Woah! This stuff is unwinding faster than my priors. I'm going to have to re-evaluate everything I thought true about the US. I just always assumed "strong institutions" meant something here. That it was all a house built on sand is disconcerting.
These attacks are not unique to the United States; there is a coordinated effort across many countries by public policy groups and private interests. The United States are highly visible due to their ownership of global media, but the Republican party has been pursuing these objectives publicly and clearly for more than 30 years, and has made incremental progress to the point where they were able to re-engineer the Supreme Court and lower courts, as well as elect far right politicians who would tear up the rules to make it happen.
This is the sharp upwards curve of increase in velocity that is the result of sustained accelleration over the last few decades. It's going to get a lot worse before it gets better, and not just in the United States.
Often these victories have contributed to further momentum—concentration of wealth means more money for the cause; death of the "fairness doctrine" opens up the possibility of wholly partisan media for propagandizing, which was instantly capitalized on with a boom in right wing AM radio; Citizens United decision de facto ending campaign finance regulation, well that's sure convenient; all kinds of things.
This has been more than a half-century in the making.
The books Democracy in Chains, Lobbying America, and Dark Money are three (of many, many) good intros to the conservative reaction to the The New Deal.
I would say it isn't that our institutions were built on sand, more that its hard to stop a madman who broke into your house with a chainsaw (a la Musk) from knocking down a few load-bearing walls.
It is easier to destroy almost anything than it is to create it in the first place.
It's worse than that. PEPFAR was a signature initiative of the previous Republican president.
Everything really changed with the bailouts then the tea party movement. The republicans went from big business, lower taxes, exclusively to populism.
The dems are going through a similar bend currently and probably would have happened sooner if they hadn't undermined their voters nomination of Bernie in 2015.
The republicans (love um or hate them) didn't change the rules to scuttle Trump. One party is listening to their base the other is trying to control them (and imo is imploding because of it). I'm honestly a bit of a neo con so there isn't a place for me in a populist republican party. I'll just keep throwing votes at Chase Oliver / similar outsiders until we have a return to sanity.
This isn't due to one man (Musk) or a rogue government agency, or even the executive branch.
This is Congress, which tells you how bad things have gotten.
Ok, but to be clear, Congress gets to. Congress has done about-faces like this before, yet the Republic is still here.
Obviously - there's no implication of processes not being followed.
My point, which mirrors yours, is that this isn't the result of a rogue actor. It's a result of collective action.
I think it's very fitting that you'd use this metaphor, because the people you oppose wouldn't even find that slightly challenging.
- Congress
- the Executive
- the Judiciary
- the States and their constitutional
institutions
- the jury
If anything, government should have been cut AND revenues increased; but, that's not how either party works. (disgusting oversimplification: Republicans reduce revenue and reduce spend while Democrats increase revenue and increase spend).
There is no system you could structure rigidly enough that it would not be vulnerable to bad actors. You can insulate yourself by distributing authority as we have, but if those authorities stop playing following the laws, rules, and norms well you end up where we are at, devolving into facisim.
Actually, it was more like 25% but who's counting?
Norms are dead, you can just suggest assassination of your opponent and still win a Presidential election now, the batshit crazy stuff's not just for races in rural Montana or whatever. Like, IDK how this reads to younger folks, but I assure them that things are now happening practically daily that would have been unthinkable 15 years ago, let alone farther back. Things got visibly weirder fast.
It makes it hard to be optimistic that there is any plausible roadmap back to some form of normalcy in the medium term.
I wish anyone with even a little power were talking about ditching the position of "Supreme Court Justice" and just drawing for the role by lot from the "lower" federal courts each term. That could be done with a law, not an amendment-there has to be a Supreme Court, and federal judgeships are "during good behavior" (de facto "for life") but Supreme Court Justice per se doesn't have to be a permanent role. The closest I hear anyone talking about is court expansion, but that's a less-effective fix, and one more likely to draw strong push-back and to be unpopular, I think.
The better thing to do, in my mind, is to limit the term length of a justice and eliminate the pocket veto, but I can't think of any way in which the elimination of a pocket veto also can't be exploited in some way (eg: with a 6-3 court, if a Republican-aligned justice stepped down, a Republican president can knowingly put forward a candidate they know won't get approved to keep the margin 5-3 vs. 5-4).
This was entirely expected and predicted once neoliberalism took hold in the Democratic and Republican parties and began rotting out the central pillars of American Democracy and Empire.
A lot of people are learning that institutions aren’t these bulwarks against hostile actors, but in actuality are collections of people aligned on a given mission. For decades, Americans have neglected these people, cut funding to the helpful institutions, and granted far too much funding to negative ones. This culminated in the vilifying of these pillars and their members by a cadre of politicians backed by wealthy donors seeking change preferable to their personal agendas at the expense of the people, and it takes decades of continuous chipping away to get to the situation of today.
None of this is sudden, new, or shocking to those of us who have been staying informed, consuming legitimate news sources, and doing proper research with high-quality reference material. To the average person who merely consumes Cable News or mass media, this may all feel very sudden or surprising and therefore reversible.
It’s not.