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I have been banging this drum for a long, long time, and have only got more cynical about the possibility of putting together a Republican policy apparatus that is able to fight the left on scale (what hani calls "incompetence"). But there's more than one way to skin a cat. Every month since Trump came back into power, I'm seeing smart guys I'm in groupchats with go to Washington - sometimes to take a job, sometimes just to talk to someone - and taking meaningful Ws that don't make it into the press, the exact sort of thing that the OP describes. The future of the right may not be building a vast apparatus of company men, but tightening the OODA loop, getting faster and leaner, and doing more with fewer people. As such, the real question is less "how long did it take the Admin to roll back some crazy trucking regulatory rule" and more "how long did it take between some anon in the industry noticing this crazy rule and the Admin acting."
Edit: as if to reward me for making this poast, this just crossed my feed - tl;dr the Admin changed the definition of "harm" in the Endangered Species Act such that you're allowed to build things even if it might disturb some rare fruitbat or gecko.
I have been wondering: for all the drama going on with frontier AI models in the world of digital security, I have to think there are some interesting red-team/blue-team ways to apply those to laws and regulations. Some of the big lawfare shifts we've seen in the last decade or so ("did you know we could just have all the border crossers say the shibboleth asylum and we have to let them in indefinitely until we can give them a hearing?") seem to have come from novel readings or applications of existing rules. It'd be at least interesting (and I haven't tried) to prompt those same models for what corners of the tax code could be abused --- or in reverse, to provide feedback to Congress and regulatory rulemakers --- to promote less-direct outcomes. It's not hard to imagine "hey Claude, let's figure out the most pathological case to bring to trial to make SCOTUS rule my desired direction" actually working.
The problem is less figuring out the ideas to sue over and more building out the necessary infrastructure and legal precedent to get those ideas before the Court. Believe me, there are many, many lawyers already working around the clock to bring these issues before a historically receptive SCOTUS. The thing is, unless you're a state suing another state, you can't just take your case to SCOTUS. It's a multi-year slog of trials and appeals that you have to successfully complete at least 2-3 times (SCOTUS won't hear a case if there isn't a disagreement between at least two circuit courts of appeal) before you even have a shot of getting on their docket. And even then it's a moonshot, with only a tiny percentage of petitions making it to briefing and argument.
The legal activists have good ideas coming out of their ears, but bringing an issue from Zero to SCOTUS, even with the best lawyers in the world working on it, is a ten-year process involving millions of dollars and dozens of skilled professionals working in perfect sync. And those skilled professionals are already making use of AI at least as aggressively as anyone else in the legal field. Maybe there's still some low-hanging fruit that AI can help them more effectively target, some subtle new way of speaking directly to the concerns of five different justices at the same time, but for the most part the bottlenecks are funding and court capacity, not lack of clever strategems.
I think you're right that legal activists aren't really limited by ideas today. But as an example, how will the APA notice and comment regime survive AI-generated slop comments? My understanding is that a lot of it today ends up as boilerplate copy-and-paste letter campaigns: if every commenter writes a unique letter, review will presumably be more involved. Or actively using AI to generate as many novel arguments for/against a proposed rule as possible to exhaust the review process. I'm sure the government side will start using AI to review comments, but I wouldn't expect them to be ahead of the public on their processes.
Require that people who wish to submit a comment do it in person at any post office. The comment has to be recorded on-site with the government supplied equipment, as audio-video, audio only or typed in on a kiosk-mode computer. It wouldn't stop someone reading or retyping AI slop, but it'd slow it down considerably. It would also have the benefit of cutting down the activist spam by requiring a bigger time investment.
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There are guys in the various successors to DOGE working on, shall we say, more prosocial variations of this. The red-teaming is definitely going to happen in the legal field, but it's not going to work unless you have hard-nosed legal realists actually taking those arguments before a court (i.e. deciding which arguments will actually work and which courts will be friendly to them).
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Interesting to think about.
In some ways, the Left is very fast to react. There's a new cause or outrage of the day, and by the evening everyone knows it's the issue of the day; new ones can replace it whenever it's decided.
But there isn't really a central committee actually deciding what to do, and it's not some highly sophisticated ecosystem of policy or issue entrepreneurs performing decentralized decision making. Instead, it's a strongly centralized coordination mechanism, driven not by people but instead some messy combination of what ideological faction is ascendent and what plays best on social media. People on the ground level might come up with interesting ideas, but they've got to go through a host of different groups' veto points to even have a chance of taking off. E.g. this is why the Left has pretty much given up on having a meaningful platform on any AI policy besides AI bad performativity: a platform requires meaningfully engaging with it and its implications, and, since it will gore all oxes, engagement with it will run into endless vetos. So, most you get are shallow responses of boo AI because of water usage or shredding books or whatever.
The Right, on the other hand, is a madhouse of maniacs of different stripes: there is no central coordinating mechanism, and the only thing most people on it have in common with each other is a hatred of the Left. That means there's no real shared policy plan coming from on high, but it also makes for a much more open space for people to contribute ideas. A smart person on a Left worries about alienating X, Y, and Z before they even start thinking how to approach a social or economic issue; but, on the Right, there is no prescribed golden path, and so individuals can be genuine policy entrepreneurs.
(Musing here on a weakly held idea, but maybe there's something there.)
The way I characterize it is that the "madhouse of maniacs" on right all agree that the left is trying to eat the goose that lays the golden eggs and must be stopped. Sometimes they think the left is trying to do this out of malice, but mostly they think it's just sheer foolishness.
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Every time I meet an intelligent person who cares deeply about a particular policy area, I tell them the same thing: go to the right and become their guy. The left (and the GOPe/Tories/etc.) are just not interested - $bad_policy is that way for a reason and many people's jobs depend on it staying that way - but the populist right probably has no idea what they want in $policy_area, and if you can come in, be the man with a plan on $policy_area, and be a team player otherwise, you have a chance utterly unprecedented in living memory to make a change actually happen.
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This is kind of what I was getting at with "the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, but doing it now is still something worthy of praise" and I'm suddenly wondering if you and I might not be in some of the same group chats.
I wonder how many Mottizens secretly know each other in real life but will never make the connection because none of us are stupid enough to tell our coworkers about the Motte. I'm growing increasingly convinced that I've shared office space or attended happy hours with at least a couple of you.
Wearing a t-shirt that reads “it’s okay to be white,” “Islam is right about women,” or “despite being 13% of the population…” to my next company happy hour to see if any Mottizens approach me. What could go wrong?
No, wear a t-shirt saying 'there is a leviathan shaped hole in the hock'.
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If you see me at Butterworth's wearing the secret Mottizen symbol, tap me on the shoulder and I'll get you a drink.
The Pug and Trusty's are more my scene, or at least were when I was spending more time in DC. ;-)
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