class I'm fervently in support of, while extreme measures like e.g. bringing back sodomy laws and stripping the vote from those that break them I'd oppose.
Do you really think "SJ" is the biggest problem? Are you putting every single disagreement about how society should operate under that umbrella? Trans issues and DEI make the most noise in politics today, but I really do not think they are actually the biggest problems facing the country, and while 90% of discussion on this forum is about culture war issues, it is, as always, the economy, stupid. (A quote- not actually calling you stupid.) We're trillions of dollars in debt, facing major issues from cans that have been kicked down the road for decades, we've got China and Russia and maybe WWIII, and AI that may or may not be civilization-threatening issues on the horizon - all of these things, IMO, are more important than the "SJ" stuff we like to argue so much about here.
I'll also note that several people replied to me saying, basically, "You're ridiculous for suggesting two sides compromise and work together, that just means one side unilaterally disarms (because the other side is evil)." But when you say "make SJ a political non-starter" - as much as I personally think most SJ stuff is a distraction, it's a major plank for Democrats, so you're just saying they should unilaterally disarm (i.e. abandon all the things they stand for). Sure, it's nice to dream your opponents will abandon all the goals you don't like and focus on the things you care about.
Among your solutions, I agree (obviously) that WWIII (or American Civil War II) would be bad. Likewise a reTVrn to sodomy laws (and repealing the 19th Amendment, and expelling the Jews Edward I-style, etc.) Dismantling the "SJ lock" on academia I'd be in favor of, which is why (I whisper so my friends in academia don't hear me) I'm not entirely against abolishing the DOE, though I'm not sure the bull-in-chinashop way Trump and Musk are going about it is legitimate (or legal). But I really don't think breaking woke hegemony in academia, even if it can accomplished, is our biggest issue. It just makes lots of Red Tribers cheer and forget about the more pressing economic issues that affect them more.
Not disagreeing (I'm on record as saying I'd vote for our SJ party if they had word one about civil defence), but SJ (and the reaction to it) seems to be what's driving the polarisation, which is AFAICT what you were discussing.
I'm not making any demands. I'm pointing out that there are levers Trump/Vance 2028/the Republicans have access to that might alter political demographics* such that it's impossible (or at least vastly more difficult) to assemble a winning coalition while holding to SJ, and thus such that the Democratic Party will have to either jettison SJ or keep losing (and of course I defend their right to pick either), which is a third option omitted by your previously-proposed dilemma of "either set up a one-party state or get everything rolled back later". I agree with pulling some of those levers (the academia one is particularly justified, IMO, as this seems more like "undoing creepy enemy social engineering" than like "doing creepy social engineering in its own right", and the lever Elon Musk already pulled of "buy and uncensor Twitter" seems to have gone pretty well) and not with pulling others, but either way I have essentially no input into which ones the Republicans including Trump do and do not pull.
*To quote B5, "I'll tell you something, my friends, the world is changing every day. The only question is, who's doing it?"; people do change their minds, people do get born or immigrate and start voting, people do die or emigrate and stop voting, and the state of the public square and the education system and the immigration system affect all of those.
More options
Context Copy link
It's certainly extremely pervasive. And by instituting political tests for various positions (such as university faculty, lawyers, doctors) it is a major long term problem. Maybe not the biggest, but very big.
if the Republicans had the re-institution of Jim Crow as a platform plank, would you not insist they abandon it?
I can't insist they do anything, but it would make me even less likely to vote Republican. Do you think everything that can be categorized under the umbrella of "SJ" is equivalent to reinstituting Jim Crow laws? The way people use SJ here seems to refer to liberalism, writ large. "Criminalize leftism" is literally a position I know at least one poster explicitly advocates (and many others clearly would endorse) but it's dumb to suggest that liberals would seriously consider this proposal. A more appropriate analogy would be me "insisting" the Republicans abandon social conservatism. As a liberal I might like that, but it's dumb to think it's a serious proposition.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Yes, it's bad when presidents abuse their authority and Congress is dysfunctional and supine. But it is worse when abuses of authority are only ever policed in one direction and thus policy only ever moves as a one-way ratchet. That dynamic is far more unhealthy than the underlying abuse itself because it cuts at the popular legitimacy of the democratic process entirely, and also leads to degradation of the quality of the party in power (see California, Illinois, NY, etc.).
More options
Context Copy link
I agree with most of what you said but I just want to correct the record and say that plenty of NGO officers make 300k or more much.
More options
Context Copy link
If you can ask "so what?" when it comes to Bush and Obama, why can't you do it regarding Trump?
Anyway, forget the talk about hypocrisy, and let's just focus on the outcomes. Yes, if Trump keeps ruling by decree, the next Dem administration can just undo everything by decree. What you're leaving out is that if Trump doesn't do that, the Dems can still just rule by decree (and have the advantage of not having their institutions disrupted). Show me a path to sustainably reducing abuses of power in the future, and you'll have a compelling argument, but right now you're asking for unilateral disarmament.
That's what I'm doing - I don't really care much about the hypocrisy on either side. I expect both sides to be hypocritical. "We are upset when their side does it, but when our side does it it's good" is practically a default in politics.
I don't know that there is one, but it would require people to actually value bipartisanship again, because you'd have to have people in both parties actually negotiating with each other, instead of treating a political victory as the opportunity to sack and pillage until the party's over.
Look, I understand (and expected) your "You're just asking for unilateral disarmament" argument. I can tell you with lots of Dems (and very liberal ones) on my Facebook feed, that they absolutely feel the same way every time they were asked not to get carried away under Biden, or when they were gloating about all the things Harris was going to do to own the conservatives, and now, when they are being asked to reflect on where it brought them. You are, after all, evil, and norms and rule and law don't really apply when you're trying to fight Nazis. Wow, you say, how terrible and unreasonable! This just proves we should crush them harder. Yup, and so we get exactly the same argument from the right - Democrats are so evil, so unreasonable, so unhinged, that norms and rules of law don't really apply.
So it goes. I'm not quite a doomer yet, but there's no way out unless at least some people want a way out that isn't "unilateral disarmament."
Well then, it's going to be hard for your charges of hypocrisy to mean something. You detail the thought process behind it yourself, and how it's so tragic that both sides see each other as evil and refuse to talk to each other, but if I offer to out my monkey-brain urge to get even on hold, let bygones be bygones, an all I want in return is some plan to ensure this won't happen again, and you've got nothing... then I'm sorry, fighting with gloves off is not hypocrisy. You need to offer a clear and actionable alternative if you want to criticize others.
There's many ways to address this, from "who started it" to disputing whether or not what is happening now is even approaching what they did in the past, but in the end you can always say "they see you in the same way", so I'll give you an argument where I think this does not hold true.
Again, let's forget about the past, and focus on the future. Ultimately, I wish your liberal friends all the best. I want that they are able to live their lives according to their values, free from the interference of evil chuds like me. When I'm in a good mood, I even wish that it brings them all the happiness they expect, rather than what I think are the likely consequences of their ideas. Even though by now they came up with things that warrant a holy crusade, and a declaration that the child sacrifices will stop (and this is more literal than some might expect), I'm willing to accept a cease fire where they their thing in peace, as long as I'm allowed the same. Would you say your liberal friends would find those terms acceptable? If not, than I'm sorry, but we are not the same, and any implication that we are equivalent is false.
I think some of them would, and some of them would not. Just as you personally might be willing to live and let live, but many (most) of your fellow rightists would not. So yes, I think you are equivalent, and the way out is either war or the "moderates" among us persuading the majority to curb the extremists. I do what little I can (I have had relationships suffer as a result); do you ever tell your side "Hey, maybe dial it down a bit"?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
There are two possible outcomes. One: The Democrats do it when they are in power, and the Republicans refrain when they are in power. Two: Both do it when they are in power. The second is less bad, unless you're a Democrat.
And this was a major error. Better that the civil service change political valence with elections than it become a power bloc of its own which remains aligned with one side regardless of who is in power now.
There is another possible outcome. Can you see the one you are missing?
Having actually read American history, I strongly disagree. There are ways to rein in excesses by any branch or segment of the government that doesn't require the entire government simply become spoils for the victor, or one branch ignoring the other two. Of course I don't think you have an accurate conception of the "Deep State" any more than you have an accurate conception of people who are not aligned with you.
The trouble with making this argument is that at some point you have to actually make the argument, not just snark about it. I don't think you have, and I don't think you can, and I don't think the foremost advocates can or will.
More options
Context Copy link
Have you lived recent American history?
The administrative state is not, formally, a branch outside the Executive.
Indeed I have, and I'm older than you.
No, but we have laws (which the other two formal branches have a say in) which the Executive can't just override. Just as every military officer, in theory, serves at the pleasure of the President, his ability to unilaterally dismiss officers has been constrained by law (since around 1950, IIRC). The civil service works for the President, but he can't just order them to ignore laws imposed on them by Congress and Supreme Court rulings, or fire people because they aren't personally loyal to him.
I am not against the president "reigning in" a bureaucratic state out of control and probably agree with you about some of the ways federal agencies have inappropriately balked his intentions in the past (so I understand, if not agree, with why he's acting the way he is now). But either we actually have laws and a Constitution, or else stop talking about laws and civil society and admit you just want to be the boot.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I don't think it was necessarily an error in and of itself. Neutral civil services are a thing. Even Bush had far less issues on that front than Trump, and TTBOMK it did great for the first 100 years or so. It's a problem when polarisation and especially educational polarisation are very strong, which they often aren't.
Are they? I agree with FC's take that this sort of neutrality is just an artifact of relative homogeneity. The distance between Bush and Obama or Biden just isn't that great, there's a reason why all the neocons jumped ship to the Dems, and why the supposedly neutral civil service started having problems with neutrality when Trump showed up.
(I think I tried to post something like this a few days ago, but something messed up somewhere. I was prepping for a colonoscopy at the time, so I was rather distracted by the whole "shitting acid regularly" issue and then afterward by the whole "recovering from sedation" issue.)
I'm not sure we actually have a substantive disagreement here. I said that strong polarisation (causing loyalty to tribe to exceed loyalty to the job and to society) and particularly educational polarisation (causing the civil service to not reflect the electorate and thus be incapable of self-policing) are the factors that cause a "neutral" civil service to become just a permanent weapon for one side. I noted that these factors are not always present. You seem to be agreeing with me by talking about relative homogeneity (i.e. a lack of strong polarisation and strong educational polarisation).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I know you're not directly calling me out here, but I must say in my defense: I don't think I've ever claimed to be anything I'm not.
I'm neither a principled libertarian, nor a totalitarian statist, but I'm not just discovering the Federalist Papers for the first time. I've spent a lot of the last few years reading history from antiquity to modernity, and political theory from Rawls to Julius Evola. I don't think I've reached a point of equilibrium, but I do find a lot I agree with in the Classical Liberal tradition, especially in my recent forays into Mills and Locke.
But I have no idea where I'll end up once I fully digest all the ideas I'm considering, because I'll admit I think there are attractive ideas in a ton of mutually incompatible political positions. I'd tentatively say I'm a left-of-center state capacity libertarian, but my views are still evolving.
Fair enough. Our views are always evolving, and I definitely would have disagreed with my 2008-era self who was ecstatic about Obama being elected.
I think we should all be given the grace to consider many different positions and try, as best we can, to arrive at the truth. That journey will be different for everyone, and I'm willing to admit that my current opinions might be very wrong
That said, what is your current position on the Covid response?
Honestly, the Covid response was one of the big hurdles that caused me to take a step back and reconsider a lot of my views, though I was interested in philosophy and ethics before that.
I'm capable of being pragmatic, and acknowledging that something like a one or two week lockdown at the beginning of the pandemic to wait for information to emerge was probably inevitable, if not mostly justifiable. But as the weeks stretched into months, and a hodgepodge of interventions with only a loose relationship to the evidence began to emerge, I lost a lot of faith in the response.
If Covid had been the Antonine plague with a 1 in 3 death rate in healthy young people, I think more draconian interventions might have been justified if people weren't opting to take the precautions on their own. But it wasn't the Antonine plague, and most of the people who died were old and on death's door already, or unhealthy in some way.
I do think the United States, at least in my neck of the woods, never adopted policies as bad as some of the things happening the UK, Australia or China, but that is damning with faint praise.
I'm mostly positive on the vaccines themselves, but I think pure social pressure without state backing would have been enough to get most people vaccinated, and so we probably shouldn't have used vaccine mandates. (I'm still developing my ideas around the appropriate use of social pressure. I think there's a place for it in a functional, free society, but I think it can also go wrong, as has been seen in cancel culture.)
social pressure, through a vast complex of government influence, regulatory power, and money spending, is used to whittle down the group of people the state dislikes until those people are small in number and power so that they can be explicitly forced without a high cost
and then the state does just that
More options
Context Copy link
I am mostly with you except it isn’t clear to me it makes sense to vaccinate during a wave because that encourages vaccine resistant viruses ie original anti genetic sin.
More options
Context Copy link
Thanks for this. This is mostly my position too. The reason I asked is because I think it’s a pretty good Rorschach test for motivated reasoning. The strongest opponents of Trump’s overreach in 2025 were the greatest proponents of totalitarianism in 2020. Those people suck, frankly.
Probably where we differ now is on pragmatic grounds.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It is my opinion that the sowing should be followed up by the reaping.
Namely, if they knock down all the checks and balances, formal and informal, in the pursuit of what they believe is good: and then this house of cards they made falls into the hands of their enemies. How foolish they were! Those rules were not to protect their enemies, or to bar what was right. It was to protect themselves.
No, they don't get to stand on principles. Because in this moment, they are not lamenting the death of the republic. They are weeping because all the enemies they have made in their ascent are waiting for them at the bottom. Their only regret is that they didn't get away with it. If they didn't want to live in Schmittian friend-enemy world they should have lived up to the liberal principles they so callously abandoned.
What follows will not be happy, or even pleasant. But it will be indisputably just.
I think this is all a confusion in category. Yes Trump is muscular. Yes Obama was muscular. But they were muscular in different directions meaning they are not the same. And I don’t mean in different policy directions (though that’s certainly the case) but constitutionally.
Obama used his executive power to trample Congress (eg DACA, DCL re Title IX). Trump in contrast is targeting the illegal fourth branch of government. Whilst this increases the power of the presidency it also will increase the power of Congress.
Treating them as the same is making a fundamental category error.
More options
Context Copy link
I don't mainly care if it's just or not, I mainly care about living with a political system that delivers to me the sorts of things that I want in my life. How is one group of people vindictively doing shitty things to get back at another group of people who did shitty things going to help me?
But how does this affect you personally? Think of it this way.
We are prairie dogs watching humans test atomic bombs. The kulturekampf is fundamentally the clash of inhuman worldviews, as impersonal and inscrutable as the forces binding subatomic particles together. As individuals, there is very little we can do to affect the outcome, unless we use our fifteen minutes in the right place at the right time.
But not all worldviews are created equally.
As distasteful and terrible the new regime may seem to be... it is closer to consensus-reality than its ideological opposite. It benefits you to live in a regime that believes in up and down and left and right. Men can't be women. There is no infinite money printer. The liberal world order is dead and gone and it's time to move on. It never benefits you to live under a regime that has delusional principles, even if makes your bellyfeel cozy.
It's easy to be cynical and just shrug it off as mere partisanry. But the left has been more dangerously deluded for a long time now. Sure, the right may be cruel in their revenge, but nothing they can do is worse than the shattering of the illusion of the end of history. That in of itself is a crime that will never be forgiven by the left, but the right was never obliged to participate in its perpetuation.
Is it cruel to tell someone they have to fight for everything they took for granted? Perhaps. But my side began that journey a decade ago. What can I say? You're not going to convince to stop anytime soon. I am full of hubris. I will die someday, but today is glory and triumph.
I appreciate many things about the new regime and their direct, bold willingness to explode old and stupid taboos. But I feel no sense of glory or triumph. The new regime, at their emotional baseline heart, is just as insane as the old. Maybe even more, because they are provoked and maddened by having been oppressed for years by the old regime. While I appreciate much of what they are currently doing, I do not trust them in any way. I fear that these are not principled classical liberals in their emotional core, they are vengeful radicals. I wish that they really were principled classical liberals, but my reading of what they do and say tells me that unfortunately, they are not. I appreciate that they are correcting the nonsense of the old regime, but I do not trust their new regime in the slightest bit.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I mean... libertarian and anarchist types were indeed complaining from at least Obama onward.
Are you in agreement that this executive is overstepping its powers, and just think it's justified?
If you think both this administration and the previous one are overstepping its powers... do you think they are doing it to the same degree? Which Biden-admin actions do you think are of a similar level to those mentioned above?
Biden went so far as to proclaim a new Amendment to the Constitution.
Yeah, Biden did a lot of indefensible stuff towards the end of his presidency, and eroded any ounce of moral high ground the Democrats might have had left.
I think Biden and Trump have both abused the pardon power, and I would personally be in favor of a Constitutional Amendment requiring Congressional approval for each use of the power going forward. It's a shame too, because I mostly like the pardon power.
Biden proclaiming a new Amendment was a cynical move, but considering he didn't actually do any official presidential acts to make it so, it's closer to Trump's "gaffs" where he says he's going to do something unconstitutional and norm-breaking, but doesn't follow through.
But I also agree with other posters in this thread that we can criticize both Democrats and Republicans when they do bad things. We don't have to try and parcel out who was the first to defect. That's just partisan-poisoned thinking.
He did a lot of stuff in the beginning and middle of his Presidency too. Student loan forgiveness -- after getting slapped down by the Supreme Court, he just "found another way". Remember the rent moratorium? After the deciding vote on the Supreme Court says basically "it's unconstitutional but I'll allow an orderly wind-down", he extended it. DEI everywhere. He made a rule all but banning gasoline cars. He floated the idea of banning gas stoves through the CPSC, and when that failed he had the Department of Energy pass regulations to make them crappy instead. There's probably lots more.
No, the pardons, at least the ones specifying people and laws (including the one for his son), were pretty firmly within his power. This is another soldier; mildly criticize Biden for his use of the pardon power to provide cover for criticizing Trump for his even-more-justified use of it.
More options
Context Copy link
Biden gives 10 year broad pardons for any "non-violent" crimes known and unknown to his immediate family, all of whom are involved in corruption and pay-for-access schemes, including his own son who has been the bag man for Biden family corruption for at least a decade and left a laptop of him recording himself doing it among like 100+ other crimes
Trump pardons a bunch of regular Americans who were targeted for political reasons and given heinous sentences way above any treatment similar situated people who weren't targeted for political reasons have ever received, and this was done after embarrassingly unfair clown-trials, and leaving the 14 most serious convictions to only be commuted. What were the facts of each case? Who knows, the trials were tainted and corrupt with the government lying and hiding evidence.
think whatever you like about the Biden pardons, but the Trump pardons were entirely justified and further reinforce just how important the pardon power is and why it should remain
and even if you don't think they were fully justified, putting them in the same category of "abuse of the pardon power" as Biden giving full pardons for crimes known and unknown covering 10 year periods to his family is ridiculous and stinks of "poisoned partisan thinking"
what is a "presidential act" which "proclaim[s] a new Amendment"?
Biden attempted to direct the Archivist and the Office of the Federal Register to declare they had received sufficient documents to proclaim an Amendment has been added to the Constitution, but they refused. So instead, he had to settle with twitter and a media blitz trying to make it happen.
I'm willing to use the hypocrisy standard here. Biden claimed he wouldn't pardon Hunter, then he did. He didn't have to make a hypocrite of himself, but he did.
J.D. Vance, when clarifying Trump's intention to pardon the January 6th protesters, said they obviously wouldn't pardon people who committed violence on the day of January 6th. He didn't have to make a hypocrite of the Trump administration he was going to be a part of, but he did.
I'm okay with holding both administrations to their own standards in this case, and saying that they both acted wrongly. I don't share your belief that we simply can't know the facts of each case. Trump isn't stupid. If he had wanted to actually investigate all of the people with violent offenses, he could have, and I bet he would quickly arrive at a gut feeling about which were legitimate and which were actual gray areas. I don't believe for a second that the number of unambiguously violent protesters was 0 or 14, given that 140 law enforcement officers were injured and 15 were hospitalized.
The following statements can all be true:
I'll bite the bullet on this one. I don't have to carry water for Biden - he did wrong here, and I'm willing to walk back my weak defense of his actions.
I think I could weakly defend my original words, because even during Trump I, a lot of the cases where he didn't actually end up following through on his stated intentions was because underlings refused to follow his unconstitutional orders. But, "I couldn't get my underlings to violate their oath to defend the constitution, so I didn't violate the constitution" is still really bad, and I think I'm more willing to say even here we should strongly condemn both Trump and Biden.
Why should we use the hypocrisy standard when speaking directly to the substantive pardons themselves? No, the pardon "abuses" aren't the same nor should be treated the same because JD Vance, who is not the President, said people who committed violence "shouldn't be pardoned" (and soon after clarified he meant people who weren't provoked or didn't receive garbage trials, etc. ), and Biden said he wouldn't pardon his son but then pardoned his son not for charged crimes and convictions but for a 10 year period for any crimes known and unknown and even gave him a full day or two of prospective pardon left if he wanted to rush out and commit some more federal felonies. You can think "hypocrisy" occurred and yet the fact they both pardons happened anyway (and we're going to ignore there is any difference in a commutation or pardon) do not make the underlying pardons the same or in the same category of abuse. Nor any of the other 8,000+ other pardons issued by the Biden admin.
I'm not accusing Trump (or I guess his VP elect) and Biden of not being in same category of hypocrites. And this hypocrisy standard accusation assumes a whole lot about either admin's standards and degrees of wrong they would apply which I don't think is supportable either.
Putting pardons used by Trump and by the Biden admin even in the same zipcode of "bad," even if you don't think Trump was justified in every single one of the Jan6 examples, is ridiculous.
Protests across the country, especially during the BLM riots of summer 2020, see these kinds of numbers because cops are heavily incentivized to record and log each and every injury from a small scratch from a branch to spraining their ankle to smashing their finger while attempting to baton a protestor on the head. For e.g., when a BLM protest breached security barricades and lit the road and St. John's church on fire right outside the Whitehouse. We can compare the prosecutions, convictions, and sentences, from that example if you'd like.
And it's not 14 "unambiguously violent" protestors, there were 14 which were identified and charged not that this represents all violent protestors there that day, and given I watched the livestreams when this happened this doesn't seem unreasonable especially if you condition this on Vance's caveats. It's not unreasonable to claim this is close to meeting Vance's clarified standard anyway.
I didn't say the facts are unknowable, I said the process which was supposed to be used to determine the facts was fatally corrupted and the government actors involved intentionally hid, destroyed, and manipulated evidence and the courts helped them do it. I've noticed many a person complaining about these pardons endorsed or at least never complained when other criminals are let out of jail because of some error in the trial that convicted them, but suddenly the fact that hundreds of clown-trials sent regular Americans to jail and failed to protect them from a weaponized DOJ isn't enough to justify a President pardoning them to stop the damage. Who/whom explains these differences far better than torturing some alleged twisted principle they just discovered.
And I did look at and follow a lot of these cases and they all fell well-below what I or anyone should consider a fair trial. We don't know how much of a "case-by-case" review was done, but given even a supportable standard for fair trials and government conduct, it wouldn't be hard to quickly review and note all of these cases fall well-below it. You imply this review wasn't done, but clearly there was one because Trump didn't fully pardon 14 convicted people.
Yeah, well they were. All of them have suffered quite a bit; their houses were raided, their property was seized, they were detained pre-trial, some for years, they were tortured in jail by screws, they lost houses and families, and they lost years of their lives and hundreds of thousands of dollars. This is all well beyond any of the people who engaged in similar conduct who weren't being politically prosecuted. All of which makes me really question people who portend these pardons were even in the same zipcode as a dude pardoning his corrupt family members for crimes, known and unknown, for a period of 10 years, before they've suffered even a small fraction of the damage these regular Americans have suffered.
No one should accept the double standard if you want to enforce a standard; you either prosecute and punish similarly situated people equally or you don't at all and anything otherwise is the direct undermining of the rule of law, something you claimed to lament. Your "both sides are bad" feels empty when the de facto result is "For my friends, anything; for my enemies, the law."
More options
Context Copy link
Vance is not the President. Worst case, he was lying about Trump's intention. That doesn't make the pardons an abuse.
And arguably he didn’t lie. Commutation isn’t pardon.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
You need to be looking at the subset of unambiguously violent protestors within the set of those convicted -- it seems quite unlikely that everyone guilty of violence was identified and arrested.
Which makes '14' at least plausible -- what criteria do you suppose Trump was using in deciding whom to pardon and who's sentence to commute?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
That just doesn’t make any sense. The Obama admin expanded its power. This admin is cutting down the bureaucratic state. It is cutting down the unconstitutional fourth branch; not impinging on the first branch.
Yes it is muscular but muscular in a pro constitutional way.
There is nothing “pro constitutional” about attempting to abrogate birthright citizenship via executive order. Whether or not the administration’s interpretation of the 14th amendment—which strains the limits of legal credulity—is actually valid, the idea that the executive can just decide one day that clear Supreme Court precedent actually isn’t binding anymore because “I really don’t like it!” is monarchist, not republican.
Ehh I think you need to look closer into the precedent. Do I think Trump Has the better argument? No. But you don’t actually need to overturn precedent to come to Trump’s conclusion.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
"justice 40" and the total drilling ban are two things that come to mind. How about this?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link