It's wild to think I'd ever say this, but the next four years will be the stress test of the strength of US institutions against an authoritarian president. If they survive the next four years, they will likely survive pretty much anything.
Organizations are ongoing processes, constantly in flux, not structures erected in the past. Like a river, you can never step in the same organization twice. Like ghosts and money, they only exist in people's minds; they consist of belief in them, hyperstitiously.
The democracy the FBI is sworn to protect has turned on it. What is left for it to protect? The laws handed down from an older, wiser time? Perhaps the time of Senator McCarthy? Or Jim Crow? What if today's president pardons common criminals and today's Congress legalizes their crimes—will the FBI continue to enforce yesterday's laws?
You can count on the FBI to protect itself, but never believe that what it is protecting is democracy.
> You can count on the FBI to protect itself, but never believe that what it is protecting is democracy.
Except the only thing that what makes them different from organized crime is also the shared belief in laws that form and direct them.
> will the FBI continue to enforce yesterday's laws?
If they don't, i.e. if they start to openly pick and choose which laws are valid and which are not, the whole thing will unravel. Laws won't mean anything anymore, and then suddenly the president is just a random dude, the FBI is just a bunch of thugs with guns and suits, and USA is just words on a map.
I think you misinterpreted something in my note. Continuing to enforce yesterday's laws after Congress repeals them would not seem to me to be the opposite of "openly picking and choosing which laws are valid"; rather, it would be an even more extreme form of it, because you're no longer even just picking from the laws currently on the books!
It would seem so, and I apologize. I think that this bit:
> The democracy the FBI is sworn to protect has turned on it. What is left for it to protect? The laws handed down from an older, wiser time? Perhaps the time of Senator McCarthy? Or Jim Crow?
specifically mentions of McCarthy and Jim Crow, made me misunderstand this bit:
> What if today's president pardons common criminals and today's Congress legalizes their crimes—will the FBI continue to enforce yesterday's laws?
That is, the first part made me think of Bad Laws created by Bad People, and this made me parse the final question as: "What if today's president and Congress turn into Bad People and make Bad Laws, should the FBI enforce such Bad Laws, even when they're obviously just like Bad Laws from Bad People of the dark chapter of our past?".
The point I'm making is, yes, the FBI has to enforce law, good or bad, because that's the reason it exists. If it starts getting picky, it invalidates its own mandate.
Also, FBI as an organization is not an independent entity that sworn fealty to the government - it is a construct of the government. Therefore, if "The democracy the FBI is sworn to protect has turned on it", what the FBI should do, as an organization, is to lie down and take the beating, and allow itself to be disbanded. The FBI was created to protect democracy (in specific ways), has sworn to do it, so if the democracy decides it no longer needs the FBI, then the sworn duty of the FBI is to stop existing. For the FBI to do otherwise is to break the oath and invalidate its own existence.
(Now this applies to the organization. As for the people in it, they're also citizens with conscience, and they're free to work within the process to right what they see as morally wrong, and/or quit.)
I'm mostly saying the same thing, but from a somewhat less prescriptive point of view. I'm less concerned with what the FBI should do than with what it will do and, by the nature of the organization, what it can do. I think these are much more interesting questions, because I really doubt any FBI agents are reading this thread in order to base their plans on my opinions or yours.
So, from my perspective, the normative questions you're bringing up are sort of a distraction. I don't want to waste my emotional energy on praising or condemning FBI agents, which seems like the only possible outcome of the normative debate.
(My examples may not have been well chosen to avoid that debate, but I discarded many even worse ones.)
Of course each individual person in the organization can do anything they choose, within their physical and mental capabilities, and what they think they should do will probably influence what they will do; but what the organization as a whole can do is constrained by those individuals' ability to coordinate. (And what you think or I think they should do doesn't enter into it at all.)
And, from that coordination point of view, at least from an outside perspective, it's not obvious that it's capable of meaningful resistance beyond simple self-preservation.
Take a look at r/conservative. They're claiming they got wins with the dismantling, the site tear downs, the "folds" in negotiation. They really think they're winning.
We have been told that if you fall head down from high altitude you will hit your self badly and probably die, but what if it is different this time around?
So fed up with the economy that they stopped talking about it immediatly after the election, even though no action had been taken.
Because:
A) It was all based on "vibes" and beliefs, not their own actual reality (the gap between "how well off are you personally" and "how do you think others are well off" was wild)
B) Voters lie and the economy was, like in 2016, the fig leaf for the true driver: egoism and cruelty. If Trump's tarriffs destroy their wellbeing, there will be no outcry, because "the cruelty is the point", to the point of self-harm as long as "the others" are harmed even more.
I think the problem is that most people think nothing ever happens, or to put it bluntly "It couldn't happen here". Harris literally offered nothing - when pressed she even said that she wouldn't have done anything different from Biden, which is the last thing you want to hear about a president whose only selling point was not being Trump and giving the country breathing room to come up with something better. Yes, the US recovered faster and stronger from COVID and the recession than the rest of the world but that doesn't change people's lived realities of living paycheck to paycheck with prices only ever going higher.
People don't "learn their lesson". Accelerationism always fails. Suffering, fear and looming threats are what enable the rise of authoritarianism and autocracy, not what helps overcome them. Fascism is rarely overthrown by a popular revolt that establishes direct democracy and egalitarianism. It's usually overthrown by a military junta or gradually coalesces into an oligarchy that reintroduces the trappings of liberal democracy to placate the masses.
As much as the American right loves to call the Democrats "radical leftists" or "socialists", the Democrats have nothing to offer in response to the people's suffering. The Republicans can at least lie through populism: claiming to be opposed to "the swamp" while installing their own loyalists and family members in positions of government, claiming to fight the "coastal elites" while implementing the whims of billionaires, claiming to defend "freedom of speech" while prohibiting government agencies from using progressive terminology, etc etc. But the Democrats can't even do this because at best they can offer half-measures or compromises. They couldn't even pass the Green New Deal and now the Trump government keeps referring to it as if it had actually been implemented.
This isn't a uniquely American problem. The social democrats in Germany have recently come out in opposition to voting on initiating the process to investigate the far-right AfD party (which Elon Musk has been actively supporting btw, which is an unprecedent level of foreign influence) for qualifying for a trial to be banned as unconstitutional (i.e. roughly equivalent to proposing a grand jury with the outcome being a constitutional court trial being launched or not). Why? Because if they would participate in such a vote and support it, "all democratic parties" should support it but there's a good chance the conservative party would vote against or abstain and this would "hurt the democratic parties" by making them no longer unified in their opposition to the AfD - or that if the conservatives were to vote in favor, this might radicalise some of its supporters to vote for the AfD instead. Mind you, the conservative party has already repeatedly cooperated with the AfD and they have supported each others' proposals, although the conservative party is officially ruling out any potential coalition with them while incrementally adopting their rhetoric. The socdems are too concerned with protecting the optics of the system itself and maintaining decorum to directly attack a party that is fundamentally opposed to the principles underlying that system.
>The socdems are too concerned with protecting the optics of the system itself and maintaining decorum to directly attack a party that is fundamentally opposed to the principles underlying that system.
What an incredibly sharp phrasing there!
Your analysis overall seems really astute too, but what you just articulated there is too good. I almost want to try to compressing it even further -- what is needed most of all is short, concise rallying cries that draw attention and raise consciousness, and that's gotta be a great example of one.
I wonder what else could be said to really draw people's attention to this sort of thing, to try to achieve any sort of reform among liberals, to wake them up from centrism and complacency.
> the Democrats have nothing to offer in response to the people's suffering.
WTF? The Democrats are the ones with concrete offers to ease people's suffering. Literally. Stuff like Medicare for all.
For example, Clinton offered coal miners retraining and income support in order to ameliorate the inevitable. Trump offered empty impossible promises. People voted for the empty promises rather than the concrete reality. Coal miners lost their jobs without the support Clinton would have provided.
99% of economists were predicting recession during the multiple crises of the Biden term. 99% of economists were wrong because we had skilled leadership at the helm. How much suffering did that prevent?
> WTF? The Democrats are the ones with concrete offers to ease people's suffering. Literally. Stuff like Medicare for all.
No. Democrats have concrete offers. The Democrats don't. The Democrats had several opportunities to pass far-reaching reforms like Medicare For All but didn't.
There's a massive difference between the ideals of a few activist politicians running for office and the actual policy decisions of a government led by that party.
Also, I already acknowledged that the US handled the recession remarkably well. But that still doesn't change that generally things are pretty rough and "doing largely the same for 4 more years" isn't a very attractive position to the masses when the other guy is appealing to the base instincts of "strong man will fix problem" - especially in a cultural environment where "hard problems require hard solutions" (i.e. that morally repugnant actions are often necessary to help people in the long run) is often accepted without questions.
But better than everywhere else in the world. Virtually every other country did worse over the last 4 years than the US did.
> The Democrats had several opportunities to pass far-reaching reforms like Medicare For All but didn't.
They had 2 opportunities to bypass the Senate filibuster and pass far-reaching reforms. They chose to use those two opportunities to fight inflation and stabilize the economy.
You'd have a point if the Democratic party ever acknowledged any of that. Instead the party line has been "things are actually fine the way they are and we're on the right track". Alas, being the adults in the room doesn't get you elected because this isn't The West Wing and Republicans don't simply disagree "but share the same goals".
It literally doesn't matter how much the Democrats have prevented things from being worse in the past because their messaging is what ultimately allowed Trump to win. Twice. This isn't the 1990s anymore. People don't want stable. People are sick of stable because what has been stabilized had already not been working for them before. There's been a massive, crippling redistribution of wealth and political power in all Western economies (and the former Eastern bloc but they were less subtle about it) from the people to the billionaire class. You can no longer pretend that's not happening. At least the Republicans had the good sense to actively lie and misdirect and continue to do so while said billionaires are desparately trying to dismantle the system before it can be turned against them.
Also, you can't rule out the corruption-like part of the situation.
When you have billions to communicate, and people like Musk have a full global network to brain wash his ideas, obviously a lot of people might be wrongly convinced that they elected the president that defend freedom and efficiency of the institutions to improve their life.
Not realizing that Trump, Musk, are just selfish bastards defending these ideas but only for themselves.
It's already over. You'll have to rely on Canadians burning down the White House. I'm afraid there's no democratic solution to what you're enduring now.
The US didn't have nukes when the Canadians did that. They can't win another war with the US. Even the UK only has US nukes and presumably can't fire them at the US. And Putin or Xi turning Washington into glass wouldn't bring it any closer to being the democracy that was finally lost nine years ago.
US institutions aka. bureaucracy isn't without its own issues. I believe that's why people voted in a rather unusual person like Trump whose main feature is being outside the establishment.
It is the US institutions who have happily engaged in endless foreign wars over past several decades. They have also enacted low corporate taxation resulting in high stock prices but even larger wealth gap where few winners take all the profits.
I think you're underestimating the damage he's done and will do. semi-permanent changes:
- complete radicalisation of an entire congressional party against functional democracy
- complete politicisation of the entire federal government
- normalisation of just straight up lying to the Senate in confirmation hearings (RFK on everything, Patel on q anon)
- normalisation of just straight up lying during campaigns (no idea what Project 2025 is!)
- making it clear to every single ally of the US that the US cannot be trusted to not be a complete cock
- normalisation of pardoning thousands of criminals who did crimes on TV in your favour
- normalisation of Congress and the top level courts being completely and utterly unwilling to lift a finger to stop autocratic exercise of powers by the president
maybe the next president won't be a sociopath, but the above will still be true and maybe the one after will be.
The lying is the most incomprehensible to me. I actually had a conversation with a family member about RFK's lies (including lies about Bernie Sanders! Which everyone around seemingly tried to suppress him from defending himself on!).
To give an example of what the process felt like with another case I made the mistake of talking about (makes a better story than just the pure lies of the rfk conversation, where said family member just lied constantly and started making things up about bernie sanders):
- elon musk probably didn't do a nazi salute multiple times
- and if he did it was misinterpreted
- no i don't want to see the videos
- and i don't care anyway
For context btw, this family member literally had their grandparents suffer under nazi occupation in ww2.
It's also wild that this family member has already actively been harmed by trump's policies including the forced RTO, and literally just ignores it. They just ignore painful examples when they're brought up, or claim it's all part of trump's plan and the only way it could possible have been done. Yes, as if it was just an inevitable occurrence like a natural disaster and thus not trump's fault.
Basically the analysis of anyone who already hated Trump and didn't vote for him. I see a lot of psuedo intellectual exercises in this thread that basically amount to trying to relitigate the election or sour grapes for having lost.
