I’ve witnessed this phenomenon that probably causes it up-close in the public sector. It’s a larger-scale case of that same phenomenon that makes bigger businesses generally less able to react than smaller ones - everyone working there is primarily concerned with protecting their own neck or at best, those of their immediate peers in a kind of clique-ey way.
Survival in those waters is about keeping your head in and greasing the right wheels. Dissenters are efficiently dealt with.
Given that, it’s no surprise there’s a general unwillingness to fo against the grain and push for change. The closest you get is elections which are drastically abstract and unable to tackle/target single issues until they become overriding priorities. Even then you’re just swapping out the leadership and there’s a whole abstraction of the machinery of government to wade through before you get close to the ‘able to do things’ people. In fact underneath that you’ve now got an additional layer because many things are farmed out to the private sector.
Maybe this is what the Great Filter looks like from within?
Alas that’ll be real late.
Road to WW2:
You could set up the dominoes all the way back to the punitive Versailles Agreement, but purely militarily...
1930, Japan moved into Manchuria. Germany withdrew from the League of Nations in 33, and immediately started rearming and brought back universal conscription. Rhineland reoccupied in 36, and Fracno put on the throne in the Spanish "Civil War" the same year - where they supplied armaments, troops, supplies, and lots and lots of planes. Blitzkreig was honed and practised here.
Britain and France still busy appeasing, and ignoring clear, obvious unmissable signs. Some fringe, and not so fringe members of their major right of centre parties are highly sympathetic to German rebuilding and aims. They would like to do deals with that nice Mr Hitler. Including the man who was offered the premiership of the UK before Churchill, when Chamberlain stepped down. USA is busy ignoring the world, deep in isolationism, but at the same time building trade with Germany and parts of the US, notably California and New York are most impressed to see German implementation of eugenics as policy (Nazi eugenics and what developed from it originated in US ideas and policies[1]). League of Nations whistles a happy tune as its highest membership was during this period.
In 37, Japan steps up to an all out war of total conquest with China, and the Rape of Nanjing takes place, 300k+ dead. Then follows Anschluss with Austria in 38 with still barely a word muttered on the global stage. Nor was anything done about Sudetenland (half of then Czechoslovakia). The day after the Slovak State was formed from the rest, they occupied that too.
39 Brought the "Peace in our Time" Munich Agreement. Hitler responds peacefully by annexing parts of Latvia, Mussolini annexes Albania. Allies, well the European ones, finally think perhaps they might, possibly/maybe do something. But not yet.
Aug 1939 brings the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which presents an astonishingly accurate picture of the post-war Europe we actually got. September 39 and Poland is annexed. Finally two of the four major Allies do something. War is declared 3rd September 1939. But it will take much stalling to buy time to rearm properly, now at full speed finally. The success of the Battle of Britain after the fall of France (in moments), and Dunkirk, gives a tiny glimmer of hope -- and bought 18 months in which to rearm, though air force losses weren't sustainable.
Those other two Allies, come to the party when it is politically unavoidable. Nazi invasion of USSR in June 41 and Pearl Harbor in December, otherwise they probably wouldn't have bothered without some other major event provoking action.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_eugenics#Origins_in_the_U...
Apparently lying to them is a good way to get them to vote for you. It works for politicians and the mass media.
I don't know how the politics in Australia work, but the main problem in the US is that the states with the biggest fire problems are democratic (California, Oregon and Washington) so are under constant pressure from republicans to have their federal fire budgets lowered, or are republican like Idaho and vote for smaller federal budgets anyway.
For a bit of background, this crisis has been playing out for over a century. Republicans supported the large timber, mining and ranching lobbies that clearcut the old growth forests of the northwest, poisoned the water with mercury/arsenic and desertified grasslands. Fire prevention measures left forests too thick with young trees of the wrong species that can't survive burns and the loss of native species on the high desert makes range fires larger and more intense. Global warming has raised winter temperatures to the point that pine beetles no longer freeze out, so most forests are sick or dying as their phloem is stripped by the beetles (similar things are happening with invader aphids on the east coast as their forests die). Democratic environmentalists worked to stop public land mismanagement but were largely mocked until it was too late.
This is primarily a republican problem, because democrats vote for solutions but are mostly outvoted in these times. The closest thing to blaming democrats for this would be via political horse trading, so maybe democrats pushed wedge issues like abortion or affirmative action so republicans attacked democratic causes like the environment in response. Or maybe democrats looked the other way as a trade for getting their own causes through. But the evidence suggests that when it comes to fires specifically, there is no "both sides" argument here.
The messed up part is that the politics don't carry over to firefighters. It wouldn't surprise me if they are majority republican, or at the very least conservative. Working hard but being undercut by their party.
Some help is on the way with new federal fire disaster funding put forth by republicans:
https://www.crapo.senate.gov/media/newsreleases/crapo-wyden-...
But keep in mind that this is a thinly-veiled attempt to reintroduce the timber industry and "thin the threat" rather than letting trees burn. Personally I'm against this, as I've seen extraction lobbyists run roughshod over the environment here. But I've also noticed that younger republicans here, especially hunters and anglers, support protecting public lands and regulating resource extraction more intelligently than in the past in order to protect natural resources for future generations. So time will tell.
I've tried to make this as factual as I can, but it's inherently a political issue. I don't mean to offend, just inform.
that are soon to be unpaid