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Notes -
If Trump thinks the election has been stolen, then the electors aren't fake (from Trump's point of view, obviously).
This sounds about the same as the Smith indictment, and is far from open-shut for the same reasons. (mens rea, essentially)
It's the same principle as - you think your wife conspired with a corrupt family court to take your children, so you forge documentation to get a school to turn them over to you, breaking a court order. Maybe you're right. But there are processes for addressing that, and if you ignore those (or in trump's case try them but perform terribly and don't prevail), you don't have a right to lie and manipulate other processes.
This is a fundamental way modern governance works. The process prevents conflict by giving both individuals and the state a - usually fair - 'final authority' to appeal to, instead of using violence, coercion, or deception. Even if it's sometimes wrong, it's better to have a single source of truth to prevent conflict - whether that's individual conflict over who owns what or who deserves what, or political conflict over who has power. It's known who wins and how that's decided, according to the process and the court, the monopoly on violence enforces it, so nobody bothers to even fight. If you're wrongfully convicted, your supporters don't suicide bomb the cops/accusers and start a blood feud, they collect evidence and appeal. If someone screws you on a deal, you sue based on the contract both parties signed. If you lose an election and are upset, you file a lawsuit.
It could be argued this is a fundamental pillar holding up modern life. I'm not entirely sure - certainly a neoreactionary government would have less of this at the top-level, but that isn't ours. And if the election wasn't stolen (and I'm very unconvinced by arguments that it was), then Trump's actions is not good for democracy.
This is exactly what the neoreactionary critique gets at, though. In this scenario, the process is your king; your final authority. And because those processes are carried out by people, ultimately those people are your kings.
In short, this way of thinking creates and sustains an oligarchic form of government. Don’t like the process? Don’t like who runs it? Then appeal. By what means? A process. Who runs that process? You’ve already guessed.
Honestly, I agree with you that this is probably the best way of doing things a lot of the time, as opposed to direct personal power or mob democracy. But this flaw is inherent and IMO when the bureaucracy gets too powerful and too uniform then this form of government starts to curdle.
You're allowed to change the people who run the process.
(How? By a process...)
But still. You can indeed change the people in charge and they can indeed change the processes of government. Even if in theory you can get into a closed loop where the people in power use their power to stay in power, that is not currently the case in reality. Although Trump did give it the old college try.
That’s exactly the point under discussion, no? The allegation from trump’s side is that this has already happened, and that following standard procedure for resolving disputed elections is therefore meaningless because the entire bureaucracy is controlled by the enemy.
Personally, though, I was thinking of the Civil Service, who I very definitely can’t vote out of office. From where I’m standing Britain has been in that closed loop for at least 20 years now.
I assure you that politicians very much do have the power to shut down departments, fire civil servants, etc. And if none of the options on your ballot paper are promising to do that, you can stand for election yourself.
The obstacle you face is not that the civil service is all-powerful. It's that your fellow citizens disagree with you.
How would we confirm that unless we see it actually happen?
I disagree with your assertion, and point to the numerous and well-documented instances of the civil service and other centers of unaccountable power wielding massively disproportionate influence in ways I consider malign. Illegal Undercover ops to discredit elected officials and cripple their ability to govern are actually kind of a problem in a purported democracy. End-runs around the concept of a free press are likewise a problem for similar reasons.
But in the end, this comes down to opinions. you are arguing that the system is basically fine. Other people are arguing that it's broken. You can engage with their concerns, and perhaps persuade them, or trust the system and simply handwave them, in the hopes that their critiques are unfounded. The later is, obviously, the correct answer at least some of the time, for some claims. Time will tell if this is one of those times.
You mean like when Margaret Thatcher abolished the Civil Service Department?
Or if that's too far in the past, how about the Department for International Development, abolished in 2020.
I swear, some of you people want there to be a shadowy cabal in charge of everything.
... Both of those examples are in the United Kingdom, and the DID was merged into the Foreign Office without many firings. The CSD reforms did cashier out 140k people from the civil service before breaking the department into new groups, and some functions were privatized, so I'll give you that one, but it was also almost forty years ago and lead to massive efforts to specifically try to prevent that exact sort of thing from ever happening again.
In theory, the UK doesn't really have a 'higher pleading' in the way the United States has the Constitution, so there's nothing explicitly preventing a future PM from changing the law and stripping a new department out. But in practice the last attempt for a significantly less robust rollback ended Poorly. Which isn't strong evidence -- there's a lot of failure in the Johnson government! And yet.
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