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The resistance doesn't feel particularly short-circuited to me. Judges have blocked most of DOGE's biggest cuts.
What does 'hide all the bad spending mean'? How would they even do that? All of the data on their spending is, and was already, public.
IMO, the first rule of warfare is to destroy your enemy, or at least their capacity to wage war. That isn't currently happening. (USAID funding is not even a percent of the reason the liberal media exists). "Not giving the enemy what they want" is, in this context, the first rule of being mad at your enemy on twitter.
This isn't about conflict vs mistake! I'm not entirely against all the libs spontaneously combusting. It's about, like, winning the conflict, which is harder than making a lot of awesome posts.
I'm willing to hear arguments otherwise, but from where I'm standing this is good.* To the extent that the blocks have an effect at all, it forces more and more of the apparatus and legal precedence that needs to be cut down and replaced onto the side of wasteful spending. If my experience of Brexit is any guide, people aren't going to say, "well, judges blocked it, it must be bad," they're going to say, "why is a judge able to block my elected president, let's get rid of this".
*Obviously, it would be best if the cuts had been carried out quickly without being blocked, but that was never on the table.
Given the complexity of spending on any serious scale, it is totally impossible to request information in a way that is: (1) readable on any practical time scale, (2) comprehensive enough to allow detailed audit. So you have to rely on people to provide honest summaries of what they've been doing, and nobody ever does when their career and budget are on the line. Impounding the money first switches the focus to "prove we need you, stat" rather than "find a good excuse for the stuff you've done so we don't cut you". EDIT: that is, it gets status quo bias on your side, forcing recipients of grant money to work harder to earn your approval rather than merely avoid drawing your attention.
That is the goal of warfare. Obviously destroying your enemy's capacity is important but to do that you have to attack in ways they find difficult to counter. That means NOT allowing them to find reasons to stall you, and it means backing them into positions that are difficult to defend. In this case, that it is not legally possible for an incoming president to halt using taxpayer money to fund trans operas in Colombia. And cutting the left-wing patronage network off at the knees is destroying a big part of their capacity, even if you don't save that much money.
Yes Minister is a classic in the art of bureaucratic stalling, and in the hiding of incompetence and corruption, written using real (secret) interviews with top-level politicians. Basically it boils down to the fact that the bureaucracy only has to stall you for a relatively short time before you're snowed under with crises and no longer able to be proactive. That's why speed and optics matters more than efficiency right now - you want to be on the front foot for the hard part of the campaign. Most effective politicians seem to work in this way: Teddy Roosevelt, Tony Blair. You have to get public support and a feeling of momentum, and then you will have the leverage to force your way through.
Stalling Technique
The Five Standard Excuses
Of course, all of this could still fail. But it's looking good right now, and it's looking far better than everyone who's tried to achieve spending reductions.
If my experience of Brexit is any guide, the people who told the necessary lies to get the median voter to believe that the government was their enemy and the system that had delivered decades of peace and prosperity should die in a fire are high on their own supply and it is going to end in avoidable harm to the country, landslide election defeat, and wailing and gnashing of teeth in opposition.
To take an obvious example, if DOGE and its supporters believe what they are saying on social media about how closing down USAID is successfully defunding a vast left-wing conspiracy then their OODA loop doesn't have ground truth in it.
It seems relevant that the tories won in a landslide after brexit and only lost after several elections and mismanaged leadership changes.
The 2019 election was before Brexit. The reason why the Tories won in a landslide was because Parliament was seen as holding up Brexit, and the central campaign pledge was to "Get Brexit Done".
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I'm sorry, but the reason Brexit ended in landslide defeat for the Tories is because the Conservatives removed the shield that had allowed them to lie about wanting to stop immigration, and then tried to keep lying anyway. It was absolutely 100% avoidable. An own goal the likes of which politics has rarely seen. The only thing I regret about Brexit is believing them when they said, "we would like to do what you want, but the EU won't let us". That's clearly not a problem here because Trump is just going ahead and doing what he said he was going to do.
Yes. That's an inherent difficulty when you are actually trying to defund a vast left-wing conspiracy. Ideally it wouldn't have come to that, but it has.
That is certainly part of it, but the Conservatives lost as many votes to the left as they did to Reform, and a party which picked up all the Tory and Reform votes* would still not have won a majority. The Conservatives defeat in 2024 was extremely overdetermined, and the fact that they had screwed up everything possible about the implementation of Brexit was most, but not all of it.
* Which they couldn't have done because Reform was mobilising 2019 non-voters with an anti-system message in a way an incumbent party couldn't.
Forgive the brief reply, but my read is different. I think that a lot of those who voted labour did so out of desperation at the state of the tories and distrust of Farage, rather than a sincere desire for left-wing or more moderate government.
The Tories were quite capable of mobilising voters with an anti-system message, and succeeded in doing so in 2019, but they couldn't do so in 2024 because the pro-system MPs had stifled meaningful reform and then regained control of the party. The Tories ran on the worst of all possible platforms: a schizophrenic mix of pro/anti-system rhetoric, a record of dismissing radical politicians like Braverman whilst bringing back corrupt Establishment figures like Cameron, and a record of failure at achieving meaningful change. They had also been mullered by Covid (which I don't blame on them specifically, most of the hysteria was ginned up as a doom loop between the press, the doctors, the public, and Captain Hindsight) and Ukraine (the sanctions produced economic pain which was blamed on Brexit).
If they had been able to push through immigration reform, at least made a start on DOGE-like pruning of the left wing state, and Covid/Ukraine hadn't happened, they would have been fine I think. Some voters would have punished them for perceived failure on Brexit, but not many.
Ultimately, the tl;dr for why the Tories lost in 2024 is that they were so incompetent in government that you couldn't tell whether they were failing to deliver on a right-wing agenda or failing to deliver on a centrist one.
And part of the reason for the incompetence is that they were high on their own supply over Brexit. The discussions within the Conservative party in 2024 were not about "How do we do the hard work of replacing EU policies on agriculture, immigration, customs administration etc?" (which needed doing, and either wasn't done or was botched with visible consequences), it was "How do we spend the £350 million a week Brexit dividend?" (which was always only £160-180 million because Johnson and Cummings lied about the numbers, and which in any case wasn't available for the first few years because the government negotiated a deal including a divorce payment). A large part of why the Boriswave happened is that Cummings thought (he boasted about this on his blog) that Brexit defused the immigration issue without the need to actually reduce immigration, because we had "taken back control."
Another part is that they chose a leader whose character made him unsuitable for executive leadership because he was able to tell the lies needed to win the Brexit referendum.
And another part is that the purge of people who were insufficiently Brexitty left the incoming Conservative govenment short of talent.
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