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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.
I thought that's what we voted on in 2016, but instead the people in charge of the process didn't play fair, and instead hamstrung the duly elected executive at every opportunity. The uniparty did not play fair.
Instead the 2016 election remains Trump's greatest crime. He defied the uniparty and must be punished for doing so. I have yet to see anything that contradicts this interpretation, and so it remains the lens through which I view these developments.
Might there be other explanations for Trump's failure than the forces of Mordor using dark plots to defeat our lone hero? Maybe Trump was an ineffective executive with a lot more bluster than execution, who was too stubborn to not commit crimes that didn't benefit him at all?
This is a necessary condition to explain what we've seen, but not sufficient.
Given that we know Trump was spied on by the Obama administration, and that every lever of power came together to fortify the election against him, I don't think it can be honest to pretend that it's all just him, and what he's done.
Trump delenda est may as well be the motto of the uniparty wherever it holds power. Pretending otherwise is make-believe.
I enjoy talking to & listening to all sides of the political spectrum, because it gives perspective. Ken White just claimed that if Trump said what he said to witnesses on his current cases as a private apolitical defendant, he'd be in jail for contempt already, and he's getting special treatment anyway. It's funny how the side that's getting preferential treatment is always the other side.
You're like the leftist radical who notices some poor people can't pay their bills and announce CAPTIALISM DELENDA EST because a BAD THING IS HAPPENING. There have always been, and will always be, bad things happening. Yet that doesn't make today unique, nor does it mean that bad things are the only thing that is happening. Mild foul play is the everywhere in politics, and the system functions regardless. I believe this refers to obamagate / crossfire hurricane. Wikipedia claims there's no evidence Obama had anything to do with that personally - which, you know, eh, maybe that's true, maybe it isn't. But I think we can agree that this had little material impact on trump's election chances - if we're asking if the FBI's discretion helped or hurt trump, it's as close to help as hurt, given Comey's announcing he was re-opening the clinton emails investigation two weeks before the election. Why isn't that evidence the FBI hated Clinton? And this is all peanuts compared to something like Bush v Gore, where you can credibly say the supreme court decided the election. In favor of the, uh, republican. I think this line of thought undermines the claim that trump is being uniquely and unprecedentedly persecuted.
You need to apply some epistemic learned helplessness here. Observe from afar the buffeting winds of the hurricane that is political discourse - all sorts of ideas forming and crashing into each other. Accountants and cardiologists come to strong conclusions about corruption and malicious intent based on complicated inferences in fields like law, economics, foreign policy, and sociology. Does CarRepairGuy #MAGA2020 or TeacherMomOfThree #StopAsianHate really understand the latest legal controversy where the other side is undermining america because they hate us? Do you really understand all the subtle technical differences between the usual adaptation of an old process (elections) to the circumstances of the times, and active manipulation? Does - not republican media, exactly, but the distributed consensus of millions of trump partisans on the internet that you're informed by - really have good incentives or mechanisms of finding the truth? How likely is it that 'every lever of power' really 'fortified the election' in a way that mattered?
I went meta there because - there's so much stuff within claims of election fortification it'd take way too long to get into all of it, and it's years ago.
Well, because they did that against their will. They were attempting to keep the fact that classified emails were comingled with child porn on Clinton's top aid's husbands laptop, but the local FBI field office shared some of their intel with the NYPD who eventually got word to Guiliani who was then shopping an "FBI coverup of Clinton emails" story which Comey got wind of and instead got ahead of while simultaneously massively downplaying what had happened.
Hm, that isn't how wikipedia frames that. The thing is, a left-winger would have a similar response to the obamagate stuff, and I think each side is about as likely to be correct.
Wikipedia is a known captured institution...
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