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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 inst

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.

stego-tech 1y ago
Institutions are only as strong as their defenders and supporters - and like countless Empires before it, the USA has bled its institutions dry of credibility and/or resources over the past several decades in a futile attempt to satiate a handful of wealthy extremists. 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.
- entropicdrifter 1y ago
  Yep, billionaires-as-termites on the public infrastructure is an apt analogy
  - stego-tech 1y ago
    To be a little less glib or inflammatory: 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.
Onawa 1y ago
The dissolution and dismantling of US gov institutions that we are witnessing is unprecedented in modern times. Hell, a few of the agencies being attacked were created with bipartisan support. 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.
- khuey 1y ago
  > Hell, a few of the agencies being attacked were created with bipartisan support. It's worse than that. PEPFAR was a signature initiative of the previous Republican president.
  - ljsprague 1y ago
    Why must everything be viewed as Democrat vs. Republican? Trump is best viewed as a case of outsider vs. entrenched bureaucracy / deep state. Party is irrelevant.
    - anigbrowl 1y ago
      Because he is being backed to the hilt by the Congressional GOP, and most of the GOP-leaning states, a fact which I feel sure has not escaped your attention until now.
      - dizlexic 1y ago
        I'm guessing you only started to pay attention to the right in 2014. 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.
Arubis 1y ago
The institutions WERE strong. It’s taken decades to unwind them. But yes, we’ve definitely crossed a big acceleration lately.
- radiofreeeuropa 1y ago
  Capturing the Supreme Court so completely was the turning point, in terms of ability to enact their agenda quickly. It's been conservative my entire not short any more life, but it's strongly packed with disingenuous, ideologically-motivated jurists vetted and guided by the "correct" organizations, now. 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.
  - ascagnel_ 1y ago
    The problem with the Supreme Court is the handshake-agreement to limit the court's size in combination with lifetime appointments and the Senate majority leader's pocket veto. Going back to 1992 (eight Presidential terms, three served by Republicans and five by Democrats), Republican presidents have successfully nominated six justices while Democrats only five (including a no-vote for Merrick Garland). 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).
ygjb 1y ago
Before you think this is happening quickly, do note that public institutions have been under attack from the right for generations, including publicly funded education, public broadcasters, public health and social programs. 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.
- radiofreeeuropa 1y ago
  This has been a project under way since the friggin' John Birchers and the postwar "think-tank" boom. They've (this specific set of interests, not conservatism in general) been successfully ratcheting things toward authoritarianism since their Chicago school pals got the right people in the right places to radically change how we enforced anti-trust in the '70s (that is, they made it impossible for us to enforce in all but the most egregious cases, period) and have been winning one boring but effective battle after another ever since (plus the occasional headline-grabbing one). 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.
  - specialist 1y ago
    Yup. 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.
nemomarx 1y ago
Large groups voting for "tear it all down, we don't trust institutions" wasn't a sign for you back in 2016? what were your priors before this year?
- radiofreeeuropa 1y ago
  My "holy shit, we're in for... interesting times, and like, soon" moment was when Trump suggested his supporters might shoot Hillary if she won ("If she wins, I can't do anything about it. But the 'Second Amendment people'...."), and didn't see a huge hit to his popularity, and supporters in his own camp distancing themselves, immediately. 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.
  - buerkle 1y ago
    Just this week Trump posted on his social media that Obama should be indicted for treason, aka, executed and not a blip from the supposed left-wing media
  - saguntum 1y ago
    I'm in my mid 30s and have definitely noticed a gap in perception between people in their early 20s who haven't experienced much of pre-2016 politics and the older folks. The younger folks are much less alarmed because they weren't familiar with the "normal political discourse" that occurred when they were children. It makes it hard to be optimistic that there is any plausible roadmap back to some form of normalcy in the medium term.
    - nemomarx 1y ago
      What you want to look at is how countries navigate back to normalcy after coups or assassinations. It's not usually a smooth process, you have to do amnesties or hash out disagreements somehow...
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
RiverCrochet 1y ago
I feel like there's been talk about dismantling the CPB for a long time. I recall talk about it on Rush Limbaugh's radio show in the 90's.
School-Cotton 1y ago
Europeans seem to understand this better than Americans, because the US has never really devolved from democracy into authoritarianism, but several European countries have. That's why e.g. in Germany it's possible to ban political parties that have as their goal the overflow of the democratic order.
- autoexec 1y ago
  It's only been a couple hundred years or so for us so I guess this is just our turn then.
MisterBastahrd 1y ago
This has been an attack on democracy over 40 years in the making. Conservatives have been openly saying what they've wanted to do all the time, but most people thought there'd never be a moment where they'd actually have enough power to pull it off. Meanwhile, liberal politicians have and still are operating under the delusion that they don't have to pass laws when they gain power, they can merely cast feelings and hope that the courts will back that up.
autoexec 1y ago
Freedom means you're allowed to own enough rope to hang yourself with. We've always been one or two elections away from our own destruction.
f33d5173 1y ago
NPR in particular has been an insane parody of leftism for at least a decade at this point. The fact that it took this long to lose funding is a testament to how strong it was as an institution.

stego-tech 1y ago

Institutions are only as strong as their defenders and supporters - and like countless Empires before it, the USA has bled its institutions dry of credibility and/or resources over the past several decades in a futile attempt to satiate a handful of wealthy extremists. 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.

entropicdrifter 1y ago
Yep, billionaires-as-termites on the public infrastructure is an apt analogy
- stego-tech 1y ago
  To be a little less glib or inflammatory: 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.

Onawa 1y ago

The dissolution and dismantling of US gov institutions that we are witnessing is unprecedented in modern times. Hell, a few of the agencies being attacked were created with bipartisan support. 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.

khuey 1y ago
> Hell, a few of the agencies being attacked were created with bipartisan support. It's worse than that. PEPFAR was a signature initiative of the previous Republican president.
- ljsprague 1y ago
  Why must everything be viewed as Democrat vs. Republican? Trump is best viewed as a case of outsider vs. entrenched bureaucracy / deep state. Party is irrelevant.
  - anigbrowl 1y ago
    Because he is being backed to the hilt by the Congressional GOP, and most of the GOP-leaning states, a fact which I feel sure has not escaped your attention until now.
    - dizlexic 1y ago
      I'm guessing you only started to pay attention to the right in 2014. 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.

Arubis 1y ago

The institutions WERE strong. It’s taken decades to unwind them. But yes, we’ve definitely crossed a big acceleration lately.

radiofreeeuropa 1y ago
Capturing the Supreme Court so completely was the turning point, in terms of ability to enact their agenda quickly. It's been conservative my entire not short any more life, but it's strongly packed with disingenuous, ideologically-motivated jurists vetted and guided by the "correct" organizations, now. 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.
- ascagnel_ 1y ago
  The problem with the Supreme Court is the handshake-agreement to limit the court's size in combination with lifetime appointments and the Senate majority leader's pocket veto. Going back to 1992 (eight Presidential terms, three served by Republicans and five by Democrats), Republican presidents have successfully nominated six justices while Democrats only five (including a no-vote for Merrick Garland). 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).

ygjb 1y ago

Before you think this is happening quickly, do note that public institutions have been under attack from the right for generations, including publicly funded education, public broadcasters, public health and social programs. 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.

radiofreeeuropa 1y ago
This has been a project under way since the friggin' John Birchers and the postwar "think-tank" boom. They've (this specific set of interests, not conservatism in general) been successfully ratcheting things toward authoritarianism since their Chicago school pals got the right people in the right places to radically change how we enforced anti-trust in the '70s (that is, they made it impossible for us to enforce in all but the most egregious cases, period) and have been winning one boring but effective battle after another ever since (plus the occasional headline-grabbing one). 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.
- specialist 1y ago
  Yup. 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.

nemomarx 1y ago

Large groups voting for "tear it all down, we don't trust institutions" wasn't a sign for you back in 2016? what were your priors before this year?

radiofreeeuropa 1y ago
My "holy shit, we're in for... interesting times, and like, soon" moment was when Trump suggested his supporters might shoot Hillary if she won ("If she wins, I can't do anything about it. But the 'Second Amendment people'...."), and didn't see a huge hit to his popularity, and supporters in his own camp distancing themselves, immediately. 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.
- buerkle 1y ago
  Just this week Trump posted on his social media that Obama should be indicted for treason, aka, executed and not a blip from the supposed left-wing media
- saguntum 1y ago
  I'm in my mid 30s and have definitely noticed a gap in perception between people in their early 20s who haven't experienced much of pre-2016 politics and the older folks. The younger folks are much less alarmed because they weren't familiar with the "normal political discourse" that occurred when they were children. It makes it hard to be optimistic that there is any plausible roadmap back to some form of normalcy in the medium term.
  - nemomarx 1y ago
    What you want to look at is how countries navigate back to normalcy after coups or assassinations. It's not usually a smooth process, you have to do amnesties or hash out disagreements somehow...

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

RiverCrochet 1y ago

I feel like there's been talk about dismantling the CPB for a long time. I recall talk about it on Rush Limbaugh's radio show in the 90's.

School-Cotton 1y ago

Europeans seem to understand this better than Americans, because the US has never really devolved from democracy into authoritarianism, but several European countries have. That's why e.g. in Germany it's possible to ban political parties that have as their goal the overflow of the democratic order.

autoexec 1y ago
It's only been a couple hundred years or so for us so I guess this is just our turn then.

MisterBastahrd 1y ago

This has been an attack on democracy over 40 years in the making. Conservatives have been openly saying what they've wanted to do all the time, but most people thought there'd never be a moment where they'd actually have enough power to pull it off. Meanwhile, liberal politicians have and still are operating under the delusion that they don't have to pass laws when they gain power, they can merely cast feelings and hope that the courts will back that up.

autoexec 1y ago

Freedom means you're allowed to own enough rope to hang yourself with. We've always been one or two elections away from our own destruction.

f33d5173 1y ago

NPR in particular has been an insane parody of leftism for at least a decade at this point. The fact that it took this long to lose funding is a testament to how strong it was as an institution.