You never have one except because everyone decides they do. The moment anyone with a modicum of power decides to say it doesn't exist, it doesn't exist.
> In 1942 there were 110,000 Japanese-American citizens, in good standing, law abiding people, who were thrown into internment camps simply because their parents were born in the wrong country. That's all they did wrong. They had no right to a lawyer, no right to a fair trial, no right to a jury of their peers, no right to due process of any kind. The only right they had was...right this way! Into the internment camps.
> Just when these American citizens needed their rights the most...their government took them away. and rights aren't rights if someone can take em away. They're priveledges. That's all we've ever had in this country is a bill of TEMPORARY priviledges; and if you read the news, even badly, you know the list get's shorter, and shorter, and shorter.
From the outside, it continues to surprise me when people bring this up, as if they're either too ignorant to know about the Dixiecrat schism or want to pretend that everyone else is. What's the point? It's so easy to look up.
It's just propaganda, optics, PR. Obviously the Democrat party in 1940 has absolutely no relation to the Democrat party in 2025, except for the name. People use that same name to smear the 2025 party because they can. And it works because propaganda works. That's how Germany got Hitler and it's how the USA got Elon.
I think it’s important to clarify that in this case, having a “modicum of power” is in the form of being able to say it doesn’t exist without a riot and a beheading. It’s not in the form of money or command of an army, though those things definitely help.
Really, in democratic societies there are three levels; those where the offending politician is actually deposed, those where their unconstitutional action is blocked by the courts or by another arm of government (as with Boris), and those where _they never do the thing in the first place because they realise they can't get away with it, and there'll be unpleasant consequences for them_ (this is by far the most common, particularly in parliamentary democracies, where Dear Leader can be fired at a moment's notice). If none of these happen, then typically the democracy ends.
The US is probably unusually vulnerable to this sort of thing; it has an unusually powerful executive, and a highly politicised Supreme Court, in particular. Though, it kind of remains to be seen how far the Supreme Court will be pushed. Some or all of Trump's appointees may take the view that they got into the job to screw over minorities and aid business, but not necessarily to actually end democracy in the US. They are likely not all that beholden to him.
R v Miller was important but ultimately overtaken by events - while Parliament did want to discuss Brexit, they were unable to find a viable solution and we still got no-deal Brexit where vital things like the status of Northern Ireland had to be patched up later. For whatever insane reason, the demand to eject us from the Single Market was just too strong.
R (Miller) v The Prime Minister (not to be confused with R v Miller, or R (Miller) v Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union (the solution here is clearly to just stop naming people 'Miller', to avoid further confusion)) was probably ultimately more important in its precedent than its concrete outcomes, though, yeah.
In a functioning democracy, the guardrails last until the person trying to break them leaves office, and then that person is not elected again; and if they break laws in office, they are convicted of them.
Laws of nature don't care what you believe: if everyone in the country thinks COVID is a myth, that won't stop COVID from killing people.
Human laws -- "What is the law?" or "Who is the king?" aren't like that. Human laws literally are, "What everyone thinks is true". The chiefs at USAID told Musk he couldn't have access. The President told the chiefs they were fired. The chiefs believed themselves to be fired, so they were fired.
What else could they have done? They could have called the police or the FBI, and reported illegal attempted access of classified systems. The police could have then arrested Musk or his people (or at least threatened to do so). But would they have done so? Wouldn't they have reasonably believed that such behavior would lead to their losing their jobs?
Maybe in 2016 they would have believed that allowing access to classified materials would eventually land them in hot water, and that standing up to the president would eventually lead to them being vindicated. But not now -- any reasonable person now would predict that standing up to the president would lead to them being fired (and possibly have other vindictive punishiments applied), with no recourse; while giving in would certainly be overlooked.
The People voted to re-elect a known authoritarian with no respect for the rule of law or democracy. I don't see how any democratic system can withstand that.
It’s not moral panic, it’s because Trump is reducing legitimacy and stability of the government. Killing foreign civilians is normal, locking everyone out of a government job with zero notice is not.
COIN sucks, civilians get killed, the closest thing to a fortress in modern warfare is a city. The US has a better record than most in protecting civilians but it’s impossible to save everyone.
The US could save people by not starting wars. And by quickly finishing wars other people started (that means Ukraine) rather than drawing them out as long as possible to maximize shareholder profits from weapon sales.
Yes. That is a common narrative from democrat leaning people. The same ones who called me a terrorist sympathesizer for not wanting to invade libya. The same ones that now think Trump/Musk are more evil than Bush who illegally invaded Iraq because that's what the narrative tells them.
Forgive me if I laugh at your "full stops" and other absolutist statements.
The article is exactly this sentiment: the experience of how how evil takes over isn’t sudden, it’s insidious and slow and happens by inches. Those around you are not crying wolf, they understand history.
Lots of people on the left who believe Bush was the worst president this country has seen in recent history, that Obama largely continued Bush’s foreign policy, and that Trumps co-conspiracy with billionaires may end up similarly to a Boris Yeltsin in the US, with large amounts of the state apparatus sold to the highest bidder or most loyal, trampling on the rights and safety net offered by the govt in the process (and likely will be no better on foreign policy, given he wants to turn Gaza into "The Riviera of the Middle East"). ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Don’t really sympathize with the whining about hypocrisy or how you claim to be personally victimized by people who are hypocrites.
But what is happening right now is not really the same as to what happened the last four years, is it? If we forget about partisan wars for a second, are there precedents to what Trump is trying to do? Genuine question, I'm not a USA citizen and I can't keep up with everything.
Lawfare against political opponent, arrest and imprisonment of people who were trespassing as though they were insurrectionists, a president that was actually dysfunctional and the executive powers was in the hands of unknown and unaccountable individuals, the hiding of the state of the president, selection of candidate for president without going through democratic process of primaries, many billions of dollars of loans forgiven without authority and against court judgement, pressuring with threats private institutions to censor themselves and their users and customers, using spy agencies to spy on political opponents, lying and misleading the public regarding scientific knowledge of matters of health. This is just what came to mind.
Musk and even Trump cannot just step in and cut spending, programs and agencies. That's congresses job. Even a president cannot say “oh, we aren’t funding USAID/DoEd/EV tax credits”. Those things are law.
Allowing that to happen basically makes the president king. It allows them to have veto power over all spending laws both current and previous and a veto that’s unable to be overruled.
“Oh, you passed social security? No, you didn’t. I’m not giving that out”. Not only this but it gives the president extreme leverage over Congress. “I’m holding funding for this specific program ransom until you do thing X”.
Interestingly enough, that’s what Trump got impeached for during his first impeachment. Withholding funding in an attempt to extort someone. If this is allowed to happen then our constitution and government fundamentally will change.
He’d have a long way to go to get down to the number of federal agencies that existed in 1900, let alone the number in 1800, yet the US had its constitution, then, too.
Since 1800 congress has used its constitutional power to establish agencies. It is congress who has the constitutional power to shut them down, not the president. The president executes the laws passed by Congress.
The president is fascist because he's, checks notes... , relinquishing governmental power by shutting down agencies? I think the only thing people have been habituated to is the enormity of the government; go back to any other point in history, was the government this big in terms of independent agencies, employee/contractor count, budget/debt as percentage of gdp?
Sure the spoils system was bad, but the current iteration where you have hundreds of independent agencies that cannot be fired breathing down your neck with statutory power is fucking insane.
Explain how shutting down USAID due to documented fraudulent spending strengthens the president’s power. I can’t think of a single way myself, but maybe I’m overlooking something?
If he gets away with shutting down USAID by fiat then it makes it clear that he can go outside the bounds of law and demand anything of the executive branch.
The next step might be going to the DOJ and telling them to detain, let's say, Ilhan Omar on suspicion of treason. This illegal demand will have much more force because anyone refusing it will know that they stand on their own and have no recourse through the courts or congressional oversight.
> The president is fascist because he's, checks notes... , relinquishing governmental power by shutting down agencies?
You do know the president is not supposed to have that power, right? His job is to execute the law, which as currently written requires those agencies to exist.
Yes and FDR also skirted around constitutionality and even threatened to pack the courts to ram his reforms in. I don't agree with everything the president is doing, but the rail we are going down is just doomed. What is your proposition to stop interest from eating 100% of the federal budget. We just paid 1T of interest, do you think that is going to decelerate?
>>What is your proposition to stop interest from eating 100% of the federal budget. We just paid 1T of interest, do you think that is going to decelerate?
Because those agencies are funded by the federal budget. We are literally going into a deficit to send money to other countries. Do you realize how insane that is? And don't tell me this is just a small part of the federal budget. Oh its just a couple billion here and there. That's a lot of money that could go towards not being in debt. This level of fiscal irresponsibility is basically taxation without representation on the unborn.
>>We are literally going into a deficit to send money to other countries. Do you realize how insane that is?
You mean the international development fund that's being raided right now? You know that it exists because US realized that it's cheaper(as in - LESS money spent overall) to help countries develop, so that US is less likely to engage militarily with whatever conflict happens in those countries eventually? It's part of being a global hagemony - it's not insane, it's just good business strategy. Out of all people, Musk and his cohort should be able to see this.
>>That's a lot of money that could go towards not being in debt.
The whole idea is that you'd be in more debt if you didn't do this, because you'd spend another trillion dollars on yet another conflict somewhere because people got fed up with having no access to fresh water and food and now there's a war that US just "has to" intervene in. Aid money is meant to explicitly prevent this.
> so that US is less likely to engage militarily with whatever conflict happens in those coutries eventually
Or you know, we can stop getting into wars? Did our adventures in the middle east advance US interests?
> It's part of being a global hagemony
It's called overextension and almost every historical power declined due to internal rot coupled by continuously getting into conflicts, which, wouldn't you know, drained the treasury.
Ah yes, "just stop". I mean, but all means - please do.
>> Did our adventures in the middle east advance US interests?
They made a few american corporations extremely rich and justified balooning the military expenditure. Whether that's in US interests or not - you decide.
>>It's called overextension
It's part of projecting your might as a superpower. The same reason why American taxpayers are paying billions of dollars to station troops in Eastern European countries - not out of charity but because it's explicitly in American interests to do so. International Aid is the same - "we're giving you money now so that we don't have to spend more money fighting with/against you(cross out one) in the future". "stop getting into wars" has the same energy as "just stop tipping" or "just stop spending so much money on the military" - imagine how quickly your entire national debt would be wiped out if you did that!
> because it's explicitly in American interests to do so
Please elaborate, and be precise because every interventionist argument is like, "but our trading partners, but our allies" but always fails to link exactly how that improves the lives of Americans. So tell me exactly what we are afraid of. If its trade tell me exactly what the comparative advantage is or what the resource we need is. And if its defense, tell me exactly what the threat vectors are, not just, "the island chains".
We've doing truly stupid things in the name of bullshit concepts like "containment" which led us into Vietnam, or "stabilizing the region" which led us into the middle east.
We can start with the Burmese scholarships that gives 300k per student; please tell me exactly what the American interests are.
That's your(American) argument, not mine. When I ask why is America building anti-missile batteries and stationing their troops in my country, the answer is "because it furthers their interests". There is of course always some bullshit of "because it improves our security" - but everyone knows that's not true. They are here because they want to project they are a superpower and therefore have bases all over the world, not because they love us.
>>We can start with the Burmese scholarships that gives 300k per student
Well I had to look it up, and apparently this is what Trump said about it:
"We also blocked $45 million for diversity scholarships in Burma. Forty-five — that’s a lot of money for diversity scholarships in Burma. You can imagine where that money went," Trump said.
I wish he was more specific. What is he insinuating, exactly?
>> please tell me exactly what the American interests are.
Having a population of burma(a historically very active conflict area) that is well educated and more likely to oppose the military Junta? Of course no one will ever say that openly, it's "humanitarian aid".
Hey, if I told you I happened to be an expert in this field, hypothetically, and I said this was a vast oversimplificaiton, would you be willing to listen to an expert?
I'm pretty open minded so if you have a detailed answer, I would love to hear it. Just to be clear, I'm not a fan of hand wavy answers around like "stabilizing" or "soft power" because I feel like vague language masquerades corruption and misuse of funds. What I want to know are the direct causal links between our money and our interests.
I work alongside highly skilled experts in my job and I've never heard them say anything remotely like this when someone disagrees with them, so I'm pretty skeptical that you actually are one. This sounds more like something that a rebellious high-schooler would say
Nobody is denying that the US budget / finances are in dire need of cleaning up, but the approach taken is a hostile and forced takeover of essentials like foreign aid, education, medicaid, etc. People will die because of this approach and its short sightedness will have a bigger negative impact on the US economy and international relationships than it will gain them from reduced costs.
> I don't agree with everything the president is doing, but the rail we are going down is just doomed. What is your proposition to stop interest from eating 100% of the federal budget. We just paid 1T of interest, do you think that is going to decelerate?
So, for you, an acceptable solution to "the budget is too big," is "let's rip up the Constitution?"
If Trump wants to veto budget bills and demand certain cuts in exchange of passage, that's fine, totally within his power, and would probably work.
Many things like childcare, elder care, or healthcare have significantly changed over the last 150 years and now people have much less slack[0] to go back to the old ways.
Anyway I care little about the size of a government as it is the result of many perverse incentives (vetocracy, companies pushing for both deregulations and regulatory capture, late stage capitalism trying to make almost everyone poor and/or unstable) but the latest generation of attacks on the size of the government feel a lot like a Embrace Extend Extinguish on social safety nets so that predatory industries like healtcare insurance can better extract wealth from the lower classes
Do you think inequality has risen or decreased as the size of the government increased? Regulatory capture can only exist with the existence of unchecked regulatory power. I personally work in a space that is insanely difficult to new entrants because of the thousands of regulations you need to comply to (90% are garbage btw). If tmrw, our industry had a regulation reform, the entrenched players would die overnight.
> Do you think inequality has risen or decreased as the size of the government increased?
I would say inequality decreased as the size of the government increased, and inequality increased as the size of the government decreased from its 1967 peak, yes. The New Deal was the single greatest reduction in inequality in national history.
I am not arguing for or against size of the government, nor I am arguing long term strategies, I am saying that ripping out wellfare programs is a rugpull on a lot of people
Inequality has generally gone down as time goes by.
Because regulations cut both ways. They stop bad actors and they stop innovators.
Innovators thrive at the start of an industry, later once its commoditized, its going to be driven by people who want to cut corners. See enshittification.
Regulations put a ceiling on harm by bad actors.
Either we need industries that do not obey such laws of physical reality and entropy, or we need to accomodate for the most probable occurrence efficiently.
You will always have examples of failures of these regulations, the measure of their efficiency is from the counterfactual losses and gains.
