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This is exactly what the neoreactionary critique gets at, though. In this scenario, the process is your king; your final authority. And because those processes are carried out by people, ultimately those people are your kings.
In short, this way of thinking creates and sustains an oligarchic form of government. Don’t like the process? Don’t like who runs it? Then appeal. By what means? A process. Who runs that process? You’ve already guessed.
Honestly, I agree with you that this is probably the best way of doing things a lot of the time, as opposed to direct personal power or mob democracy. But this flaw is inherent and IMO when the bureaucracy gets too powerful and too uniform then this form of government starts to curdle.
You're allowed to change the people who run the process.
(How? By a process...)
But still. You can indeed change the people in charge and they can indeed change the processes of government. Even if in theory you can get into a closed loop where the people in power use their power to stay in power, that is not currently the case in reality. Although Trump did give it the old college try.
That’s exactly the point under discussion, no? The allegation from trump’s side is that this has already happened, and that following standard procedure for resolving disputed elections is therefore meaningless because the entire bureaucracy is controlled by the enemy.
Personally, though, I was thinking of the Civil Service, who I very definitely can’t vote out of office. From where I’m standing Britain has been in that closed loop for at least 20 years now.
I assure you that politicians very much do have the power to shut down departments, fire civil servants, etc. And if none of the options on your ballot paper are promising to do that, you can stand for election yourself.
The obstacle you face is not that the civil service is all-powerful. It's that your fellow citizens disagree with you.
https://www.civilservant.org.uk/information-dismissal.html
Politicians may not fire or hire civil servants in the UK. They may request for them to be moved, but they will get a new civil servant in a similar mould. They can rearrange departments but those departments will, again, be staffed by the Civil Service and I do not believe that the government can formally choose which civil servants are appointed.
These tools might be enough if the civil service contained a significant amount of different opinions, but in practice they are wholly insufficient. Given that the legal system also leans hard left, I can’t see any future for conservatism in the UK without completely reworking the Civil Service, the human rights apparatus, etc. What my fellow citizens think does not affect government policy, only government rhetoric.
The government makes the rules. If they want to fire civil servants, they can give themselves the power to do it.
In theory, yes. In practice, I can't recommend highly enough that you watch Yes, Minister. There was a post about it here not too long ago. It's utterly brilliant. You will laugh a lot. You will have a joyous time watching it. It will be the highlight of your year.
I'm a huge fan of Yes Minister and frequently refer to it as my favourite documentary. It's extremely true to life.
Nonetheless, the power of the civil service lies in manipulation and persuasion. It's not actual power. They thrive with governments that are directionless, cowardly, and unresolved - which is most of them. But when the voters clearly want something and the government is determined to give it to them, in the end the civil service must meekly say - Yes, Minister.
Brexit actually happened, after all, despite the many attempts to sabotage it.
I think you lost the thread of this conversation. We're talking about the civil service deciding to prosecute someone who they view as a major political opponent. They're trying to put their political opponent in a cage and strip his name off the ballot. If accomplished, that is actual power.
Not only was the British bureaucracy caught with their pants down on Brexit the way the American bureaucracy was caught in 2016 (they thought it was already so unlikely to go through with the regular measures that there was no need to pull out all the stops), but I find it unlikely that the British bureaucracy feared something like Brexit in the same way that the American bureaucracy feared being dominated by Trump/Trumpists.
Stewart Baker's great line about technology is that you never know how evil a technology can be until the engineers who designed it fear for their jobs. Trump was something like that, but somehow, maybe even worse. It's likely totally irrational fear, but most fear is irrational. That fear, and the knowledge that they got wrecked when they only implemented regular measures, was sufficient that they decided to roll the dice as many times as possible on as many questionable charges as they could come up with, knowing that they don't actually have total control of any one process and can't completely guarantee success in any one venue. They've had this power of prosecution in their back pocket for a long time. They've always kind of known it was there; it's the classic stuff of banana republics. They simply haven't tried smacking it down and asserting their hard power in quite such a fashion, maybe since Ted Stevens.
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Do you really, honestly think that could happen? Without the civil service pulling every dirty trick in the book? Without all sorts of scandals bubbling up out of the woodwork? Without strikes? Without rebellions in the Lords? Without legal challenges?
Regardless, if the necessary requirement to get conservative policies passed is ‘lead a rebellion to replace the existing bureaucracy’ then that sounds exactly like an oligarchy to me. The King technically has the power to overthrow the PM tomorrow but if there’s no realistic prospect of exerting that power then you don’t really have it. Same with the government. The set of powers it has in reality is far, far smaller than the ones it’s supposed to have.
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How would we confirm that unless we see it actually happen?
I disagree with your assertion, and point to the numerous and well-documented instances of the civil service and other centers of unaccountable power wielding massively disproportionate influence in ways I consider malign. Illegal Undercover ops to discredit elected officials and cripple their ability to govern are actually kind of a problem in a purported democracy. End-runs around the concept of a free press are likewise a problem for similar reasons.
But in the end, this comes down to opinions. you are arguing that the system is basically fine. Other people are arguing that it's broken. You can engage with their concerns, and perhaps persuade them, or trust the system and simply handwave them, in the hopes that their critiques are unfounded. The later is, obviously, the correct answer at least some of the time, for some claims. Time will tell if this is one of those times.
You mean like when Margaret Thatcher abolished the Civil Service Department?
Or if that's too far in the past, how about the Department for International Development, abolished in 2020.
I swear, some of you people want there to be a shadowy cabal in charge of everything.
Thanks for these examples, I didn’t see this reply before.
As far as I can see, the departments were abolished but the functions were reallocated. This would be enough to prevent a few civil servants from unduly influencing policy but I don’t think it’s enough to prevent a unified civil service from continuing their preferred policy. Note the continued presence of Stonewall in civil service departments despite the government explicitly forbidding it, or the way that ex-Tavistock personnel seem to be cropping up again in their new gender treatment facilities.
In evidence against myself, all government departments have now been dropped from Stonewall's list of morally upstanding employers. Various components of the NHS are still on there though, as are many quangos and all of the regional governments (NI, Scotland, Wales).
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/08/18/stonewall-removes-government-departments-top-100-employers/ (paywalled)
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... Both of those examples are in the United Kingdom, and the DID was merged into the Foreign Office without many firings. The CSD reforms did cashier out 140k people from the civil service before breaking the department into new groups, and some functions were privatized, so I'll give you that one, but it was also almost forty years ago and lead to massive efforts to specifically try to prevent that exact sort of thing from ever happening again.
In theory, the UK doesn't really have a 'higher pleading' in the way the United States has the Constitution, so there's nothing explicitly preventing a future PM from changing the law and stripping a new department out. But in practice the last attempt for a significantly less robust rollback ended Poorly. Which isn't strong evidence -- there's a lot of failure in the Johnson government! And yet.
Yes, because @Corvos was specifically talking about the United Kingdom.
To your other points, I'm not disputing that a serious effort to gut the civil service would face stern opposition. My point is that if the voters want it to happen, it absolutely can happen.
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I thought that's what we voted on in 2016, but instead the people in charge of the process didn't play fair, and instead hamstrung the duly elected executive at every opportunity. The uniparty did not play fair.
Instead the 2016 election remains Trump's greatest crime. He defied the uniparty and must be punished for doing so. I have yet to see anything that contradicts this interpretation, and so it remains the lens through which I view these developments.
Might there be other explanations for Trump's failure than the forces of Mordor using dark plots to defeat our lone hero? Maybe Trump was an ineffective executive with a lot more bluster than execution, who was too stubborn to not commit crimes that didn't benefit him at all?
This is a necessary condition to explain what we've seen, but not sufficient.
Given that we know Trump was spied on by the Obama administration, and that every lever of power came together to fortify the election against him, I don't think it can be honest to pretend that it's all just him, and what he's done.
Trump delenda est may as well be the motto of the uniparty wherever it holds power. Pretending otherwise is make-believe.
I enjoy talking to & listening to all sides of the political spectrum, because it gives perspective. Ken White just claimed that if Trump said what he said to witnesses on his current cases as a private apolitical defendant, he'd be in jail for contempt already, and he's getting special treatment anyway. It's funny how the side that's getting preferential treatment is always the other side.
You're like the leftist radical who notices some poor people can't pay their bills and announce CAPTIALISM DELENDA EST because a BAD THING IS HAPPENING. There have always been, and will always be, bad things happening. Yet that doesn't make today unique, nor does it mean that bad things are the only thing that is happening. Mild foul play is the everywhere in politics, and the system functions regardless. I believe this refers to obamagate / crossfire hurricane. Wikipedia claims there's no evidence Obama had anything to do with that personally - which, you know, eh, maybe that's true, maybe it isn't. But I think we can agree that this had little material impact on trump's election chances - if we're asking if the FBI's discretion helped or hurt trump, it's as close to help as hurt, given Comey's announcing he was re-opening the clinton emails investigation two weeks before the election. Why isn't that evidence the FBI hated Clinton? And this is all peanuts compared to something like Bush v Gore, where you can credibly say the supreme court decided the election. In favor of the, uh, republican. I think this line of thought undermines the claim that trump is being uniquely and unprecedentedly persecuted.
You need to apply some epistemic learned helplessness here. Observe from afar the buffeting winds of the hurricane that is political discourse - all sorts of ideas forming and crashing into each other. Accountants and cardiologists come to strong conclusions about corruption and malicious intent based on complicated inferences in fields like law, economics, foreign policy, and sociology. Does CarRepairGuy #MAGA2020 or TeacherMomOfThree #StopAsianHate really understand the latest legal controversy where the other side is undermining america because they hate us? Do you really understand all the subtle technical differences between the usual adaptation of an old process (elections) to the circumstances of the times, and active manipulation? Does - not republican media, exactly, but the distributed consensus of millions of trump partisans on the internet that you're informed by - really have good incentives or mechanisms of finding the truth? How likely is it that 'every lever of power' really 'fortified the election' in a way that mattered?
I went meta there because - there's so much stuff within claims of election fortification it'd take way too long to get into all of it, and it's years ago.
Why do people continue to think that this is a worthwhile point? Comey actually explained this and has been extremely vocal about his dislike for Trump.
I think this is the third or fourth time I've had to post this quote on the Motte.
No, I agree it's not good evidence the FBI hated clinton. But if things like that still happen to someone the FBI hates, why is it good evidence the FBI tunnel-vision hates trump given what happened to him? Especially given the impact on 2016 voters of comey's statement was, I think, larger than the impact of what they did to trump in 2016. Post-2016 actions would be a different discussion.
Huh? Clinton here is someone who the FBI absolutely loves. They were actually trying to help her - they were just incompetent. You don't even need to start reading tea leaves to figure out the FBI's position here because you can just read the Strzok texts, Higher Loyalty (please don't actually read this paper-based sleeping pill) etc. They absolutely did tunnel-vision hate Trump and went out of their way to try and hamstring him in as many ways as they could. I don't see how there can be any debate on this issue when you know the full context of the Steele dossier and how it was laundered in the media to justify Crossfire Hurricane even as they spoke amongst themselves about how the accusations had no substance but it was worth doing anything they could to take down Trump.
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Well, because they did that against their will. They were attempting to keep the fact that classified emails were comingled with child porn on Clinton's top aid's husbands laptop, but the local FBI field office shared some of their intel with the NYPD who eventually got word to Guiliani who was then shopping an "FBI coverup of Clinton emails" story which Comey got wind of and instead got ahead of while simultaneously massively downplaying what had happened.
Hm, that isn't how wikipedia frames that. The thing is, a left-winger would have a similar response to the obamagate stuff, and I think each side is about as likely to be correct.
Wikipedia is a known captured institution...
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The dark plots by the forces of Mordor unquestionably happened, so it behooves us to address them rather than imagine hypothetical scenarios where they did not. This does not change when Trump is, in fact, an ineffective executive with more bluster than execution. It doesn't change even if he did in fact commit crimes.
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Yes it is. The deep state is in power and will forever be in power unless someone can fire 3/4 of the federal government which is impossible due to lawfare. The bureaucracy is a self-sustaining cancer at this point.
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