There's probably no ideal out there, just different better (or if you prefer, 'less bad') options. With the modern web, nothing is permanent. If a company or software is amazing, it could always become awful in the future. In principle software always potentially suffered from this problem, but the modern web really accelerates this process. There's effectively no web browser which can remain static as the web around it changes so rapidly. And, in order to be meaningfully useful for a broad audience it would also need to keep up with Chromium, which is incredibly well-funded. I think we're in a losing game.
I don't believe we are facing a military conflict soon, but it is clear that something fundamental has changed, and even if suddenly the US government does a 180, it's a whooole lot of toothpaste to put back in the tube.
Essentially, start freezing US dependencies out of your tech stack and take control:
- Keep local and off-line copies of your important data, and maintain frequent backups
- Block companies that comply willingly with unfair practices at your network edge (e.g. with a Pi-hole for DNS-based blocking, and you get ad blocking in addition)
Thank you. My first two steps will be to switch over my computer from macOS to Asahi Fedora Remix and make myself comfortable with finding alternatives to the iCloud service, maybe an encrypted NextCloud hosted on some non-US server provider. I know that Fedora is also US-based but it's the best Linux distro that's currently available for Macs and as soon as i'm getting used to the OS I'll be able to look for other distros and hardware.
The US is busy making the biggest own-goal one could imagine.
From a position of world-wide dominance and respect, it is being destroyed at a rate that is too quick for most to even start to comprehend what the outcome of these actions will be. I suspect the consequences of these actions will be carried for the rest of our lives, as they are not so easy to turn back.
Lots of other countries are standing by watching while the USA has seemingly found enough rope to hang itself.
It’s like the “fish don’t know they are in water” saying. As an American if you weren’t educated to be aware of Pax Americana you very much struggle to understand it. The current world order is far from perfect and many suffer as a result but the people in charge of this effort absolutely benefit from it far more than they seem to understand.
Dugin had ideas of spheres of influence. Roughly speaking, he thought that America should be dominated by the US, Europe/Africa by the EU and Asia by Russia.
This however coincides with the much older ideas of the technocracy movement, which was championed by Musk's grandfather Haldeman:
Europe is a bit slow in picking up on all this: Russia, the US and China are carving up the world and Macron calls a summit to determine how to make Russia and China eternal enemies. The EU (and Ukraine!) have been played since 2008/2014.
> In the Americas, United States, and Canada:
Russia should use its special services within the borders of the United States and Canada to fuel instability and separatism against neoliberal globalist Western hegemony, such as, for instance, provoke "Afro-American racists" to create severe backlash against the rotten political state of affairs in the current present-day system of the United States and Canada. Russia should "introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social, and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements – extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S. It would also make sense simultaneously to support isolationist tendencies in American politics".
It sounds like he’s less concerned about the west, but knows that there needs to be political chaos in order to prevent the US from interfering with Russia’s political goals.
I guess that seems obvious at this point, but worrisome that the US government is now actively supporting of those goals.
If you take an objective view that these are geopolitical conditions that would be beneficial to Russian objectives, and pair it with the concurrency of these things playing out, then it’s hard to see it as coincidence.
The seeds for this were set in the cold war if you believe Soviet defector Yuri Besmenov. He stated that the soviets removed malcontents from their society, the revolutionary Marxists that paved the way for the USSR. Eventually they figured that instead of killing or gulaging them, send them to the USA where the egalitarian society would allow them sow their revolutionary ideas into future generations.
The idea of spheres of influnce is far older than Dugin sure, but you are not considring that the tactics being deployed are consistent with Dugin, and support the overall strategy outlined by Dugin, in service of goals listed by Dugin.
I think it is safe to say that the west is experiencing Duginism.
Russia can not dominate *ANYTHING*. Its economy is about the size of Australia's despite having nearly four times the population. Its much-vaunted military could not defeat a minnow like Ukraine.
Yes, Russia has nuclear weapons but no one would commit suicide by using them.
Russia is dying, so are Italy, Japan and China etc.
I believed this at the beginning of the Ukraine war and went to read Dugin's philosophy to get a sense of where this was all headed. I believe that the Dugin-centric view of Russian _realpolitik_ is an intellectual meme moreso than an accurate view of reality.
Dugin's thought is being used as a rosetta stone in Kremlinology, but I believe that _Foundations of Geopolitics_ has been coöpted as an intellectual veil for a bare Russian imperialism. There is not a lot of evidence that Russia is trying to enact actual Duginist political thinking (which is a specific kind of ethnocentrism highly influenced by Heidegger; he outlines it in _The Fourth Political Theory_). It's being used in a way not dissimilar to Marx being co-opted as a means to domination in Leninism.
We are looking for a more complex answer to a simple problem, which is that an authoritarian leader obsessed with dominance wants to expand that sphere of power where he feels wronged. It doesn't have to be intellectual.
Marx isn’t being co-opted by Leninism. It builds on Marxism. Have you read The State and Revolution or Imperialism or What is to be Done? Unless you mean dominating the bourgeoisie which is what Marxism is about too.
Not driven. They influence right wing people and probably Trump himself to set the environment that moves towards their policy goals.
Lenin had a newspaper called “the spark” the concept was that a spark would light the flame to revolution. Trump was the spark in the US, but the tinder had been laid out over many years amongst political weirdos who are now prominent.
Putin isn’t a communist, but he’s a former KGB guy who wants the USSR back. They want the outcome, the ideas are a means to an end.
Pre-USSR, he sees himself as a Czar akin to one of the Greats, a resumption of the Russian Empire. Culture wide revanchism, it's not exclusive to Putin and will still occur without him.
It does seem quite implicating that both Musk and Trump have had multiple reported private calls with Putin. I dont recall other ex presidents meeting with Putin so frequently.
Missing dossiers of Russian Intel from Mar-a-Lago...which of course we never got to hear the full story of thanks to Judge Cannon and SCOTUS.
This is so on the nose it would be rejected if someone wrote it as a novel or film.
In the same vain and USA's politics it driven by Unabomber.
Dugin's influence on Putin/Russia is a total fake news. Aleksandr "Putin's favorite political/historical/cultural icon/advisor according to Western media" Dugin, has NEVER even met with Putin, as in not a single time.
And where is the evidence for such influence, on the only person that matters (Putin)? There is none.
Are you a powerful dictator? Is Wallace living under your rule? Is Wallace's writing influencing your policy? Is Wallace proclaiming everywhere that he is close to you, that he is your advisor (you can't advise without the connection), that you are worshiping him?
Don't be goofy and intentionally misunderstand my arguments.
Brexit pales in comparison to the damage that has _already_ been done to the US federal government. The dust just hasn’t settled yet so most of it not visible right now.
There's an old saying in Tennessee -- I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee -- that says, fool me once... shame on... shame on you. Fool me... you can't get fooled again!
You sure there will be a change allowing a reversal in four years? I doubt that this kind of steamrolling power will be contained by law or institutions. They came into office while blatantly disrespecting law and institutions in the first place. There will be not enough left to get back to last year's state of affairs. This is not going to be a short hiccup. This is changing the world and the path of the future and I hate to witness it happening.
Which is good for those countries. In my home country of Bangladesh, China is helping build infrastructure. While the U.S. was bankrolling left wing social and activist programs to destabilize the government (and ultimately contributed to the recent overthrow of the government, which will derail a decade of consistent growth).
The damage to the US’s global influence and stature. Whether that’s morally a good or bad thing is a separate question. There is no question the US has screwed over a lot of countries. But be aware that the Chinese will step into the void as they already have in Africa. And those countries may find themselves out of the frying pan and into the fire.
As bad as the USA is (and it’s pretty bad) it’s still better than China (though at the rate it’s digressing this may not be true for much longer).
It’s instructive that you mention only USAID. Based on past conversations, you were born and raised in Asia, right? So maybe you have an ax to grind. What about all the other agencies that are being gutted?
It’s more than that I’m Asian. The same arrogance and disregard for popular sovereignty in other countries that you see at USAID/State/NED has metastasized and been turned inward. “Deplorables” is how Acela types see Iowans and Bangladeshis alike.
My dad spent his career in public health. He did things like convince villagers in Bangladesh to trust hospitals instead of midwives. So I’m thrilled to see cuts at NHS and CDC, which torched public trust by making exceptions to Covid lockdowns for protests. Those people are just bad at their jobs—everyone in public health knows you don’t do shit like that.
I can’t wait to see what Tulsi does to the intelligence services that lied us into the Iraq War, and what Kash does to the FBI that investigated conservative parents as domestic terrorists. These agencies are full of disloyal people who think they know better than the public, and few people are going to lament them getting canned.
As a train nerd who took Amtrak every day to work for two years I hope we fire every manager at Amtrak.
I hope the social security checks keep coming. The FAA and FCC generally seems to do a pretty good job. That’s about it.
The Tulsi that pushes Russian disinformation? That should do well for rooting out lying. Also some facts: Intelligence services did not lie us into the Iraq war - politicians did. Politicians manipulated intelligence reporting to fit their narrative. Since you seem to like conspiracy theories, it should be obvious that this was so Halliburton, the company vice president Dick Cheney was CEO of, could profit from government contracts. Guess what CEO will now profit from government contracts due to all the lying from the current slate of politicans.
And by conservative parents as domestic terrorists, I assume you mean the people convicted of crime due to their actual criminal actions on Jan. 6?
I randomly sampled a few articles. And I think you’re right and I’m wrong. The economic messaging is aggressive and was wrong, but I’m not seeing famine and war.
Here is an article that sampled various expert opinions:
“ This event will unleash the kind of uncertainty that Keynes had in mind when he said “we simply do not know” when referring to the likely effect of war. Such uncertainty can only be disruptive for financial markets. We will enter a new era of volatility that is likely to last until these difficult negotiations are completed.”
“it is more likely than not that we will witness political instability.”
“ Such market reactions could sharply contract economic activity, further depressing asset prices in a self-reinforcing cycle”
>“it is more likely than not that we will witness political instability.”
We have had 5 Prime Ministers since 2019.
Some of the problems we are seeing are due to the pandemic and the war in Ukraine. But Brexit is the biggest factor by far. And 100% self-inflicted. It is the elephant in the room that the politicians can't even talk about it, as it's electoral poison.
I live in Texas and contract for a company based in Europe. Comparable UK software engineering salaries are about 1/3-1/2 of what my salary expectations are.
The UK’s GDP per capita trajectory diverged around the end of the Great Recession. That was before the Brexit vote (2016) and long before the actual Brexit (2020). France and Italy have been stuck in more or less the same doldrums since the same time: https://datacommons.org/place/country/FRA?utm_medium=explore...
It would be somewhat unusual if they didn't all look similarish given the level of trade between them.
The UK government predicted a 2% reduction in growth over 15 years with a soft brexit compared to what it would have been otherwise, but seeing it on a graph may be difficult given those countries were also hurt by Brexit.
I'm not disagreeing with your main point (by a host of metrics, the UK and EU have stagnated economically compared to the US since the end of the great recession), but I also don't think GDP per capita is the best metric to use here given widening levels of inequality. Median income levels taking into account government transfers are much more informative in my opinion.
As a fairly regular visitor (for work), what particular doldrums are you referencing?
Admittedly, the loss of the US market will be a big blow for exports, but the anti-US (Trump) feelings strongly would put up with a financial hit rather than dealing with Mr. Loopy.
And Tesla's are becoming very unpopular...and unsellable.
I'm as anti-Brexit as they come, but it didn't change the UK's direction much. It's still the 2nd richest European state (with the 1st declining fast), the 3rd largest tech ecosystem worldwide, one of the premier military powers. Brexit wasn't great, or even good, but it's not disastrous.
That’s because Europe overall is declining fast. However the rest of the world is rising fast and the next ten years should be interesting from this alone.
As someone who has studied the American constitution and been actively engaged in much civil discourse locally, I firmly believe and comprehend the logic of an unmanageably large “government” being a very bad thing on many levels. Please explain to me your obsession with a massive tax funded “government” and your thinking behind a comment such as the one you made. Why do you think this way? Nothing could be more in line with the American forefathers vision than what trump and Elon are doing by dismantling a grossly overweight, fraud ridden, and useless system that the US calls much of its government. I’m eager for a cogent argument, that blends constitutionality and logic, for such a broken system. Hoping you’re the one to make this argument
Nothing could be more in line with the American forefathers vision than what trump and Elon are doing
the problem with people like you (I sincerely do not mean this in ANY derogatory way, just generalising people that make these arguments) is that you are using “American forefathers” as you see fit. American forefathers would be ROLLING IN THEIR GRAVES seeing and hearing what Trump and Elon are doing. They literally fought against people like the two of them.
If I have too choose between bloated federal government and having a President who thinks he is above the law and his Supreme Court cronies saying so in so many words and having a fucking african immigrant with god access to government computer systems I choose bloated government any day of the week and twice on sunday
There have been a lot of times over the past couple weeks where I've thought "OK, is the US toast now??", and the thing that finally did it for me was Trump's prominent post "He who saves his Country does not violate any Law."
Trump announced the rule of law is dead and there has been basically no pushback. I mean, sure, it may have just been bluster, but the Republicans used to put the idea of the Constitution on a pedestal. Now the president is saying, loudly and prominently, that laws don't apply to him (or anyone who is "saving" the country), and it's crickets.
There is no way the US comes back from this in my opinion. I'm not saying something like "collapse" is imminent, but I think the decline is irreversible once the rule of law has been declared null and void.
Also, while I obviously have my opinions, I honestly would be genuinely interested in someone who has a different take (i.e. who thinks Trump's statement isn't as catastrophic as I think it is) to explain their rationale.
The whole issue with the idea that "Trump is destroying democracy," isn't that what Trump is doing is NOT damaging to democracy, or corrupt, or what have you. It is. But Trump will be gone in 4 years. There will be a new Republican nominee. Whatever (and I mean, whatever) that nominee says will be the new party line. And the idea that the Republicans are willing to continue an actual overthrow of law and order in the US is...close to a fantasy. The Republicans are with Trump as long as he is the most popular candidate. As soon as he is no longer useful in that function, he's toast.
> the idea that the Republicans are willing to continue an actual overthrow of law and order in the US is...close to a fantasy
No, imagining them continuing to do what they have been doing in the open is not fantasy.
Imagining them somehow "snapping back" to supporting constitutional order is much more fantastical. Especially in the face of the anti-judiciary salvos of JD Vance -- a leading candidate for the next nominee.
Yeah, TBH I find throaway89's comment a little baffling.
I'm not that concerned that Trump said what he said. I'm concerned that he said that and there was no pushback from Republicans or probably about half the country (and I'm guessing that at least a third of the country vehemently, enthusiastically supported the idea).
I saw a good post recently that described what is happening as essentially a "'cold' civil war". That is, in normal times, there may be strong disagreements about policy, the role of government, etc., but there is general agreement on the framework of democracy, the role of institutions, etc. But it feels to me now that we're past that point, where each side essentially sees the other in "existential threat" terms.
For me personally, I don't want to be there, but if you believe that it's fine for the President of the US to declare the rule of law null and void, then there is no middle ground, primarily because if you're declaring the rule of law null, then the only option for both sides is non-legal conflict. I can't think of a statement that is more "anti-American" to me than that. Which is again why I'm open to the idea (TBH actually I'm really hoping) that I'm either misinterpreting the statement or there is some other reason to think it's not as catastrophic as I view it.
I'm saying the reason there isn't any pushback is because the whole system is working as "winner-take-all," hence pushing back on ANYTHING that Donald Trump does, when there is no other Republican who can challenge him for leadership, is like scoring on your own net. It's a bad strategy if you're trying to win the game!
Adolfo Franco (interesting name for a right-wing strategist..) said it best on Al Jazeera. "How can he be a spokesperson for a man like Donald Trump?" He was asked. his answer was that he's a spokesperson for the REPUBLICAN PARTY, and in 4 years, there will be a new nominee. Simple as that. Time will tell what happens.
Polarization has reached "existential threat levels." It will eventually go back. Vance may find that moderation is in his party's interest after all the chaos of Trump. They are very different personalities.
As someone from LATAM who is more aware than they should be about the US system of government, I agree that the statement and lack of pushback is catastrophic for what it says about the current climate, but rule of law has been as weak as gypsum board for decades. The US system is full of shiny toys for a populist to cement power, and the only safeguards are decorum and the threat of eventual impeachment (good luck with that!). These issues exist because the American system is old and full of incremental cruft; newer democracies have had the advantage of starting with better safeguards, and there's an inability to actually change the system due to the legal system and Congress being a mess.
Practically speaking, common law is the judicial branch using moonlogic upon moonlogic to create pseudo-laws (Roe v. Wade, Citizens United v. FEC) that may be good or bad but should be made by Congress. If the Constitution is unclear, it should be modified through a democratic process that can actually pass, not be continually reinterpreted in absurd ways by a 9-person court that can be corrupted and has no term limits. Congress is unable to fix itself; the unlimited filibuster in the Senate proves that, and the "pro-forma" session is simply embarrassing. Clear systemic change is excruciatingly difficult, so actions must be taken through fuzzy emergent messes without guardrails like executive orders.
"Is outrageous thing X from this EO illegal? Idk, let's wait months to check with the courts."
The popular comment I see is that institutions are people at the end of the day, so "strong institutions" is just a buzzword, and the current crisis comes from cowardice and inaction. But if the mechanisms aren't there to stop a bad actor in the executive, the best they can do is make some noise (which they should). If they truly bend the rules, the executive can always just write a more unhinged EO, so it all reduces to who has control over actual enforcement.
The problem is widespread; for example, the election system is simply dysfunctional, like Flint water tier. From the basics of gerrymandering, to the electoral college creating absurd things like "swing states" (if you want to give more power to some states, just weight the votes), no real universal national ID, voter suppression, voting by mail is a horrible idea that invites conspiracy theories and is a crutch for the lack of accessibility, voting machines are bad and a crutch (see the French). Not even the schizophrenic rules-set is actually followed; the 2000 election was decided by Supreme Court fuckery. Trump would've been stupid not to try to interfere in 2020; an election was successfully stopped 20 years ago and nothing happened. The most basic democratic institution failed and the priority wasn't "let's fix this immediately, oh my fucking god." So yeah, rule of law has constantly been chipped away for some time, good luck with the midterms.
To be fair to the average American, the idea that "gradually, then suddenly" also applies to the state is something people learn firsthand and hopefully teach their descendants. The history of outsiders only goes so far.
The US just decided to negotiate with Putin directly, leaving Europe out of it even though they're the ones affected by the Russia-Ukraine war, not the US.
And Vance explicitly said that Russia can't be expected to go back to the pre-war borders. In other words, Russia gets what they want (Donbas).
The perceived return could be timing and presentation.
If he has to spend the rest of his term negotiating back and forth over which flag flies over a particular outhouse in Western Crimea, he may not see that as being a successful deal-maker.
Being able to say "we got buy-in for our first proposal, took me four days to end the conflict" fits his image.
It's not embarrassing reversals, that's the problem. People who want the government to work well for the general population will leave, and those that can't find employment in the private sector will stay. So we're immediately left with a less capable government.
Those who stay will be doing so with the full understanding of the vindictive nature of the current administration. What makes you think these employees will stand up to illegal requests? What makes you think they'll go the extra mile? It's a bad situation all around, and it's going to get worse before it gets better.
Americans should care because America isn't the world. So much wealth and power derives from people seeing you as the good guy. Blowing that up will make America poorer.
The US is far less dependent on trade than the average country. We could close our borders to the world entirely and be fine after an initial discomfort.
And nobody has has seen America as the “good guy” in my lifetime. We’re the country that destabilizes Latin American and Asian countries, bombs the Middle East, etc. I used to think there was at least a logic to all that, but it turns out our elites were just ideologues and morons.
Canada is the source of more than 80% of the US's potash, the source of fertilizer. Without that, the entire farming industry and its crops withers and dies. It is not something easily sourced and not something easily replaced, and the crops all die long before it can be sourced or replaced. Your suggestion to close the border is absurd, jingoistic, empty, and meaningless.
Again, I'm not an economist, bear with me and explain what that's got to do with the trade deficit being a deficit? You could have a GDP of a quintillion dollars a year but if you're consistently running a trade deficit (which the US has for decades), that strongly implies you cannot close your borders with impunity.
If you could supply the goods cheaper than importing them, people would, no? Simple capitalism!
While American, I've lived most of my life abroad, and share with your world view of the US.
But after having spent years living in China, and being very familiar with the political situation there and their global ambitions, I'm afraid that the alternative to the US is even worse.
Have a democratic system has somewhat of a moderating effect on the worst impulses of the US elite. China has no such guardrails.
What “democratic system?” American are checked by anti-democratic forces at every turn, from a judiciary that overturns duly enacted laws based on “emanations from penumbras” to an executive branch that is run by the same people regardless of who wins the election to institutions that are captured by people that abuse their positions to peddle their fringe ideologies.
To paraphrase Churchill, "democracy is the worst system, except for all the others".
There's a lot you don't know about how things actually work in China. The levels of autocracy, corruption and lack of true legal framework, make the US look like a democratic haven.
Would this be the same China where jaywalkers' portaits are automatically shamed on electronic billboards and fined social credits? Is that a worthwhile trade for universal single-payer healthcare?
The US is extremely dependent on trade because the US needs the USD to be the currency of trade and reserve to sustain its debt and deficits, without which GDP would drop precipitously.
The US isn't far less dependent, China is at 37% GDP from trade to the US's 27% but doesn't have the structural dependency on trade from having the reserve currency.
USA exports are idling around 1/4 to near 1/3 of the GDP. Our economy is heavily tied to imports from other counties.
When it comes to isolation I think of this:
The word invasion itself is a good example of this.
A French ironmaster says: "We must protect ourselves from the invasion of English iron!" An English landlord cries: "We must repel the invasion of French wheat!" And they urge the erection of barriers between the two nations. Barriers result in isolation; isolation gives rise to hatred; hatred, to war; war, to invasion. "What difference does it make?" say the two sophists. "Is it not better to risk the possibility of invasion than to accept the certainty of invasion?" And the people believe them, and the barriers remain standing.
And yet, what analogy is there between an exchange and an invasion? What possible similarity can there be between a warship that comes to vomit missiles, fire, and devastation on our cities, and a merchant vessel that comes to offer us a voluntary exchange of goods for goods?
Laws are being broken to make the omelet. Will the executive constrain itself to breaking only the laws you don't like, and stop when you want it to? Will the legislative branch cede it's authority and responsibilities only temporarily?
It might hard to unscramble that omelet if we want the rule of law back later.
The laws were broken in the 1930s when we created the unconstitutional monstrosity that is the modern executive branch. If you want to turn that back then I’m on board.
But if not then it must at least be democratically responsive. When republicans win the presidency—or a progressive or populist democrat—the 90% of the administrative state that’s comprised of Acela liberals should be asking how high to jump. Otherwise you have a system that’s not worth saving.
> The laws were broken in the 1930s when we created the unconstitutional monstrosity that is the modern executive branch
That's bibliolatry, directed to a long-obsolete interpretation of the Constitution and the role of the federal government. FDR was analogous to Copernicus and Kepler, rescuing the country from Ptolemaic interpretations of the Constitution that were based on outdated data sets. He pushed successfully for a pragmatic reinterpretation — not inconsistent with the text — that allowed effective federal government action to deal with a global crisis.
No, FDR's New Deal didn't end the Great Depression (that was done by World War II). But the New Deal did help hold off what could easily have turned into authoritarianism of the Huey Long variety.
The "living constitution" angle doesn't get you anywhere. If we are going to "pragmatically reinterpret" the Constitution to allow the modern administrative state, that just makes it more exigent to "pragmatically reinterpret" the law to ensure effective presidential control over the administrative state. I'd start by reinterpreting the Hatch Act to allow prosecuting anyone in the government who "resists" policies such as DOGE and mass deportations.
> The "living constitution" angle doesn't get you anywhere.
Says who? The Constitution is in essence the basic operating manual for American national government. Conditions on the ground have changed — and we've learned more about the world — since 1787. It'd be unpragmatic (read: insane) to insist that the original modus operandi MUST stay the same forever and ever, just because that's how they did things in 1787, as long as the new M.O. can fairly be said not to be inconsistent with the constitutional text.
It doesn't help your case that Article V provides an amendment process: Nothing in the Constitution prohibits reinterpreting the existing language to accommodate new evidence and new insights, at least not as long as the reinterpretation doesn't do violence to the text.
"The executive power" in Article II is just as open to interpretation as anything. Interpreting that power as being subject to Congress's Article I authority is clearly well within the hash marks, to say nothing of the playing field as a whole.
Article I can fairly be read as allowing Congress to expand, and/or to cabin, presidential authority. That includes creating, and delegating power to, administrative agencies under general presidential supervision; that could include delegating expansive powers to agencies and perhaps limiting the president's ability to hire and fire agency personnel.
The "unitary executive" interpretation — with a president asserting the right to unilaterally disregard or revoke congressionally-enacted arrangements — is dangerous in the extreme. We've seen that in other countries, and we could well see the same thing happen here.
Decades ago, the head of the Reactor Department on my ship [the USS Enterprise] had a list on the office wall of Great Naval Quotes that we were forbidden to use. The #1 prohibited quote on that list was, "But we've always done it that way!" followed by #2, "But we've never done it that way!" Both of those are violated by using a bibliolatry-based approach to the Constitution as a purported justification for unilaterally up-ending longstanding practices — especially when, on the whole, those practices have worked passably well.
==========
> that just makes it more exigent to "pragmatically reinterpret" the law to ensure effective presidential control over the administrative state
That's clearly one of your ideological priors, but it wasn't handed down from Mount Sinai on stone tablets.
But the “living constitution” is nothing more than imposing one’s ideological priors onto the document. I happen to think the crisis of a permanent bureaucracy that is ideologically divergent from the population is far more “dangerous” than anything else the country faces. If we are going to “pragmatically reinterpret” the constitution, that’s the challenge that such interpretation needs to meet.
> But the “living constitution” is nothing more than imposing one’s ideological priors onto the document.
That overlooks a key distinction: An "ideological prior" that's proved to be supported by real-world evidence (i.e., experience) is no longer an ideological prior.
Analogously: Special- and general relativity were just theories in 1905 and 1915 (their respective publication dates). Over decades, real-world evidence proved that they were, in the main, correct — but we still don't treat either as a sacred, immutable text.
The unitary-executive view is an untested theory, an ideological prior. In contrast, our existing administrative state is supported by close to a century of real-world experience.
That's not to say that modifications aren't needed in the modern state. We don't want to make a golden calf of the granular details of FDR's or the Warren Court's approaches, any more than we want to enshrine the unitary-executive model or the Alito-Thomas perspective.
But in a country with some 340 million people that's been the source of the reasonably-successful Pax Americana, it's incredibly risky to go unilaterally f*cking around — it's the equivalent of a teenaged driver insisting that he can refuel his car and change the oil while driving 75 mph on a crowded freeway.
The administrative system never worked. For much of the 20th century we had prosperity deriving from the post-WWII boon and the tatters of the Old Republic protecting private industry. But since 1980, we have had 12 presidential administrations. Of those, 9 won elections by expressly promising to cut government, several by promising to drown it in a bathtub. The only reason the system still exists is because American democracy is like those crosswalk buttons that aren’t actually hooked up to anything.
Regardless, we find ourselves in a new time. If the Old Republic could be overthrown by “emanations from penumbras” we can just as easily wave away the current imperial interregnum in which we find ourselves.
The “Acela class” is a term used, often pejoratively, to refer to the elite political, business, and media class concentrated along the Northeast Corridor of the United States, particularly in cities like Washington, D.C., New York, and Boston. The term comes from the Acela Express, Amtrak’s high-speed train that runs between these cities, symbolizing the connectedness of this group.
Critics use it to describe a political and economic elite perceived as out of touch with the rest of the country, especially with working-class and rural Americans. It’s often associated with establishment politics, bureaucratic power, and coastal liberalism.
It also refers to a political faction in the electorate, comprising about 11% of voters, that has interests and values aligned with that group: https://www.ncronline.org/opinion/ncr-voices/what-if-we-had-.... E.g. knowledge workers who benefit from globalization and upper middle class people who benefit from cheap labor provided by illegal immigrants.
I'm saying that the people who employ illegal immigrants tend to be republican small business owners. They're not a majority of republicans but they are the heart of the party in the way educated professionals are for the dems.
It's funny how hundreds of millions of normal Chinese people belong to the "Acela class."[0] Supporting decent public infrastructure does not make one an elitist.
As another commenter noted, I believe the phrase is used as a metonym (?) here to refer to a class of people that is largely unrelated to support for public transport.
I mean ignoring all the trade that will wither away to/from America and slowly be diverted to other countries instead (lost American money/opportunity), there's also lost tourism money from people not wanting to come spend their vacations there (lost money).
A "disloyal" administrative state for trying to perform their boring congressionally-designated jobs in response to a pandemic, rather than falling in line with supporting the president's personal business interests by saying everything was fine and telling people to continue going to hotels? Uh-huh.
The government is not a corporation and the president is not a unilateral dictator. You're right about other cultures having values alien to Americans, and perhaps you need to do some introspection there before making political arguments.
So is your argument about "disloyalty" or about poor official actions resulting from personal bias? Because the indications of each would seem to directly conflict.
>From a position of world-wide dominance and respect
It already had very low respect (except by paid hacks and client states) and declining world-wide dominance for decades. And the churn rate for those very dissaponting results, reflected in public debt, was huge.
And that's assuming a nation having "world-wide dominance" is a good thing to begin with.
