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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   22122 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 28, 2024

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There is actually a hidden veto by the bureaucracy and the deep state

I disagree that this is a "hidden" veto, I think it's an obvious feature of liberal democracy. A president can't govern without the lower level bureaucrats' cooperation. If they find his proposals so hideous that they're willing to blow up their careers by defying him, he'll have difficulty implementing anything. To become an actual totalitarian, the president would have to replace all the bureaucrats with yes-men, and that takes time. If he just fires them all immediately, he won't have the infrastructure to govern. I find this very comforting, and it makes me less scared of a Trump presidency than many of my family members and friends. But when a politician talks about "draining the swamp", that's a clear sign that he's not willing to work within the system. We need to protect the swamp.

I don't like bureaucrats and I obviously didn't vote for them. These self-appointed vetoers should be fired and criminally punished if I had my way. They derive all their authority from the executive. In a better world they would be suitably punished for betraying that. They also almost all happen to be partisan Democrats very selectively deciding which sorts of policies to obstruct.

I think they exercise the veto power prior to Trump doing anything, and they exercised it without any serious consequences. There were generals lying to Trump about troop levels in foreign countries, and not only were they not court marshaled for insubordination they were lauded for their efforts. And I'd be pretty happy to with generals that were willing to stand up and defy orders like "shoot american civilians" but they used their "backbone" to defy the president by continuing to wage wars abroad that the president and voters did not want.

I agree that there is a good use case for a veto among the bureaucracy and state agents. But they basically demonstrated the worst level of judgement in exercising it pre-emptively, used it for dumb things, and then suffered no consequences. Theoretically good, but in practice it was awful.

If they find his proposals so hideous that they're willing to blow up their careers by defying him, he'll have difficulty implementing anything.

That is not how it went when marriage ceased to be between a man and a woman: if bureaucrats had an objection of conscience at facilitating a man marrying man, they lost their jobs. Such firings weren't called totalitarian by those who now object to insubordination possibly having actual consequences.

I'm not exactly saying that bureaucrats shouldn't be fired if they disobey the president. Just that the process of firing them and finding replacements would serve as a buffer against a totalitarian president implementing his agenda. If only a few bureaucrats object, it's obviously not much of an obstacle. But their act of civil disobedience can still raise awareness of what's going on.

Right - the conscience veto didn't work in the case of marriage because it was only a small handful of people willing to stand up for it. It's different when you're looking at most of the bureaucracy. The president can fire them all, but if so he's destroying his own state apparatus and thus his own ability to act.

There's an obvious rebuttal here - "If I fire the bureaucracy I won't be able to act? But I'm not able to act now! My choice is a bureaucracy that refuses to do what I want, and no bureaucracy that does nothing. At least with no bureaucracy, there isn't an institution actively impeding me, and I can get started on the long, difficult process of building a new state apparatus."

But that's where I worry about the election cycle. Four years is not long enough to rebuild the entire federal bureaucracy.

But that's where I worry about the election cycle. Four years is not long enough to rebuild the entire federal bureaucracy.

First, I — like many — would question just how necessary so much of the federal bureaucracy is. There was that discussion here recently about what the Department of Education does. I'd also point to some of Curtis Yarvin's comments in this interview by Harrison Pitt about bringing in Elon Musk to head a "Department of Government Efficiency":

Well, if you wanted to run the government efficiently, you would do actually the California startup thing, which is you would simply replace it with a different organization; and which is about approximately 100,000 times easier and more effective than trying to take a process-oriented bureaucracy and turn it into some kind of mission-oriented thing.

It would be like, you know, if you told Elon Musk, basically, that he had to build a space program and start with NASA, he would simply fire all of NASA and build SpaceX.

…

Like you can't actually make these organizations more— I mean, you cut a little here; modify, tweak a little, but you can't make them into organizations that are even 1/1000 as efficient as SpaceX.

Moreover, if you're doing this kind of organization where you're just, like, "okay, I'm going to replace the State Department," uh, great, then you're face-to-face with an even more knotty question of what is the State Department, and what does it do, and why does it do it, and is this organization going to have the same goals and missions as the State Department; because the State Department is, of course, living in this sort of, like, exquisite historical fantasy, which it itself has constructed, of the Global American Empire.

…

You would not, if you actually worked from first principles in the way Elon Musk does when he launches a rocket, you would be, like, I don't even know even the concept of a rocket is up for grabs here, because if you look at what the State Department does, and the system it administrates, it is almost entirely a contingent product of history.

…

There's all of this just frame-breaking, where you try to make this thing— we're going to make the State Department more efficient, and you start thinking harder and harder what is the State Department? Why do we need a State Department? Right. And you're just basically, as you get more and more galaxy-brained, you're basically just, like, the reality is the United States does not have an Executive Branch, it has an administrative branch.

So, if you focus only on rebuilding the most core, essential functions of the federal government — can we get by for awhile without a Department of Energy? Transportation? HUD? CPSC? USAID? The Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service? the Postal Regulatory Commission? — I can see quite a lot getting done in just four years.

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