There are two elements of this situation that I'm consistently trying to open-mindedly hold in balance.
One part is what I call "The Great Defederalization". In a myriad of ways, the federal state that was erected between FDR and LBJ is being torn down. That state existed on a group of decisions that allowed independent agencies outside of the direct oversight of the president: the Humphrey's Executor agencies, NLRB, FCC, FTC. The Supreme Court and Congress are very happy to work on rolling them back, and they were constructed on pretty awful jurisprudence to begin with. That can work-- we should engage in creative destruction, the administrative state did restrict economic growth, and it did create carve-outs out of the Constitution. If it made us a more reliable partner, that did come at the cost of flexibility.
But at the same time, this executive isn't defederalizing to defer power to the states-- it's doing it to grant more immediate power to the president, who is in effect weaponizing the armed forces and police forces against non-compliant localities and personal enemies. News like this happening the same week as the president sends the Army to a passive American city in order to plainly provoke a conflict, and directing his DoJ to enact a case on paper thin justification, is troubling, to say the least.
> That can work-- we should engage in creative destruction, the administrative state did restrict economic growth, and it did create carve-outs out of the Constitution.
The highest level of economic growth (GDP), and total factor productivity growth, was between 1929 and 1973. It was also the time period when income inequality plummeted (post Gilded Age).
All three metrics have gone down hill since 1980 and the mainstreaming of neo-con economic thinking.
>> The highest level of economic growth (GDP), and total factor productivity growth, was between 1929 and 1973
That's also the time period that immigration to the US was at its lowest. The Immigration Act of 1924 strictly limited the number of immigrants allowed. That law was reversed by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Only 5% of the population were immigrants by the 1970 census, the lowest in US history. It's close to 15% now, a level which hasn't been reached since around 1900.
Income inequality plummeted because immigrant labor wasn't allowed to enter the US to drive down the wages of US workers.
H1B labor drives down the wages of US workers. Illegal immigrant labor drives down the wages of US workers. If you care about income inequality, then maybe consider supporting enforcing the immigration laws, and maybe consider supporting ending the H1B and other programs that drive down the wages of US workers and increase income inequality.
> Has the surge in immigration since 1970 led to slower wage growth for native-born workers? Academic research does not provide much support for this claim. The evidence suggests that when immigration increases the supply of labor, firms increase investment to offset any reduction in capital per worker, thereby keeping average wages from falling over the long term. Moreover, immigrants are often imperfect substitutes for native-born workers in U.S. labor markets. That means they do not compete for the same jobs and put minimal downward pressure on natives’ wages. This might explain why competition from new immigrants has mostly affected earlier immigrants, who experienced significant reductions in wages from the surge in immigration. In contrast, studies find that immigration has actually raised average wages of native-born workers during the last few decades.
I have heard people claim that cracking down on immigration will increase labor costs for farmers in California who rely on immigrant labor to harvest their crops. That would be a contradiction of your study that you cite.
Can you find an example of the opposite? Can you find me a California farmer who is happy with the crackdown on immigration because now his labor costs will decrease? That does not exist, for reasons of reality.
Where is the corporate support for decreased immigration if it will lower corporations labor costs?
Hmm, the rigorous systems of measure for GDP were only pioneered by Clark and Kuznets in the 30s and collected widely in the 40s. There were measures before then but they had much less rigor. I imagine the 1880s-mid 1920s were pretty impressive. Ditto for the 1830s-late 1850s.
What’s more, that time period includes recovery from the crashes of the early 30s, the massive war production of the 40s, and the massive boost that was having the rest of the world’s manufacturing and demand still in ruins in the 50s and 60s.
You could be right— but the data sure is confounded.
Lots of arguments back and forth about the politics of government workers. But perhaps the biggest argument against the “creative destruction is good” might be that it favors hiring workers who like to leave a lot of the details up to someone else. But the “someone else” people (who like stable, rule/process oriented organizations) will be missing in the asymptomatic solution? (Contrast with an org with stable, rule/process development, where an asymptomatic solution exists?)
The first point requires an additional layer. The modern administrative state has its origins in Woodrow Wilson ideology of scientific governance. Wilson didn’t like democracy and wasn’t much of a fan of the constitution: https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/the-study-of-ad....
A consequence of centralizing governance in a giant federal bureaucracy is that it’s become dominated by one party: https://www.govexec.com/pay-benefits/2016/10/federal-employe.... That was a predictable result of federalization. If the government is run by unelected bureaucrats insulated from the elected officials, then it’s completely unsurprising it will become dominated by the party that prefers bigger government.
In classic Trump fashion, he doesn’t care about federalism per se, hence his inconsistent actions on law enforcement and crime. But he has a brain stem level reaction that it’s crazy he got elected President and is expected to cajole a federal workforce of 1.8 million democrats into executing his policies. And he’s not wrong about that.
Regarding the DOJ, Thomas Jefferson personally directed the prosecution of Aaron Burr: https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/the-great-trial-that-tes.... So that part isn’t anything new. As to the merits of the case, 18 USC 1001 is astonishingly (and I’d argue unconstitutionally) broad. I think prosecuting people for “obstruction” without an underlying crime is bullshit, but the government does it all the time. And Comey vociferously defended the practice.
> then it’s completely unsurprising it will become dominated by the party that prefers bigger government.
I think you've assumed the conclusion here. One could equally say that if one party becomes overrepresented by people with higher education, that party will become overrepresented in any administrative position.
> Aaron Burr
I find myself more and more often in the position of having to look back many decades for precedent of things that are currently happening. Again, that's not necessarily a bad thing. But the variance of what to expect is wider, and I think it's fair to cast out one's net of expectations wider, and possibly darker.
Burr was a complicated man, doing complicated things, in a newly defined nation that was still defining norms. His trial was no stellar example of how to find truth and remonstrate wrongdoing. And I agree, "Lying to a federal officer" is absolutely ripe for misuse. A critical component of any subjective human system is integrity and adherence to justice. I don't think many people will look at Comey's prosecution and see it as the clear-headed and honest pursuit of justice.
> I think you've assumed the conclusion here. One could equally say that if one party becomes overrepresented by people with higher education, that party will become overrepresented in any administrative position
I think that’s true! It’s another reason why the federal workforce has come to be dominated by one party. But both point to the same result.
> I don't think many people will look at Comey's prosecution and see it as the clear-headed and honest pursuit of justice
I think it’s terrible to go fishing for a technical crimes with the goal of prosecuting a particular person. The criminal laws are written broadly and cannot withstand prosecutors who fit legal pieces together like a puzzle to come up with a legal theory for a prosecution (https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/charting-the-legal-theo...).
Comey was also involved in the Flynn setup. If Comey is convicted of procedural crimes it will be difficult to feel sorry for him when he used those or similar statutes to pursue other people.
So you're admitting that Trump is weaponizing the DOJ to get revenge on his opponents? How does a NY court and jury of his peers finding Trump guilty of a felony justify that?
The facts of the case have been covered at length (including by us in a detailed chronology), and the grand jury’s indictment and accompanying Statement of Facts speak for themselves. The prosecution has said that this case is not just about an affair and hush money payments, neither of which are illegal. Rather, the DA has explained the case concerns an attempt by Trump to interfere in the outcome of the 2016 presidential election outcome.[0]
The hush money arrangement with Daniels occurred just after the Access Hollywood scandal, where Trump boasted about committing sexual assaults, and was finalized on October 27, 2016, twelve days before the election. As described in the Statement of Facts, Trump initially directed Cohen to delay the payments to Daniels until after the election, “because at that point it would not matter if the story became public.” However, “with pressure mounting and the election approaching,” Trump ultimately agreed to the payoff.[0]
He doesn't have to be charged with them, the intention is what matters, but regardless the three points brought up were (as shown in your own lawfaremedia link):
Your quote above from the article you linked says:
> [T]he DA has explained the case concerns an attempt by Trump to interfere in the outcome of the 2016 presidential election outcome.
If the DA himself says that Trump’s crime is interfering with the 2016 election, why doesn’t the DA have to charge the law that covers that, and prove every required element of the crime under that law?
Because that's how the law in NY is written? I'm not really sure what you're trying to argue here, to be honest. The case played out in the legal system, a judge ruled it should go forward, and a jury convicted Trump on these charges.
A person is guilty of falsifying business records in the first degree when he commits the crime of falsifying business records in the second degree, and when his intent to defraud includes an intent to commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission thereof.[0]
> (a) Except as otherwise provided in this section, whoever, in any matter within the jurisdiction of the executive, legislative, or judicial branch of the Government of the United States, knowingly and willfully… (2) makes any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation
It basically makes any lie about “a matter within the jurisdiction … government” into a felony. No surprise that even a blue state grand jury indicted Comey for this.
The problem with the Comey case is that Trump is publicly pressuring the DOJ and installed his former personal attorney as the prosecutor. It's reported that they did so because evidence is lacking and the former prosecutor was pushed out for saying so. I guess we'll see how the case plays out but you can't deny that is clear weaponization of the DOJ. I don't recall Biden ever doing this.
> No surprise that even a blue state grand jury
Why would being in a "blue state" matter here? I don't think it's a given that grand juries are politically biased.
It will be run by the party that prefers bigger government... unless you remember how much the current administration has expanded the deficit and DHS.
Also, if you're saying that the past 100 years of American history, with all its various technocrats, was the result of a single ideology operating the government... maybe that ideology actually works pretty well?
Other Republican Presidents didn't have trouble getting their policies carried out despite similar civil service party membership and donation distributions.
It's also important to highlight the origins of modern US civil service (read: the Wilson+ era you're referencing) in the anti-Conkling/spoils Congressional factions and presidents of the late 19th century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-Breeds_(politics)#Setback...
As recently as 1880s the US was still assigning important civil service roles to whomever donated the most money to election campaigns.
The 1880s - 1970s generally featured a more protected civil service, with both advantages (insulation from changing presidents / legislators, maintaining institutional knowledge and competence) and disadvantages (insulation from performance-based hiring / firing, optimizing for bureaucratic rules became more effective than doing a great job).
The latter of which and anti-government sentiment post-Nixon drove deregulation and more direct executive control of the bureaucracy (e.g. the OPM).
As with all pendulums, we're now again seeing the excesses of affording too much power to the presidency (firing institutional knowledge because their role/expertise isn't currently politically en vogue).
Hopefully post-Trump this will spur reinforcing and insulation of civil service expertise.
There is expertise, but there is also ideology. To use the plane analogy everyone likes: the pilot should use his expertise to fly the plane, but he doesn’t get to choose where the plane is going! When you “insulate” the civil service from politics, what you end up doing is privileging the ideology and political goals of civil servants over those of voters.
But to continue your analogy, the pilot is also totally correct in refusing to crash the plane into the ground or jettison passengers out the door because they're brown.
The current state of affairs is not some mere disagreement of ideology.
> When you “insulate” the civil service from politics, what you end up doing is privileging the ideology and political goals of civil servants over those of voters.
No.
You end up balancing the current political desires of voters with institutional expertise.
Or to put it another way, would you say that "competency" is a political ideology or an objective fact?
It’s a terrifying experiment in hollowing out the civil service. At some point a critical mass of Federal workers may be lost which brings the entire machinery of the Federal Government to a standstill.
It’s also not clear how to recover from something like this.
That's the intention of this administration. Destroy any service that the government could provide until people can genuinely think the government is useless. Then the people currently in power and their cronies will come out of the woodwork "saving" the country with their private companies and interests. Competing with an empty shell of a government is the easiest way.
As a side effect, if they're to lose the next election they leave a corpse on the doorstep of the next administration. That makes it so much easier to pass on the blame.
Aligns perfectly with these people's views that a country is best led like a company not like a democracy. The realistic outcome will be formally (rather than the informal one as until now) corpocracy.
No matter who wins the elections, most of the actual decisions are being made by adherents of the same party. Trump had four times the support in AOC’s district in the Bronx than among federal employee donors. This is not a sustainable situation in a democracy.
Did you actually look at the numbers? You should give it a try. The best you can get from those numbers is that people are more likely to donate to the Democratic party than the Republican one.
For example: true, 99.4% of the donations from the USDA employees went to the Democratic part. 99.4% of how many donations? Less than 3,000. - Source [0] - and that's an overestimate, since that filter will include donations from 2015.
How many employees work for the USDA? About 100,000 [1].
That means that 97,000 people made no donations - to either party.
> The lopsided donations do not necessarily reflect how the federal workforce is voting. The former State Department secretary led the businessman by 5 percentage points among federal employees in a July poll by the Government Business Council, the research arm of Government Executive Media Group, with 42 percent of respondents saying they would vote for Clinton, compared to 37 percent who said the same for Trump.
Why wouldn’t donations be a reasonable proxy? 3,000 samples is more than enough to have a statistically significant analysis of a population of 100,000.
> 3,000 samples is more than enough to have a statistically significant analysis of a population of 100,000.
It's not a valid sample because it's not a random selection - statistical sampling isn't only about sample size.
One reasonable conclusion that can be drawn from the above numbers is that the Democrats in government are less stingy about donations, or that the Republicans there don't really like the GOP and are there for the money alone.
Nationally, Democrats raise significantly more money than Republicans[0], especially from small donors[1]. It wouldn't be surprising to me if this skew was stronger for people working in government.
It's not as odd when you look at employment length. One of the stats I've seen is that Democrats who go into the civil service are more likely to stay long term. Republicans are more likely to leave for the private sector.
I'd expect employees who have been there longer, and so are likely making more money, to be both more likely than shorter term employees to make political donations and to be likely to make bigger donations than those shorter term ones that do donate.
It is not a population sample - IE: we didn’t randomly pick 3000 people and observed who they donated to. Or in other words: we asked the whole population who they wanted to donate to and 97,000 said “none”.
> There is an ulterior motive for these cuts, but please be honest about what it is.
If you admit that the administration is up to "ulterior motives", you have to admit that they are likely to have more than one. There's no reason to assume there's only a single one and we should disregard everything else, no matter how well supported by the facts - looking at the composition of this admin, a drive to corpocracy is a a rather well supported assumption.
On the other hand, if a re-balancing was justified or required, it wouldn't be an ulterior motive, it would be up, front and center because it helps to paint the admin in a good light. The scope and reasons for the imbalance would be widely discussed... something that isn't happening. Also, to avoid disruption, it would be done gradually and absolutely NOT under the diabolical slogan "The Government is Bad".
I think, I practically proved the point of the parent of your comment, and disproved yours.
That link is looking at money donated which is not a very good measure because the amount a person donates is not fixed.
When you instead match up personnel and voter registration records you get that about half of the federal workforce was Democrats. Republicans were around a third in the late 1990s, but fell to about a quarter by 2019.
Polls of federal workers for specific elections also suggest that it is not nearly as imbalanced as the money totals. For instance in the 2022 midterms 37% of federal workers said they were voting Democrat in Senate races and 33% said they were voting Republican. In House races it 46% voting Democrat, 35% voting Republican.
> This is not a sustainable situation in a democracy.
Purging your enemies from everything and instead putting your buddies (especially as dishonest and unqualified as the ones this admin brought) will fix the current "unsustainable" situation? Is it even marginally less bad? Because looking from the distance what they're doing is changing from "not great" to "awful" for democracy, and looking close up I'm sure it looks even worse.
There's not a single illegal, abusive, or plain stupid thing that this admin has done where you can't find some "silver lining" that allows you to dilute the problem and make it look like you're part of some solution. "And well, the implementation may not have been perfect but we're trying to fix things".
Nothing about this was for democracy or the country, and who those people donate do doesn't matter. Only who they don't donate to.
I think an independent civil service dominated by a single party is the single greatest threat to democracy. It’s highly destabilizing when the executive branch is on auto-pilot pursuing its own policies regardless of whom voters elect as President.
The military is similarly dominated by the other party. Somehow, we expect them to be professional. Professionalism here means to faithfully execute lawful orders even when a Democrat is in the white house. There were no personal loyalty tests for the military under Obama, or loyalty purges.
That went fine (in that the military did in fact follow lawful orders under Democratic presidents, not in that those orders were necessarily good). It also went fine for the civil service under Republican presidents other than Trump. There are a number of explanations for the difference in perceived (and possibly real) professionalism, which I will not try to speculate on here - but this is not a partisanship problem. It seems to be something specific to Trump-as-President.
The military is uniquely disciplined and socialized to follow orders in a way the ordinary civil service isn’t.
And in comparison to previous republicans, the difference is two-fold. First, the government has been affected by the same politicization of the workplace that’s happened in corporate America over the last decade.
Second, previous republicans are aligned with neoliberal democrats on certain key cultural issues. Reagan publicly opposed affirmative action, but his government kept implementing and expanding it. Reagan and Bush supported immigration and Reagan granted amnesty. Highly educated democrats were willing to play along with certain issues, but see Trump’s issues as fundamentally moral ones. E.g. Even today, there is almost no partisan politics within the FCC. The career folks will happily go back and forth on net neutrality all day long. Nobody sees it as a moral imperative the way they see immigration.
Both of my parents worked at times for the Federal, state, and local governments. From that small sample size (also including corworkers, neighbors, etc) I would suggest that it IS the case that government workers will be strongly biased towards process-oriented changes. So “ignore the rules” will not go over well for most of them.
I think the most charitable interpretation of your argument might be that people would be more inclined to ignore the rules for ideas they believe in, but my data suggests that government employees in general (and not just the military!!) tend to be rule followers. I would argue that most people’s complaints about the government historically could be summed up by this???
It is a pretty remarkable strategy to be able to spend decades shitting all over the federal bureaucracy as a party, obviously discouraging conservatives from joining the bureaucracy, and then using party affiliation (obviously further skewed by the fact that federal workers tend to have college degrees, tend to be more racially diverse, and tend to live in the DC metro area) to decide that the whole thing needs to be destroyed.
You are spamming the same comment all over this thread. And this is just the RW hypocrisy at full display.
Trump is apparently the strong man leader with lots of support but at the same time the weakest leader who can be obstructed by smallest of opposition.
If he cannot get his most ardent detractors to support him then he is not much of a leader.
The sheer amount of complaining is grating and not even backed up with facts. It seemed you ran with the first article you found on Google and didn't read the conclusion:
> in a July poll by the Government Business Council, the research arm of Government Executive Media Group, with 42 percent of respondents saying they would vote for Clinton, compared to 37 percent who said the same for Trump.
That is maybe Democract are driven more to contribute but in voting there is just 5% difference. So much for "dominated by one party".
The federal bureaucracy is only "completely dominated" by one party, because the other party embraced a several-decades-long marketing campaign about how the de jure government is inefficient, hostile, and needs to be destroyed. It's utterly disingenuous to cast this in some relativist context, when this makeup is a direct result of the Republican party's chosen actions.
And I'm saying this as a libertarian who shares most of those frustrations with entrenched bureaucracy - just one who has become extremely conservative now that open fascism is upon us.
>>> That's the intention of this administration. Destroy any service that the government could provide until people can genuinely think the government is useless.
Not really sure ANY government service runs well. There are maybe one or two but as a whole government run anything never seems to be done well or at a decent cost. Just scan the comments about the massive overspending and poor service we already get as taxpayers.
Trying to get a properly run government program or service has been going on since the country was founded.
> Not really sure ANY government service runs well
I don't think you have perspective on that. What I'm telling you is that it can be a lot worse. I don't think you realize how much less accountable any private company is and that if you are ever ruled by one you will effectively be under a very abusive dictatorship, for all intents and purposes.
Random example. Google can cut you off from everything Google related and then some (identity, data, purchases, anything external that was linked to Google identity, etc.) with no recourse or justification. How often does the Government do that to you?
It's very easy to complaint when you've never seen the worse alternatives. How many people alive in US today do you think have even lived under them?
I've got this theory that people think government service must be so terrible because it was poor compared to corporate service in the 80's (the Golden Age of Boomerism), corporate service shamelessly got so much worse, and they simply assume government service must also have.
I've called the federal government a handful of times (IRS, Savings Bonds, Social Security). The people I spoke with were knowledgeable and empowered. A bit comic promulgating bureaucracy and delays (I think I was once told something like oh your case is only 10 days late being processed so it's not a priority yet), and of course some wait on hold/callback game. But the people I would end up speaking to had my paperwork in front of them, readily answered questions in an intelligent manner, and were empowered to make binding decisions for the government.
There was none of the "your ticket is still open so the only thing I can do is add a note that you called", or "sorry you've reached the wrong department, I can transfer you" buck passing bullshit that permeates corporate phone mazes. It was actually a breath of fresh air compared to dealing with corporate banks and financial institutions (at Vanguard I was told I had reached the wrong department, transferred, and waited on hold again five times before reaching the "correct" department).
I've also represented myself on the phone to my state's tax authority, and they were eminently reasonable as well. On the scheduled phone call (with me, their agent, and his supervisor), we agreed to an amicable solution on the spot. (I had really wanted to hire an attorney but they all played the equivocation game!)
>> It's very easy to complaint when you've never seen the worse alternatives.
I have relatives that fled the USSR during the heights of communism. I have played soccer with guys who came from South American countries that were mired in Civil War. Two of my best friends fled South Asia during the Pol Pot regime.
Its interesting you tell me I have no perspective without even knowing who I am or what I've experienced in my life. To judge someone like this is pretty offensive.
I'm keenly aware of how dictatorships work. I've heard and seen what an abusive government is capable of. I have yet to see the abuses people I know fled from happen here in the US.
>> How often does the Government do that to you?
Your short term memory must not be very good:
"If you like your doctor you can keep your doctor."
"If you like your plan, you can keep your plan."
"Take this vaccine or you're going to lose your job."
"This is the govt, you need to remove posts that we don't like."
"We couldn't come to an agreement on a budget so the government is shut down until further notice."
With a second attempt to rectify PAEA’s errors, Congress successfully granted a financial reform of $57 billion dollars through the Postal Service Reform Act in FY 2022. Soon after, Postmaster General DeJoy announced his “Delivering for America Plan” (DFA)
Delivery performance suffered as well, as the new consolidated facilities far underperformed the prior structure, leading to enormous cost overruns and overtime. The infrastructure for new EV delivery vehicles simply did not exist, and the selected manufacturer fell behind implementation times as each facility needed to be retrofitted for EV charging.
I'm not terrified. Just to put some perspective on this, per Pew [1], the federal workforce excluding the postal service (which has actually shrunk as a semi-private employer) has grown by about 1% per year since 2000. As of 2024, it was at 2.4M people. The federal workforce is dramatically bigger than it was even a few years ago [2].
Moreover, the vast majority of federal workers don't have anything to do with the kind of consumer-facing services that people think of when they think "government". More than half of all federal employees comprise: the Defense departments (Army, Navy, DoD, etc.), the Department of Homeland Security and the VA [3].
The federal workforce continues to get bigger and bigger, there's absolutely no practical incentive to stop it, and congress has abjectly failed to do its job in controlling the budget.
To be clear, this is not the right way to reduce the size of the federal government, but I'm not "terrified" of losing 100k employees in a government of this size. We need more cutting, not less.
If you zoom out (https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-people-work-for-the-f...), the size of the federal workforce has been at around 2.7-3 million people since the late 1960s, while the US population has gone from ~198 million in 1967 to ~343 million in 2025. We've gone from 14.39 federal employees per 1,000 people in 1967 to 8.78 federal employees per 1,000 people in 2024. Given that many of these employees do things like maintain infrastructure, regulate goods and services, and provide healthcare, you would expect the federal workforce to scale with the population.
> The federal workforce continues to get bigger and bigger, there's absolutely no practical incentive to stop it, and congress has abjectly failed to do its job in controlling the budget.
Most of the budget increase (~80-85% depending on whose projections you look at) comes from entitlements (social security, medicare/medicaid) and interest payments on the federal debt rather than any new spending. Of course interest payments are caused by past irresponsible spending, but it's hard to avoid debt if whenever the "party of fiscal responsibility" is in power, it does loud and flashy budget cuts that don't meaningfully reduce federal spending, followed by massive tax cuts to juice the economy. This is basically the equivalent of quitting your job and buying a ton of stuff on a credit card because you won $1000 on a scratch-off.
> the size of the federal workforce has been at around 2.7-3 million people since the late 1960s, while the US population has gone from ~198 million in 1967 to ~343 million in 2025. We've gone from 14.39 federal employees per 1,000 people in 1967 to 8.78 federal employees per 1,000 people in 2024.
Again, so what? The entire premise that government should scale with population is questionable. These comparisons with US population are facile.
Again, most of the employees are with Defense, VA and Homeland Security, none of which "should" scale with US population. I could go down the list and identify many other areas that likewise do not obviously scale with population (e.g. Agriculture, Interior, State, NASA, etc.) but this entire line of argument is pedantic. It's obvious to anyone who has dealt with the government that it is a bloated bureaucracy.
We completely agree that the budget problem is, at root, entitlements, but that doesn't mean that the government workforce is anywhere near an optimal level. I remain unterrified of a cut to 100,000 workers.
Why shouldn't Agriculture scale with population? Presumably a larger population involves more food being sold in the US (and grown in the US if the share of exports/imports remains the same).
You generally expect the size of an organization to scale with the scope of its activities, especially if its activities include "healthcare" and "building roads."
"Scope of activities", maybe, but there's no inherent reason that has to be equal the rate of growth in the population. You'd hope that government becomes more efficient over time.
Private organizations have profit constraints, and they're constantly striving to become more efficient, cut what doesn't work, and so on. Government has no such constraint.
To compare, Walmart employs over 2M workers, and as efficient as they are, they still need to scale with the size of their business scope. Whether it's a linear scale or a log scale, they need more and more people as they do more and more.
The fact that the same order of magnitude number of people can administer an entire country as the number of people that it takes to administer a bunch of stores is actually remarkable.
The government has become more efficient over time and its size as a percentage of the population has reduced as the population has grown.
Government does have a constraint like that - it has to remain solvent. A government as powerful as the United States has many tricks it can use to do that, but at some point even it cannot do anything it wants.
Why do we need more cutting? Why does the size of the federal government need to decrease? Please list the ways in which I and my community will benefit from a federal government with less personnel.
That's their entire strategy. Shrink government causing government to become ineffective, which provides evidence that government should shrink even more.
In reality there aren't that many jobs that exist but don't have to. The overwhelming majority of employees are paid to do work the employer needs to be done.
I honestly can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not.
It takes 10 different offices at the Department of Health and Human Services to run programs addressing AIDS in minority communities. Autism research is spread out over 11 different agencies. Eight agencies at the Defense Department are looking for prisoners of war and missing in action. And Schriever Air Force Base in Colorado has eight different satellite control centers to control 10 satellite programs.
The report, by the non-partisan Government Accountability Office, identifies 26 new areas where federal government programs are fragmented, duplicative, overlapping or just inefficient. Add that to the 162 areas identified in past reports, and Congress has a road map for saving tens of billions of dollars a year.
I stated there are actually few jobs in the world that are not needed. I didn't say government was perfectly efficient or that process changes are not needed.
Voting? Just like the Russians and North Koreans and Iranians vote better, right? If there will be voting, it will be very vetted by the administration. No "antifa" allowed. It's too funny in a way. Like a mirror:
In Russia, it's "fascists" the administration is fighting. In the US, it's "antifa" the administration is fighting.
By “better” you mean “more consistent with what I want,” right? Because your average Trump voter voted for the guy who had Elon get on stage with a chainsaw.
> By “better” you mean “more consistent with what I want,” right? Because your average Trump voter voted for the guy who had Elon get on stage with a chainsaw.
Do they want healthcare? Because I want Medicare for All (affordable, accessible, universal healthcare), and large swaths of conservative and rural America are going to lose their ~700 hospitals and Medicaid coverage (50% of rural births are paid for by Medicaid, a June 2025 KFF poll found that more than one in four (27%) adult Medicaid beneficiaries under age 65 are Republicans or lean Republican). Do they want to be able to export their ag to China? I was fine with farmers having their export market with federal subsidies, they voted against it (China has zeroed out US ag imports due to the tariff war, 75-80% of farmers voted for this admin). Do businesses want immigrant labor? I voted for it, they voted against it, and now they face crushing labor shortages in ag, construction, food services, hospitality, etc. Do they want their social security and veterans benefits and support systems? I voted for it, but they voted against it and now these social systems are going to rapidly degrade at scale. Do they want good paying jobs? I voted for it (pro worker, pro union, pro labor policies), they voted for the chainsaw (federal renewables subsidies cuts, federal gov workforce reductions, staunchly anti union positions, etc). Do they want universal daycare/childcare and school lunches? I want this for them, but they vote against this.
I want better for these people (accessible and affordable healthcare, childcare, social security, economic success broadly speaking to live healthy, fulfilled, meaningful lives), but they keep voting to hurt people like me, minorities, and vulnerability populations while shooting themselves in the feet. It's unfortunate. Having empathy is a terrible curse on this timeline. I can only ask them to vote better or I can stand back while they get the chainsaw. The choice lies with them.
"Too strong a belief in the rationality of people in general, or of the world, will lead us to seek purposive explanations where none exists."
Trump supporters are voting the same way as you—for the kind of country they want to live in, not just narrowly on policies to benefit themselves personally. But they think that their policies will achieve that, while your policies will just direct more taxpayer dollars to the layers of government and NGO employees who never manage to fix any of the problems they’re tasked with fixing.
I want your average Democrat to grow up with the privileges I had: a household with two married parents, an upbringing that emphasized hard work and resilience and discouraged ethnic identity or solidarity, a school where everyone speaks English and nobody belongs to a gang, a society with a safety net but without long term dependence on the government, etc. I think these things will make the country better for you, not just for me. Look at Mormons: they’re happy, healthy (the longest lived people in the country besides asians), and upwardly mobile. I want that for Baltimore!
I have empathy too! I lived in downtown Baltimore and saw that extensive social programs mostly go to funding middle class lifestyles for government workers and NGO employees. I think the people in Baltimore would be better off if they had the rigid social infrastructure they have in Utah rather than spending more money on programs that never seem to work.
This is the same thought process behind layoffs and is categorically, scientifically, absurd. It doesn't pan out that you "only let go of the people you don't want" and it turns out those people you let go signal to the people you absolutely want that they should leave.
I don't support what the Trump administration is doing. But saying it's "categorically, scientifically, absurd" to lay people off is some next-level stuff. I can guarantee to anyone reading this, that this person has never owned a business with any kind of significant overhead.
> For instance, a study of one Fortune 500 tech firm done by Teresa Amabile at Harvard Business School discovered that after the firm cut its staff by 15%, the number of new inventions it produced fell 24%. In addition, layoffs can rupture ties between salespeople and customers. Researchers Paul Williams, M. Sajid Khan, and Earl Naumann have found that customers are more likely to defect after a company conducts layoffs. Then there’s the effect on a company’s reputation: E. Geoffrey Love and Matthew S. Kraatz of University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign found that companies that did layoffs saw a decline in their ranking on Fortune’s list of most admired companies.
> A 2002 study by Magnus Sverke and Johnny Hellgren of Stockholm University and Katharina Näswall of University of Canterbury found that after a layoff, survivors experienced a 41% decline in job satisfaction, a 36% decline in organizational commitment, and a 20% decline in job performance.
> In a 2012 review of 20 studies of companies that had gone through layoffs, Deepak Datta at the University of Texas at Arlington found that layoffs had a neutral to negative effect on stock prices in the days following their announcement. Datta also discovered that after layoffs a majority of companies suffered declines in profitability, and a related study showed that the drop in profits persisted for three years. And a team of researchers from Auburn University, Baylor University, and the University of Tennessee found that companies that have layoffs are twice as likely to file for bankruptcy as companies that don’t have them.
It also just doesn't make any sense whatsoever.
Also, there's no reason to cast aspersions. Feel free to actually engage anytime you want.
The point is that they don't want it to recover. This is evidence that the US Government can't be trusted to provide the service themselves, and those functions should be privatized / contracted out instead... like how our Defense budget is so small thanks to us paying government contractors for everything we need, like $5,000 screwdrivers and $7,500 toilet seats installed by $300/hour Mechanic Specialist II's.
These people mostly already and effectively stopped working... The people I know that took this offer were told to stop showing up for work back in March-ish time frame. I see nothing in the article to suggest a sudden wave of new people taking up this offer -- as far as I can tell, the only thing that's about to change from what this article says is that our unemployment numbers will start to reflect it if those federal workers did not find new employment.
> These people mostly already and effectively stopped working... The people I know that took this offer were told to stop showing up for work back in March-ish time frame.
Well, yes. That's what the DRP was, they were put on administrative leave through 30 September. It's kind of hard to work when you're on admin leave. Are you surprised by the fact that this group of DRP folks are resigning on 30 Sept when that was the agreement they signed under the DRP? Did you expect something else?
The deferred retirement scheme is an incredibly ill-conceived way of shrinking the government. The way the incentive is structured it encourages the workers who are most able to find another job to leave. These are your best workers. The ones that will disproportionately stay are the least competitive in the job market. The other group of workers that will take it are those that were going to leave or retire anyway. So, for them its a waste of money and the transfer of their knowledge is cut short.
The same goes for the other DOGE employment initiative of firing probationary employees. These are mostly either people you have just hired or those that have been promoted. Of course, these are the employees you would most want to keep.
Since Reagan, the Republican party's stance has always been that government can't do anything right, so we should get rid of as much of it as possible, and every time Republicans have had the power to do so, they've sabotaged various agencies, then pointed to the inevitable problems that arise as proof of their claim.
An example of this was decommissioning mail sorting machines during Trump's first term, resulting in mail delays.
If you get rid of the most competent government workers, then obviously, government services will function less effectively, which will serve to bolster claims that those services simply don't work and should be shuttered anyway.
The real shame in all of this is the fact that buried deep within the 100k are workers who actually know a thing or two about how things actually work, have the experience and knowledge to get things done, have a pretty good idea how to improve the processes and policies, have chosen to do their assigned duties correctly, but have probably had limited success trying to change things.
So they're getting out because "it's time I guess. Not much else I can do."
Salient point: this is not a resignation, these are the people who took the buyout, and the buyout period is ending. There's not going to be this mass resignation today of people walking out of their jobs. They've already left the position.
> Speaking to Newsweek, Scott Lucas, who teaches international politics at University College Dublin
It perhaps says a lot about the current situation in academia in the US that they had to go _outside the US_ (albeit to an American working outside the US) for comment.
What i have seen is that those who resigned had 20+ years experience and younger folks stayed. So it was a bit of a brain drain, at least from my limited interaction with the three letter agencies.
At the start of the year, the OPM announced that federal workers could either take a voluntary resignation and go on paid leave until Sept. 30 (today), or be subject to return-to-office orders (including forced relocation if necessary), higher performance standards, and further involuntary layoffs. According to this article, about 100,000 people took the voluntary resignation.
As for motive, it's a way for the Trump admin to clear out the federal workforce and install loyalists to make it easier for him to carry out his agenda.
Resignation? Doesn't that imply that they are choosing to leave?
> The resignations—which come as part of a program drawn up by President Donald Trump at the start of his second administration—will happen on Tuesday as Congress is facing a deadline on the same day to authorize more funding or risk a government shutdown.
> If there is no deal, the White House has ordered federal agencies to make plans for the large-scale redundancies.
I believe the 100k are those that took the "deferred resignation program" at the beginning of the year. They have been getting paid to not bother showing up to work all this time, but are finally coming up on the date where they will all officially resign. Those people are choosing to leave.
It was voluntary on paper, but there was a clear threat that if you didn't take it there was a good chance you would be fired with no severance. Whether this threat was implicit or explicit depended on what department you were in.
Source: Federal workers I know personally, and numerous public statements from DOGE officials and cabinet secretaries when this offer was made.
> “The reality is clear: A large-scale reduction, in response to the President’s workforce executive orders, is already happening. The government is restructuring, and unfortunately, many employees will later realize they missed a valuable, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” the official said.
It was actually and completely voluntary. My only source is that I am a federal contractor who was invited to at least some of the all hands meetings where this was discussed within my agency. The federal government is _huge_ and obviously I can't speak to every single agency, but at least for mine there wasn't even a hint of pressure to take the offer.
DRP was voluntary. Some people who took it would still have a job tomorrow if they hadn't. Others who took it were in a situation where they were likely going to get RIF'd. DRP gave them a better off-ramp than the severance package under a RIF. For them, it wasn't really voluntary but more a "Well, I'm losing my job anyways might as well get the best deal I can out of this shitty situation." Many others took it because they were going to retire this year anyways, so why not?
In the U.S. context this impacts agencies that regulate industry and offer beneficial state services (healthcare, food inspection, pollution monitoring) and not services that impact state control (DHS, the military, or domestic secret police (FBI)).
The longstanding goal has been to undo the new deal
I recommend _Culture in Nazi Germany_ by Michael H. Kater. [1]
Propaganda was the control they wanted. 3rd party companies and organizations allowed for a pseud disconnect with the shared propaganda. See this paper, music group, artist supports our ideology and we are not paying them for it.
Centrally controlled does not mean being centrally employed. Just take a look at all the big businesses that assisted fascism for financial gain. Lot of it being slave labor. [0]
I honestly don't understand this. Businesses have been doing loads of things along with the last government as well - silencing/reducing certain views while promoting others, and creating a monoculture throughout schools, universities, and businesses. Why do you only see it when this side does it (or some fraction of it)?
Fascists generally want everything centrally controlled, but the mechanism generally used is government control of industry. The government itself might become relatively small because government functions are performed by industry in government control. Or by the military, not the civilian government.
I find the constant equating of illegal immigrants with Jews who lived legally in Germany for many generations and who had done nothing illegal or wrong at all very disturbing. It minimizes what happened there.
If not for Nazi Germany, would the behavior of the current admin, especially with respect to ICE, be labeled “fascist”? My impression is that the optics of vanning people is reminiscent of the optics of what happened in Germany, and so the label comes out. This is bolstered by Nazi Germany being probably the most covered topic in American history class for the past many decades, as well as similar coverage in Hollywood, to the point where “bad guy” and Nazi/fascist are basically synonyms.
I mean, you can be just as callous and say that those who remained in Germany after the country legally revoked their citizenship[1] had, in fact, done something illegal by remaining there. They were just as illegal as a kid who has lived here since she was 3 months old.
Yours is also the same argument that was made for years about not including LGBT people among the victims of the Holocaust, since they had in fact broken the law by existing.
So in your comparison, on the one hand are laws that are shared by literally every nation (having and maintaining a border), and on the other hand is a historical edge case where citizenship was deleted.
I think it’s pretty easy to achieve consistency by just being opposed to deleting citizenship, but being in favor of maintaining and enforcing a border? No contradiction there.
I don’t see what’s calloused about it, either. People voluntarily relocate with their children, who do not have a choice in the matter, all the time. If the parents are sneaking into and hiding in a country, I don’t see what’s so different about the family being removed to their place of origin vs the family voluntarily relocating, from the perspective of the child.
Once the child is 18 they have their own choice to continue hiding in a country they are not in legally or to return to their place of origin. Like, if I was forcibly returned to where my family is from in Europe due to similar circumstances, I would not be that upset about it. These people are only mad because the place they are from sucks. That is not the problem of America or Americans.
What are you talking about? Revocation of citizenship, denaturalization, exile, banishment, etc are some of the oldest functions of law there are. For as long as states and the concept of citizenship have existed, revocation of citizenship has been a thing.
Hell, entire countries were started by populations that were denaturalized.
And countries regularly denaturalize their own citizens, both in the past and present.
During war, it's even more common, especially among naturalized citizens. Germany considered itself in a state of war from an enemy foreign and within, denaturalization and then expelling of non-citizens was in their right, just as it was in the right of literally every Western nation to do the same during times of war, which they did. In fact, just having the wrong ideas or saying the wrong thing were grounds for denaturalization here and elsewhere.
In the period that the Nuremburg Laws were passed, rates of denaturalization world-wide had reached a high point. World War I had increased the rate, and it continued accelerating after, with denaturalization laws passed and used in practice by every country that had fought in it. In the decades before Germany's denaturalization laws, literally tens of millions of people had been denaturalized from their homelands.
Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were denaturalized and exiled in order to establish the State of Israel. Millions of black South Africans were denaturalized and were made citizens of Bantustans. Today, the Royhingya are stateless because they were denaturalized. In 2013, hundreds of thousands of black Haitians had their citizenship revoked.
The idea that citizenship cannot be revoked is a recent US/UN thing for some reason. And even then it's still wrong, because the US has a long history of denaturalizing its undesirables.
> I don’t see what’s calloused about it, either. People voluntarily relocate with their children, who do not have a choice in the matter, all the time. If the parents are sneaking into and hiding in a country, I don’t see what’s so different about the family being removed to their place of origin vs the family voluntarily relocating, from the perspective of the child.
[0][1]:
> Neighbors like Eboni Watson say they ducked for cover as they heard several flash bangs.
> "They was terrified. The kids was crying. People was screaming. They looked very distraught. I was out there crying when I seen the little girl come around the corner, because they was bringing the kids down, too, had them zip tied to each other," Watson said. "That's all I kept asking. What is the morality? Where's the human? One of them literally laughed. He was standing right here. He said, 'fuck them kids.'"
> “It was heartbreaking to watch,” she said. “Even if you’re not a mother, seeing kids coming out buck naked and taken from their mothers, it was horrible.”
> "They just treated us like we were nothing," Fisher said.
Okay so what percent of historical citizenships have been revoked? What percent would it be for you to not consider it an edge case? My estimate is an upper bound of 1% of citizenships historically were deleted. I would call that an edge case. Not because it doesn’t matter, but because being for enforcement of borders and residency laws does not make you automatically for deleting citizenships, and conflating the two is incorrect. If it is 5% or 10% then I would be wrong to use the language “edge case” but I believe my point stands regardless.
I had not read about the “naked zip tied children” case. If that happened as described, the officers involved should be disciplined. I do wish this could be done in a more orderly fashion as that would reduce the chances of illegal conduct from the officers, though with the American election cycle I can understand why the regime may feel like it needs to act quickly.
You're saying that ICE only targets illegal immigrants? how do they know who's an illegal immigrant? skin colour? Because that's the criteria they're applying right now.
Also what do you say about ICE detaining legal residents? you stated "equating illegal immigrants with Jews [...]" as if ICE is only detaining illegal immigrants. They're not. They're detaining anyone who isn't white enough. Members of the Trump regime have also threatened to deport legal citizens who are just exercicing their free speech. You're anti free speech as well?
When is your moral framework going to kick in and call a spade a spade?
ICE doesn’t do law enforcement against citizens. It does affect citizens tangentially but not directly. ICE will not come after citizens for crimes. That would be regular local police, state police or FBI/ATF, etc. ICE is immigration enforcement. Some people may not like that especially illegal residents but it would be a poor way to affect citizens like fascists or communists did.
What do you mean? If you mean interfering with officers carrying out their duties, then yes, people do get arrested for that. But you would get arrested for interfering with any law enforcement. People do get to protest but they do not get the right to protest violently nor do they get a right to interfere with law enforcement just because they disagree with the law.
Just like if you want to protest eminent domain but officers come in to move out protesters getting in the way of construction. People will get arrested. You can protest peacefully. You cannot interfere with official acts or be violent.
ICE will (and already are to an extent) come after anyone who looks like trouble. If they want to superficially follow the law, they beat people up and release them after 23 hours after "discovering" the person is a citizen. Then, repeat as many times as necessary.
Since nobody actually knows who ICE is, it can devolve pretty easily from there. The most pedestrian would be protection money to avoid detention, from citizens and non-citizens, it doesn't matter.
Kind of the same role they played during the civil rights struggle. They are there to bolster law enforcement when local law enforcement may be overwhelmed enforcing federal law.
Trump has actively talked about denaturalizing his enemies [1]. You would be technically correct that he's not going after citizens, but that's only because he'll declare everyone he doesn't like antifa and thus not worthy of citizenship.
A move, I should point out, that the Nazis did to the Jews and Communists.
In his 1995 essay "Ur-Fascism", cultural theorist Umberto Eco lists fourteen general properties of fascist ideology.[17] He argues that it is not possible to organise these into a coherent system, but that "it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it". He uses the term "Ur-Fascism" as a generic description of different historical forms of fascism. The fourteen properties are as follows:
"The cult of tradition", characterized by cultural syncretism, even at the risk of internal contradiction. When all truth has already been revealed by tradition, no new learning can occur, only further interpretation and refinement.
"The rejection of modernism", which views the rationalistic development of Western culture since the Enlightenment as a descent into depravity. Eco distinguishes this from a rejection of superficial technological advancement, as many fascist regimes cite their industrial potency as proof of the vitality of their system.
"The cult of action for action's sake", which dictates that action is of value in itself and should be taken without intellectual reflection. This, says Eco, is connected with anti-intellectualism and irrationalism, and often manifests in attacks on modern culture and science.
"Disagreement is treason" – fascism devalues intellectual discourse and critical reasoning as barriers to action, as well as out of fear that such analysis will expose the contradictions embodied in a syncretistic faith.
"Fear of difference", which fascism seeks to exploit and exacerbate, often in the form of racism or an appeal against foreigners and immigrants.
"Appeal to a frustrated middle class", fearing economic pressure from the demands and aspirations of lower social groups.
"Obsession with a plot" and the hyping-up of an enemy threat. This often combines an appeal to xenophobia with a fear of disloyalty and sabotage from marginalized groups living within the society (such as the German elite's "fear" of the 1930s Jewish populace's businesses and well-doings; see also antisemitism). Eco also cites Pat Robertson's book The New World Order as a prominent example of a plot obsession.
Fascist societies rhetorically cast their enemies as "at the same time too strong and too weak". On the one hand, fascists play up the power of certain disfavored elites to encourage in their followers a sense of grievance and humiliation. On the other hand, fascist leaders point to the decadence of those elites as proof of their ultimate feebleness in the face of an overwhelming popular will.
"Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy" because "life is permanent warfare" – there must always be an enemy to fight. Both fascist Germany under Hitler and Italy under Mussolini worked first to organize and clean up their respective countries and then build the war machines that they later intended to and did use, despite Germany being under restrictions of the Versailles treaty to not build a military force. This principle leads to a fundamental contradiction within fascism: the incompatibility of ultimate triumph with perpetual war.
"Contempt for the weak", which is uncomfortably married to a chauvinistic popular elitism, in which every member of society is superior to outsiders by virtue of belonging to the in-group. Eco sees in these attitudes the root of a deep tension in the fundamentally hierarchical structure of fascist polities, as they encourage leaders to despise their underlings, up to the ultimate leader, who holds the whole country in contempt for having allowed him to overtake it by force.
"Everybody is educated to become a hero", which leads to the embrace of a cult of death. As Eco observes, "[t]he Ur-Fascist hero is impatient to die. In his impatience, he more frequently sends other people to death."
"Machismo", which sublimates the difficult work of permanent war and heroism into the sexual sphere. Fascists thus hold "both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality".
"Selective populism" – the people, conceived monolithically, have a common will, distinct from and superior to the viewpoint of any individual. As no mass of people can ever be truly unanimous, the leader holds himself out as the interpreter of the popular will (though truly he alone dictates it). Fascists use this concept to delegitimize democratic institutions they accuse of "no longer represent[ing] the voice of the people".
"Newspeak" – fascism employs and promotes an impoverished vocabulary to limit critical reasoning.
From a European perspective, it's really hard not to see much/all of this resonating in MAGA USA.
> From a European perspective, it's really hard not to see much/all of this resonating in MAGA USA.
That might be partly because there've been 10 years of everything being called fascism, rather than any genuine thought that selects fascism out of a group of alternatives.
This is so lazy. I literally posted a list of things that typify facism in an article from 30 years ago.
In case it’s not clear: Trump looks like a racist and a facist to many Europeans. He’s stoking division for policitical ends, extending and normalising the use of the army under laughably thin pretext. What is shocking is how little Americans see to notice or care. But given the state of your media, perhaps that’s to be expected?
Under Umberto Eco’s definition of Ur-Fascism[1] (the usual one I reach for, though others are available) what GP is referencing is most closely aligned with #13 Selective Populism, which at least from my viewpoint outside the US is seemingly correct.
At the risk of sounding dumb, I've never found this list of traits particularly illuminating. Many of these are found in the left political faction in the US as well (4, 7, 8, 13[1] and 14 immediately come to mind) and some are absent from the right. How do you weight which ones are important and who's really "fascist"?
The whole exercise feels like going on WebMD and diagnosing yourself with cancer because of some vague symptoms. Doesn't mean that nothing is wrong with you, but it's not necessarily cancer either.
[1] This one happened in this very thread where someone accused the Supreme Court and Congress of being complicit. Like, ok.
An autocrat attacking and destroying societal institutions, bringing industry to heel under his dictats, and running concentration camps to perform ethnic cleansing (while being primed to move on to ideological cleansing). It's not "Fascism" in the sense of being Mussolini's party, but if you're willing to label National Socialism / Naziism as "fascism" then the label most certainly applies to Trumpism.
I think it is quite evident that the modern far-right movement in the US (including those in power today) can be characterized as fascist.
"The cult of tradition," characterized by cultural syncretism, even at the risk of internal contradiction. When all truth has already been revealed by tradition, no new learning can occur, only further interpretation and refinement.
"The rejection of modernism," which views the rationalistic development of Western culture since the Enlightenment as a descent into depravity. Eco distinguishes this from a rejection of superficial technological advancement, as many fascist regimes cite their industrial potency as proof of the vitality of their system.
"The cult of action for action's sake," which dictates that action is of value in itself and should be taken without intellectual reflection. This, says Eco, is connected with anti-intellectualism and irrationalism, and often manifests in attacks on modern culture and science.
"Disagreement is treason" – fascism devalues intellectual discourse and critical reasoning as barriers to action, as well as out of fear that such analysis will expose the contradictions embodied in a syncretistic faith.
"Fear of difference," which fascism seeks to exploit and exacerbate, often in the form of racism or an appeal against foreigners and immigrants.
"Appeal to a frustrated middle class," fearing economic pressure from the demands and aspirations of lower social groups.
"Obsession with a plot" and the hyping-up of an enemy threat. This often combines an appeal to xenophobia with a fear of disloyalty and sabotage from marginalized groups living within the society. Eco also cites Pat Robertson's book The New World Order as a prominent example of a plot obsession.
Fascist societies rhetorically cast their enemies as "at the same time too strong and too weak." On the one hand, fascists play up the power of certain disfavored elites to encourage in their followers a sense of grievance and humiliation. On the other hand, fascist leaders point to the decadence of those elites as proof of their ultimate feebleness in the face of an overwhelming popular will.
"Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy" because "life is permanent warfare" – there must always be an enemy to fight. Both fascist Germany under Hitler and Italy under Mussolini worked first to organize and clean up their respective countries and then build the war machines that they later intended to and did use, despite Germany being under restrictions of the Versailles treaty to not build a military force. This principle leads to a fundamental contradiction within fascism: the incompatibility of ultimate triumph with perpetual war.
"Contempt for the weak," which is uncomfortably married to a chauvinistic popular elitism, in which every member of society is superior to outsiders by virtue of belonging to the in-group. Eco sees in these attitudes the root of a deep tension in the fundamentally hierarchical structure of fascist polities, as they encourage leaders to despise their underlings, up to the ultimate leader, who holds the whole country in contempt for having allowed him to overtake it by force.
"Everybody is educated to become a hero," which leads to the embrace of a cult of death. As Eco observes, "[t]he Ur-Fascist hero is impatient to die. In his impatience, he more frequently sends other people to death."
"Machismo," which sublimates the difficult work of permanent war and heroism into the sexual sphere. Fascists thus hold "both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality."
"Selective populism" – the people, conceived monolithically, have a common will, distinct from and superior to the viewpoint of any individual. As no mass of people can ever be truly unanimous, the leader holds himself out as the interpreter of the popular will (though truly he alone dictates it). Fascists use this concept to delegitimize democratic institutions they accuse of "no longer represent[ing] the voice of the people".
"Newspeak" – fascism employs and promotes an impoverished vocabulary in order to limit critical reasoning.
Depends on how you measure things. Trump did not receive a majority of all possible votes, nor did he receive a majority of all votes that were cast. He did receive a plurality of votes that were cast.
But then again the oldest trick in the authoritarian‘s playbook is to abandon the path of democracy by tilting the scales in their party’s favor. which is why you want strong independent institutions and separation of powers in a democracy, something the current administration does not appear to be in favor of.
In the Westminster system, if Parliament can't pass the budget brought by the Government[0], the head of state dissolves Parliament and issues writs for a new general election. This is because raising taxes and spending money is most of what the Government does, so an inability to do this is a constitutional crisis. In the US, this is impossible, because the head of state leads the administration that prepares the budget.
In most such systems it’s a simple majority vote of a unicameral legislator. The uniqueness of the USA is the bicameral legislature with de facto veto by the minority by refusing cloture. Without at 8-10 members of the minority breaking ranks (depending on the actual split), a unified minority can cause complete gridlock.
No. the administrative state is negligible budget expense in the grand scheme of government payments. Interest payments, entitlements, defense budgets etc are orders of magnitude more. Trump is just using the Project 2025 playbook to screw over the American people and the USA and line his pockets while he can. The idiots over at the heritage foundation are foaming at the mouth they're so happy now.
All of these resignations were submitted before February 12. The resigning employees have been collecting payroll until today, but they resigned long ago
Flagged as misleading/inflammatory. Most of the comments here are probably bots.
One part is what I call "The Great Defederalization". In a myriad of ways, the federal state that was erected between FDR and LBJ is being torn down. That state existed on a group of decisions that allowed independent agencies outside of the direct oversight of the president: the Humphrey's Executor agencies, NLRB, FCC, FTC. The Supreme Court and Congress are very happy to work on rolling them back, and they were constructed on pretty awful jurisprudence to begin with. That can work-- we should engage in creative destruction, the administrative state did restrict economic growth, and it did create carve-outs out of the Constitution. If it made us a more reliable partner, that did come at the cost of flexibility.
But at the same time, this executive isn't defederalizing to defer power to the states-- it's doing it to grant more immediate power to the president, who is in effect weaponizing the armed forces and police forces against non-compliant localities and personal enemies. News like this happening the same week as the president sends the Army to a passive American city in order to plainly provoke a conflict, and directing his DoJ to enact a case on paper thin justification, is troubling, to say the least.