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Great post, of course.
One thing I've very hazy about, though, is whether this is an argument that stops with the Republican party being doomed, or whether it's rather an argument for all those institutions actually being doomed.
I remember years ago reading some prepper types making the point that America as we know it is not physically built to survive meaningful civil unrest; there's all sorts of infrastructure and pipelines and so on that are huge and spread out and essentially undefendable. But the reason for that is, of course, that America is largely peaceful, and has been relatively high trust in most places for quite a while, and so it has been built with those assumptions in mind (and indeed this is one of the huge economic benefits of having a fairly high trust society).
I think there's something very similar going on with all of America's ostensible shared institutions; at least in my view, the entire point of stressing the rhetoric of "consent of the governed" is recognizing that all of our various systems work because the lion's share of citizens are willing to accept the authority of those systems, even if they don't understand them or are wary about the people who operate them.
And in that sense, consent of the governed is a very different concept from some theoretical notion of democratic legitimacy, in the "majority of votes = legitimate" sense. I mean, on paper inner city police departments are propped up by local democratic governance. But one of the giant problems inner city black neighborhoods have long faced is a lack of trust about police as an institution from certain communities, and there are huge amounts of horrible downstream consequences to that lack of trust and consent. It is trivial as an outsider to look at a lot of that dysfunction and say, depending on your political point of view, "See, that's why people should trust police with a monopoly on violence" or "see, that's why police need to be reformed so that they can be trusted". But it turns out regaining trust in institutions is incredibly difficult in practice, regardless of the wisdom of the bromides. Maintaining buy in from random citizens is crucially important.
This stuff is obviously far from academic. I had an uncle in 2021 who was all in on the ivermectin stuff. He's in his late 60s. Not a dumb guy, in general. He's a senior engineer in some firm. He's also apparently very online these days. He and his wife had a pretty nasty time with COVID. They were very aggressively anti-vax. I wish I could have rolled my eyes and said, at the time, "See, that's why you should just listen to the various authoritative bodies and trust what they have to say!" And I'm not, by nature, inclined to think that populist medical treatment rumor mongering online is a better idea than rigorous, empirical medical science from well-functioning institutions. But of course, I also lived through the summer of 2020, and I was paying pretty close attention to those same experts and their public pronouncements too. And I remember being told that racism was the real public health crisis. I remember being told that everyone needed to stay in their apartments RIGHT NOW - SHUT DOWN EVERYTHING to save lives, until suddenly it was time for anti-racism marches and everyone needed to go back outside immediately. And I remember being told that it was more important that young black health care workers get vaccines rather than my older white relatives, despite the much more severe relative risk of death they actually faced. I'm not in the business of forgetting any of that.
And so what happens if more and more of the population stops accepting the authority of those various institutions? What if more and more of the country starts treating universities and various federal agencies and ostensibly mainstream, shared press and maybe even public schools in exactly the same way that certain inner city black communities treat their cops?
Because I feel certain that having a dearth of public conservatives in those bodies is likely to greatly speed up this process. There is no endpoint where the bifurcations sharpens much further, and meaningful consent of the governed somehow remains. The line of a nullification crisis runs through every human heart. And someone responding "but those bureaucracies fulfill essential roles - they are indespendible!" is understandable, but is in some sense fundamentally disconnected from the facts on the ground. It's much like saying "Those inner city neighborhoods need functioning police forces and rule of law (and locals schools, for that matter)!" All true, but there's no obvious mechanism from here to there.
One particularly interesting wrinkle in all this, to me, is the current Supreme Court. It is not an inevitable fact of nature that all the various institutions that progressives dominate should have actual power or authority within the context of America's political system. In many cases, a tangle of legislation, court rulings, and executive branch decisions are the basis for their explicit authority. We've already seen the current Supreme Court take a wrecking ball to topics of abortion and affirmative action. I've seen the claim made, recently, that prior to the current court, the last time the Supreme Court had a 6-3 conservative majority was back in the 1920's. Which is to say, before the New Deal. Before World War 2. Before several waves of massive expansion in the Federal government. I don't think it's beyond the realm of possibility that the naked partisanship of a bunch of the institutions dominated by progressives right now, and the very overtness and antagonism of that partisanship, leads to partisan conservatives in the Supreme Court taking a sledge hammer to the foundation of some of those institutions. Which... is not a very conservative thing to do, of course. But live by who/whom, die by who/whom. I've seen a number of really furious, anxious progressive think pieces about the Chevron doctrine in particular recently, and the potential damage the court could do to the entire unelected federal bureaucracy and its power if that doctrine is significantly revised. But who knows.
The institutions reassert their authority by cracking down, making showy examples of people, and changing people's incentives toward compliance as needed.
Which is why, to the (debatable) extent "consent of the governed" ever existed, it will be removed. Most of the history of large, settled societies has been a tiny elite ruling over a vast body of disenfranchised, ground-down peasants. I see no reason why our current society could not be run the same (to the extent it isn't already there).
What was the mechanism by which William and his fellow Normans ruled the Anglo-Saxons? How did any Chinese emperor rule a realm as large and populous as China? How did the East India Company end up with power over the subcontinent? How did the Romans successfully suppress revolt after revolt against their rule for century after century?
I would dispute this characterization of these decisions. Dobbs was a purely symbolic victory; one where there were plenty of legal minds on the other side who, even though they agreed with Roe's outcome, thought it was on shaky ground as a legal ruling; and which has had negligible effect on actual abortion rates. And I remember when the affirmative action decision came out, people were already pointing out how schools in California have been straightforwardly bypassing the similar state-level restriction with 'totally-not-a-quota "holistic admissions,"' and that the majority decision itself lays out the start of a path for academia to essentially ignore it. These are more a feather duster than a wrecking ball.
How, exactly? What means does the Court have to enforce any decision it might make against them?
Again, I don't see how that could work.
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Could you link one or two?
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/chevron_deference
I did not ask for a definition of Chevron deference; I didn't have it memorised, but I looked it up myself. I asked for a "furious, anxious progressive think piece" about Chevron deference and the "damage" that could occur if it's "significantly revised", because @CrispyFriedBarnacles said he'd seen "a number" of such pieces.
Not sure what meets @Questionmark's definition of "really furious, anxious progressive think piece," but there are a few I've seen around the net in the last week or so:
"The Case That Could Destroy the Government" https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/11/securities-and-exchange-commission-v-jarkesy-supreme-court/676059/
Then there's this one, which originally had the title "A new Supreme Court case threatens to sow chaos throughout the federal government" https://www.vox.com/politics/2023/5/2/23706535/supreme-court-chevron-deference-loper-bright-raimondo
Then there's another Vox masterpiece: "The Supreme Court seeks a middle path between following the law and blowing up the government" https://www.vox.com/scotus/2023/11/29/23980966/supreme-court-sec-jarkesy-administrative-law-judges
And more or less every respectable news outlet had some opinion piece along the lines of Washington Post's "A conservative court intent on arrogating power unto itself" https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/12/01/supreme-court-administrative-state/
For comparison, Reuter's most recent headline on the topic is "US Supreme Court signals it could limit SEC in-house enforcement," though I do think that undersells it somewhat.
It was @CrispyFriedBarnacles who brought up the topic, not Questionmark. But thanks a bunch.
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Rhetoric around the SCOTUS is turning into a particular flashpoint in recent times as well, particularly because of Rightist failings in the Executive and Legislative branch even when they win those branches. The Legislative has failure to repeal Obamacare, and to be frank the failure to do much more than obstruct; The Executive has the whole deep state thing, brought into sharp contrast with the Trump administration. Now we are seeing consent being manufactured to reach into the Judicial branch as it falls into hard Originalist control for the first time, as mentioned, since the '20s. If the SCOTUS returns to penumbras and emanations through less than clean means the right very much will feel locked out of the Federal government entirely, when they very much shouldn't be.
Why shouldn't we feel that way, given that we pretty much are locked out? And even if we do start realizing that, so what?
Shouldn't be locked out, or shouldn't be feeling locked out? This reads unclearly to me. And in either case, why not? Why shouldn't the Left do everything they can to lock their hated enemy out of every institution, every power center, every decision-making process?
What reason does a stronger party have not to crush utterly their weaker foe?
Because then it turns into a prisoner's dilemma case, and everyone defects.
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