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Notes -
On the sqs thread, @Capital_Room had an interesting query, about whether Trump is actually being authoritarian:
Is there anything to this: "The Coup We've Feared Has Already Happened"?
Is this what it seems like to me — just more lefty pearl-clutching and crying wolf — or is there something to the arguments James Bruno and Tonoccus McClain are making?
Some of the commenters like @MadMonzer offer an interesting response:
That substack is a bad take on it - the best version of the theory I have seen is spread across multiple posts on lawfaremedia.org. But the underlying story is absolutely serious, and as far as I can see it is true. The three-bullet version of the story is
The slightly longer version is:
The claim that Trump and Johnson are trying to change the US budget process to one where (at least as regards discretionary spending - the only changes to entitlement spending have been done in regular order through the OBBBA) Congress does not meaningfully exercise the power of the purse seems to me to be straightforwardly true.
Overall I tend to agree that Trump's admin is acting in authoritarian ways, and even moreso than past administrations. However, it seems to me that the Congressional structure is so broken that, it kind of makes sense?
The way I see it, and the way Trump et al probably sees it, is that the Three Branches as they exist are extremely dysfunctional, and cannot do the actual job of governing the country pretty much at all. This has allowed NGOs and other non-state actors to come in and basically take over by deploying social and cultural capital in key areas, craftily created a sort of secret network of influence, etc.
The only way for us to get out of this morass, the theory goes, is to have a strong executive who basically burns this gridlock down. Though I don't know if Trump's team would want to restore a functioning American government after or just keep an extremely strong executive.
Anyway, I can't say I fully agree with Trump's seeming plan to just destroy jurisprudence for the executive and do whatever he wants, but I admire the sheer boldness. OTOH, I'm also not convinced that the U.S. has more than a 2% chance of meaningfully falling into an authoritarian dictatorship under Trump, or even in the next 10-20 years. Hopefully I don't eat my words!
There is lefty overreaction/derangement to actual issues. Just because they would complain at anything doesn't mean everything they complain about is nothing.
An unreliable source crying wolf doesn't actually give you a lot of information on whether there is a wolf one way or the other.
Let's not forget that in The Boy Who Cried Wolf, the wolf did eventually come and eat everyone.
But when and how do you sound the alarm when a dictator is slowly installing an authoritarian regime over a country? American leftists warned everyone against this from day one, with poor results. Alarm fatigue set in, people became habituated to the steady erosion of democratic norms because there wasn't a single act to push them over the edge, just a slowly boiling of the frog of democracy.
Way to miss the whole point of the story. What enabled the wolf to come and eat everyone is exactly the fact that the boy lied so many times before. So the first step is to make really sure it's the wolf and only then cry, otherwise you are fucking it up for everyone. And if you are about to sound the alarm, you need to make really, really sure that it's indeed a dictator is slowly installing an authoritarian regime, and not just an elected politician enacting policies you happen to dislike. You need to work extra hard if you already sounded multiple alarms which are on record as false. In fact, in this case it's better to just shut up and let somebody else, who doesn't have such a horrible record with alarm sounding, to do it.
American leftists falsely warned everyone against this from day one, with poor results. That's the word you missed, "falsely". So your question is "how can you make somebody who lied many times before to sound believable this time?" And the answer is "you don't".
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