In the spirit of reacting before even reading the whole piece here by NS, I will point out a possible error in transliteration on the part of Lyons. I believe the three letter acronym, OPM, does not refer to the Office of Personnel Management, but rather Other People's Money.
this is a great idea long overdue. drain the swamp, share the wealth, let the rest of the country feel that the nodes of power are nearer to them, and staffed by people like them and who care about them (at least theoretically). representation matters!
As a long term federal underling I can only say that there are many feds that hop to implement their preferred policies of their preferred party and foot drag or actively sabotage the desires of elected officials of the less-desired party..certain agencies are worse (energy not so much, epa pretty much overtly hostile).
I don't know what the answer is , but some agencies do better than others. A rational government would approach this as a problem worth working on.. snd important for democracy to work.
I have been looking everywhere and hoping someone would address this topic. My stomach has been in knots over this blanket admission and no one thought to cover it beyond a basic statement. Now, I'm hoping you'll tell me there's a way to ignore, override, or change this and other entrenched "rules" put in place by bad actors. Please?
It's clearly unconstitutional, but N.S. Lyons had an article on March 26, 2024, "Why the Constitution Won't Save You." It looks bleak, but the sands are shifting. It's just going to take perseverance.
I totally agree. All my kids are Gen Z, and I am ashamed of what they might inherit. More people are waking up, and some of them are powerful. CEO of J.P. Morgan, Jamie Dimon, released his “Letter to Shareholders.” A man who literally genuflected to BLM in 2020 has seen the light, or at least left the dark side.
Seems to me that they are removing the schedule F as a pre-emptive measure or a "just in case" anyone gets "in" that could use it to get ride of these manager types.
This said, I hold that Trump is simply being cycled into office to bleed off those that are opposed to the system that are on the 'right-wing'.
Essentially staving off actual opposition to the actual rulers.
With that said I do not hold the same opinion as regards my home in Britain, the situation here as regards the structure is very different.
Well for one, there are absolutely zero, nill, an empty void of any Actual Opposition to the rulling system, everything is practically captured so there is no actual threat other than that of paranoia for the managers here in Britain.
And even those that appear to be opposition are actually Toadies for the regime such as UnHerd and GBnews, and such figures like Farage, Richard Tice and Mary Harrington.
All captured by the regimes castle called the Torie Party, when the Labour 'Government' is cycled into power at the next general election those people I've mentioned will tone flip.
I am likely missing some bits but this will do for now.
When I read your comment, I said to myself, “this guy gets it.” And then when I pressed on the YouTube link you provided in your follow up, I realized why. You’re from Scrumpmonkey, a channel to which I am subscribed. You produce great content.
Btw, in case you didn’t know, some of N.S. Lyons’ articles have been posted at Unherd (as well as City Journal—Manhattan Institute). Something to keep in mind.
I see, I have been having some suspicion for a while now that there are many 'right wingers' on substack that are also compromised, but I don't know.
I didn't know that Lyons had pieces published to UnHerd.
I do believe, however, that there are many people who are not necessarily compromised, but they are simple blind or unaware of the connections of certain groups behind the curtain.that they are not allowed to see, and are not invited to such face to face meetings.
Like you, apparently, I'm always trying to figure out the nodes and networks. Realizing that everyone has bills to pay, I'm vigilantly attentive to where each influencer's funds are sourced. Furthermore, I also try to discern whether someone is a true believer, an opportunist, or downright grifter. A tricky task, indeed. The true believers are impossible to convince, whereas the other two types are somewhat persuadable. I'd like to think that those who are compromised can influence their paymasters rather than the other way round, but I'm just not that naive. Ideally, influencers like Lyons (and Auron at The Blaze) maintain their intellectual integrity and eventually build their own networks of support, thus freeing themselves from their current ideological prisons. Otherwise, they'll end up convincing themselves at some point that they have always been true believers--as human nature dictates.
I myself don't have the sufficient time or know how to figure out who is and is not, I personally don't hold any devot semitic believers (Jewish, Muslim or Christian) as being able to deal with the actual rulers.
Their belief systems are made in a way that prevents them from seeing this in a 'true' sense, inability to perceive you could say.
As an aside, I'd hold that their (Aurons' and Lyons') freedom would be in serving their own clans/ ehtnos/ blood ect ect not as in the current modern/ post-modern? sense of Alister Crowley 'do as thou wilt' 'frewdom.
I agree with the sentiment; Schedule F is a very good idea. But consider the counterpoint of a nation in which a future president, call him perhaps Hunter Biden, can replace people with really important jobs of keeping the lights on and so forth with his cronies. The kind of stuff that can happen and has happened in not so rule-of-law countries like Venezuela and South Africa. Like, I don’t want Frank Biden’s son in law’s cousin of whomever in charge of our water quality, you know what I mean?
It isn't just marginal regimes and borderline failed states. The same situation applies to a very long list of countries around the world. I do not want the US to join that list.
Avoiding the turnover of party affiliated bureucrats when the vote changes, by giving unelected bureucrats belonging predominantly to a single party tenure and unaccountability to voters, is hardly an improvement. If anything, it's worse...
Of course if you agree with/benefit from that party, it's fine! It's even "non political", it's just "good sense".
“A nonpartisan civil service is essential to governmental effectiveness and fairness because who you vote for should never affect your rightful access to government benefits and services. This regulation will work to protect a civil service that implements the laws of the people and protects the rights and benefits of the people against partisan manipulation.”
I'm not sure what Raskin is inhaling or smoking but this cuts to the heart of what is wrong in the imperial capital.
I have believed for decades, that the administrative state is by far the more dangerous of the administrative/deep state dichotomy. Un-elected and unaccountable which is a frightening reality.
I guess, we the people, wait for the great conflagration to cleanse this deeply corrupt and evil beast. What form that comes in I'll leave to the imagination of the discerning reader.
For an enlightening and short read, I would recommend "Confessions of Congressman X". It is as insightful, as much as it is, a depressing take, on our "elected representatives". After all is it not they who appoint these parasites? Yet we overwhelming re-elect these folks. So one could say that you get what you deserve.
That documentary comes to mind about how the deep state played Trump during the pandemic.
I'm not sure how this situation isn't leading us towards a civil war. If it becomes more and more apparent that the government is essentially a possession of HALF of the country. When the other half 'wins' an election, they're undermined in every way possible. That's not heading anywhere good.
Bureaucracies are a conundrum; the larger a polity is and the more materially developed a society is, the more requirement there is for them. And the larger a bureaucracy is, the more tendency there is toward overcomplexity, hierarchical fiefdoms, petty turf wars, bloating, inefficiency, and unaccountability.
Those problems deserve addressing, and continual vigilance. But it's crucial to take care about the remedies. The cure proposed in the post is much worse than the disease.
In my experience, American bureaucracies- whether Federal, state, or local- work reasonably well, as a rule. I've had problems, but they've been rare. IRS tax forms are worse than ever. But my local post office and DMV work great. I've heard and read complaints about American bureaucracies for decades. Some of the horror stories about bureaucrats and bureaucracies get wide exposure. But no one ever does stories on civil service employees complaining about the iron-headed ignorance, exaggerated entitlement, dishonesty, and obnoxiousness of some of the citizens that they're required to serve- up to and including incidents of physical violence directed at them.
In comparison with the other nations of the world, American government bureaucracies are rated quite highly. Probably the main reason is that our civil service is built on a baseline standard of merit and tenure- rather than bribery, nepotism, and political chicanery. ALL of those problems proliferate to a regime of pervasive corruption once a civil service bureaucracy is converted to "at-will-employment" at the hands of a partisan regime and its elected officials.
The situation is already bad when it's found as an "unofficial" problem. An Official Policy to institutionalize politicization is intolerable. At any level, but especially at the national level. We're supposed to be electing Presidents, not Autocrats. American Presidents have already been ceded the ability to overstep their authorized powers in arenas like foreign policy. Granting them--or their deputized surrogates in the Executive branch--the power to transform Cabinet departments into political patronage plums from top to bottom is no kind of answer for the problems that ail those bureaucracies. Such a regime doesn't enhance transparency in government; it undercuts it.
Also, don't kid yourselves, the size of the bureaucracies doesn't shrink as a result. In fact, they're more likely to balloon. It should be easier to ensure transparency, accountability, and competence in bureaucracies, along with keeping them in check with more reliance on measures like temp staffing projects with a mission expiration date. But political patronage employment only leads in one direction- more of it. Simply in practical terms, the notion of mass staff layoffs and a frenzy of rehiring with politically acceptable minions is a juvenile Revanchist Fantasy. Come on. This is basic.
If the goal is reducing incompetence in the American government, what we really need to be addressing is the current electoral ballot system. Without ranked-choice voting, electoral democracy has degraded into a rigged system that the professional loyalists of the two established political parties and their ordained candidates have learned to work for their own venal private ends at the expense of a functioning democratic republic. Both parties have learned that all they have to do is scare a plurality of voters about the horrors of a victory by the nominee of the opposing major party, and whichever candidate succeeds at that pathetic mission becomes the President of the most powerful nation on the planet.
That bar is too low. We need a ranked choice of two candidates: the candidate we most want in office, and the one we'll settle for. The current system only allows us the second choice- at best. Imagine, a Presidential election reduced to casting a single vote for the candidate who--we hope--might edge out the candidate that we find to be least acceptable. That's a description of nearly every Presidential election in my lifetime. (Then there's this indicator--number of newly elected Presidents since 1976 who entered office with a popular vote majority: two, out of eight.)
The real way to trim or dissolve bureaucracies and Cabinet agencies is through the Congress denying funds to them. That's the appropriate Constitutional check and balance. But see above. My comments on the ballot system also apply to the way nearly all American voters are cornered into electing our Representatives and Senators.
There's some truth in that "Bureaucracies are a conundrum; the larger a polity is and the more materially developed a society is, the more requirement there is for them". But at this point, most of their presence is busywork and over-stepping boundaries (nanny state), not some real "requirement" for them.
According to your comment, the bureucracy has mastered the difficult arcane art of delivering packages and issuing car licenses (or not, since neither the post office or the DMV are seeing that fondly by the vast majority of the population, but let's ignore this).
Big deal. They still are miserable failures in managing the tech and telcos, healthcare, education, infrastructure, development policies, and most other things that actually matter. And what they do do competently might not be worth to be doing in the first place, or even be actively hostile to the population, including all the indoctrination initiatives.
And when you say "in comparison with the other nations of the world, American government bureaucracies are rated quite highly", you mean compared to the developing and the third world or ex-Eastern Bloc countries? Like, they beat Nigerian and Bulgarian bureucracies? Perhaps the richest nation on Earth also gives Mongolian and Portuguese bureucracies a run for their money? And how much of this "good job" is momentum from more balanced and less partisan bureucracy eras, that is being lost year after year past 2000 or so?
"We're supposed to be electing Presidents, not Autocrats".
Are presidents supposed to be figureheads for photo-ops, or to represent the general will of the voters? Are unelected bureucrats for-life meant to do the actual policy work (including resisting policies and preventing the enforcement of changes and laws they don't like)?
"That bar is too low. We need a ranked choice of two candidates: the candidate we most want in office, and the one we'll settle for".
Given that we just established that Presidents are just figureheads with no importance, what exactly would that accomplish? Not to mention how limited it is in any real bite and scope. Talk about "too low a bar"...
To quote the exchange up thread: "We need a ranked choice of two candidates: the candidate we most want in office, and the one we'll settle for".
>"Given that we just established that Presidents are just figureheads with no importance, what exactly would that accomplish? Not to mention how limited it is in any real bite and scope. Talk about "too low a bar"..."
For one thing, I've rejected your contention that Presidents are "mere figureheads." Secondly, we need ranked-choice voting for Congresspeople and Senators, too.
The present reality is that neither the Democrats or the Republicans allow "change from within" their party structure. Some might say that Donald Trump proves that the Republican Party allows for exactly that sort of change, but all it's really proven is that Donald Trump was able to adjust some of his formerly expressed political views in the direction of wooing constituencies of the Republican Party, while picking up on the widespread dissatisfaction of the electorate with a stagnant party regime of Democratic Party candidates prefabricated to suit the Funders, with nowhere to assert dissent except for voting for a Republican. (Which some of them did, in the example of Trump. But that doesn't mean that "the system works.") By contrast, Trump managed to take over the national Republican Party and turn it to his ends. Followed by a perfect storm.
But that doesn't solve the problem of introducing more dynamism into the Republican Party, or into American political parties in general; it's merely effectively converted it to the one-man rule of Donald Trump, Maximum CEO. Temporarily. That's an unstable system.
Under ranked-choice voting, Republicans who find Trump's exclusive hold over the GOP unacceptable could reorganize outside of the GOP and run a candidate slate- and a Presidential nominee- closer to the aspirations of them, and GOP-affiliated voters who have enough concerns about a re-elected Trump that they would rank a different candidate at the top. But they could still choose to include Trump as a second choice, instead of the way it is now- where, as a practical reality, everyone opposed to Trump is in the position of voting Biden. Or staying home- and under the current system, that's all a 3rd party vote amounts to: an abstention.
That's where ranked-choice voting changes the system: it induces the priceless capability of pressuring the Established parties from outside. That's "parties", plural. For example, a No Labels (aka anti-Trump trad GOP) candidate in a ranked choice system would have the potential to draw away Democrats and Independent voters from D-nominee Biden, not just from the Republican base. And since the second slot is open, voters who loathe the Democrats are still able to vote for Trump as something like an insurance choice. Their non-duopoly votes are no longer consigned to the Spoiler bin, ineffectual at best- and, at worst, actively working in favor of the candidate that they least want in office.
Pressure From Outside of the Party Hierarchies: this is crucial to effective electoral democracy. Because under the status quo, dissidents are permitted, but they're routinely subordinated and dismissed by the workings of the Party Institution. Both the Democratic Party "Progressive Caucus" (House: 100/213; Senate: 1/50) and the Republican Party "Liberty Caucus" (House: 9/218), Senate: approximately 10/50) are confined to dismissable niches; some of their "outlier" views may even be shared by a majority of Americans across ideological lines, but those views have no Push. Not from within. Not within either hidebound Party establishment.
Ranked choice voting- and a first and second choice is sufficient to be a major upgrade, and possibly optimal- and it's a whole new game.
Finally: my advocacy for ranked-choice is based on principle. I'm seeking nonpartisan assent. I don't want to see the advocacy of ranked-choice become associated with one side. Unfortunately, when I look at the institutional effort nowadays, it resembles a takeover by Establishment Liberals associated with the Democrats- to the point where I'm suspicious that the ultimate result will be slow-walk the ranked-choice reform until it bogs down and is forgotten. Both Democrats and Republicans have given lip service to ranked-choice voting, but the right thing to do would be to advocate for the reform as a nonpartisan effort, not reducing it to the tin-eared partisan effort by branding it as a "progressive cause." So I frankly doubt the sincerity of most of the endorsers on the list in the link: https://fairvote.org/our-reforms/ranked-choice-voting/endorsers/
It's easy for elected leaders to SAY that they want something, as long as they don't have to DO anything about it.
I also think that if every national-level "third party movement" in the country with a base of support of more than 100,000 voters joined together and put their combined energies in common cause to focus on the SINGLE ISSUE of enacting Ranked-Choice Voting all over the country, it would beat the hell out of all the wheel-spinning performances that parties like the Libertarians and the Greens put on in Presidential election years, to obtain the passing notice of The Media.
I agree. The question is how to properly solve it.
It would be a lot less complicated without having to contend with the array of responses, reactions, power trips, etc. from all those other countries out there. But that's like complaining about the weather.
You could shrink the government while retaining the functions established by the Founders which includes dealing with other countries.
Or you could partition the country. A smaller and perhaps weaker country would still be pretty big. And retain the nukes. There is an interesting counterfactual as to whether the Dulles doctrine of massive retaliation would have worked had we not tried to be globocop. Not complete safety as we would need to maintain a robust militia. Israel illustrates both points or would had they not forgotten the militia part with armed citizens.
As an elevator pitch, devolution of government power is an easy project to get behind. My impression is that the idea is really popular. The devilment is in the details. I'd like to see a set of competing plans, in outline form. And then the best features of the plans could be combined.
I think it's something AI could help with, as long as AI had no final decision-making status whatsoever in terms of calling the shots. AI is for advice, not wielding Power. Not that this would solve that other Power problem, the human one, lol. But that isn't a hopeless situation. One of the best features of the founders of the US is that they understood the practical value of compromise, and none of them made it all about their own exclusive private ends. No one was bidding to be dictator. George Washington was offered the Presidency for life, as if he were to be a King. After all, monarchy was the status quo, the system everyone was used to back then. Washington turned it down...how many people get an offer like that, and turn it down?
But the 1776 Project wasn't all wrong, even if they really went overboard in some ways. Slavery really is the thing that fucked up the national charter of the Constitution from the beginning. Most of the compartmentalized hypocrisy in the original draft has since been successfully addressed. But the Electoral College is a hangover from the era of slavery, even after most of the original reasoning for it was long gone.
The Electoral College isn't the source of the real problem, though. The real problem is that the US grew from coast to coast- and up to Alaska and out to Hawaii- with a system of adding States that never had any logic to it. It was just ad hoc: here's Rhode Island, and there's Alaska. Here's Massachusetts, and there's Montana. Here are the headwaters and tributaries, divided up in ten different states, and there's the river mouth, in another state somewhere else.
I don't think that it's an overly ambitious project to get things to make more rational sense in that regard. It isn't some soup-to-nuts Utopian overhaul. But it's a huge project, and probably one that would require 20 years to complete in terms of shifting the, yes, bureaucracies. It would be a much bigger deal than simply adding or repealing a Constitutional amendment. Which is why there's so little energy for even proposing it. Every State capital has its own set of special interests, for instance. The amount of support for the project would have to verge on consensus. Not just majority, or supermajority. Most every American citizen and associated enterprise, public and private, would have to be down with it. Even given that some of them would lose private advantages.
So maybe what we need is a more rational set of regional structures, for some purposes. And also some lessening of both Federal and state power hoarding. I think one of Trump's more commonsense ideas is to take away State chartering of medical insurance companies and allow them to sell their policies in every state, for example. What's the rational argument against that? Maybe there is one. But I haven't heard it.
"They [bureaucrats] still are miserable failures in managing the tech and telcos, healthcare, education, infrastructure, development policies, and most other things that actually matter.'"
Performance can be improved. Considerably, in some cases. My impression is that the efficiency of administration of a polity drops off drastically once its population exceeds 90 million people. But that problem isn't solved by politicizing the bureaucracy. And "miserable failures" is just hyperbolic rhetoric.
"And what they do do competently might not be worth to be doing in the first place, or even be actively hostile to the population, including all the indoctrination initiatives."
That's trivial, compared to the amount of stuff that gets done competently, often so unobtrusively that most of us don't give it a second thought.
"And when you say "in comparison with the other nations of the world, American government bureaucracies are rated quite highly", you mean compared to the developing and the third world or ex-Eastern Bloc countries? Like, they beat Nigerian and Bulgarian bureucracies? Perhaps the richest nation on Earth also gives Mongolian and Portuguese bureucracies a run for their money? And how much of this "good job" is momentum from more balanced and less partisan bureucracy eras, that is being lost year after year past 2000 or so?"
More rhetoric. And you sound really mad. As if everything around you stopped working. Granted, the infrastructure of the country has been under-funded for at least 25 years. But that isn't the fault of DEI initiatives. The problems of the VA almost entirely the result of an overnight switch to war footing to carry out American aggressive invasions and occupations halfway around the planet, and the worst of it follows from tens of thousands of tragedies that no amount of funding can fix. And I'll put the responsiveness of Federal government bureaucracy up against the way large private bureaucracies treat consumers any day. That said, both public and private sector bureaucracies are contending with a massive number of demands. Complex modernity exacts a price. The population of the country has doubled in my lifetime. And Americans used to make do with a lot more self-reliance, a lot less Stuff, and a lot less Entitlement. Problems that aren't confined to any one partisan side or ideology. Or matter of ethnic ancestry, or level of household income. The Terrible Twos.
For crying out loud, get a grip. You're straining at gnats, as if Americans haven't assented to swallowing camels for decades on end. War On Drugs propaganda was more pervasive than the most nonsensical of CRT-related indoctrination in the schools in the 1980s, and it was backed up by Hard Power. To this day, even Elon Musk still has to submit to a Federal government order for a Drug Screen- on account of a policy that dates back to the 1980s. Presidents have been unilaterally deploying military power around the world for as long as I've been alive, which is not exactly "figurehead" behavior. Republicans in Congress toppled a Democratic Party Congressional near-supermajority under a Democrat President in 2010 by neutering Obama with filibuster threats and a scare narrative, and followed it up with government shutdowns. Obama's legislative legacy amounts to the ACCA, and maybe a t-shirt. He even kept most of the Bush tax cuts in place. Over half of his timid half-stimulus consisted of tax holidays and unemployment extension. I think orthodox Democratic Party liberalism is full of bien pensant ineptitude, cheezy patronage, tin-eared paternalism toward some voting constituencies and hostile condescension toward others, along with sharing many of the same bad priorities as Republicans. But at least they understand the need to fund clean water and pay working people enough to keep themselves housed. Too bad the Republicans made such a show of standing on Ideological Dogma instead of taking note of practical reality, because they held up the works for 20 years on those problems.
Yes, it's called making a case. Just like your rhetoric about how efficient and underappreciated the bureucrats really are. Or was the praise to the efficiency of your local DMV and the hard working bureaucracy based on numerical stats?
> And you sound really mad.
Since we've come to ad-hominens ("mad", really? can't even reply without stooping to that) is the "DC" in your username implying that you are a swamp resident and perhaps a bureaucrat yourself?
> As if everything around you stopped working.
Compared to the momentum and position the US had 30, 50 and even 80 years ago? It might have not stopped (at least not everything has), but it sure as hell has hit the breaks.
In STEM education and research for example, if it wasn't for the continued stream of (raised and educated abroad until at least college) incoming Asians (Chinese and Indian), the US would have sank already.
Public infrastructure? City safety? Places that were thriving or regular few decades ago, have turned into dangerous or shit or both.
> Granted, the infrastructure of the country has been under-funded for at least 25 years. But that isn't the fault of DEI initiatives.
Of course not. It's also the fault of corporate lobbying, misapplication of funds, neglect, wrong priorities, greed, ideology, and a few other things.
> Presidents have been unilaterally deploying military power around the world for as long as I've been alive, which is not exactly "figurehead" behavior.
It is, when the President could not care less either way, and it's the MIC, related advisors, and deep state, that push for those military deployments. They're just the figureheads to "give the order" and look nice on TV while talking macho.
> But at least they understand the need to fund clean water and pay working people enough to keep themselves housed.
Funnily enough, they had made (at least since Clinton) the same concessions to corporate greed and neoliberal policies than prevent those working people from being "housed". And Obama and Biden continued the same war machine, just like Bush and Bush Jr (which the latter, they're even all pals now, and have photo-ops together). Sorry, did you think you were talking to some GOP partisan?
I'm not even local. I have no horse in this race. Just don't like these kind of bureaucracies and especially unelected unaccountable ones, which are all the rage for the last 20 years or so. And can see the signs.
"That is, when the President could not care less either way, and it's the MIC, related advisors, and deep state, that push for those military deployments. They're just the figureheads to "give the order" and look nice on TV while talking macho."
Oh, the US President always cares about those decisions, and the consequences of them. It's just that it's become something of a practical requirement for over a century for the Chief Executive to have already accepted the American National Prerogative to order US military strikes to kill people. I mean, read the biography of Smedley Butler. But one of the objections to Trump is that he's liable to go off and abandon any prudence or restraint, because Trump believes the same narrative, only more so.
"In STEM education and research for example, if it wasn't for the continued stream of (raised and educated abroad until at least college) incoming Asians (Chinese and Indian), the US would have sank already."
You're slighting all of the other immigrant nationalities, heh. And you're also somewhat underestimating the situation; in the medical professions, around 27% of physicians are foreign born; also16% of registered nurses, 25% of nursing aides. It's work that native-born Americans don't flock to. Business administration is still the most popular undergraduate major- followed by all "health professions" combined, on this list of 12:
Engineering is the 4th most popular major on the list, so there's that. And Biology is 5th place. The next indisputably hard science listed is Computer Science, #7. And that's it. The numbers are not that bad, really. It's just that so much of the demand for a technologically advanced level of medical services and industrial base R&D is concentrated in the US.
"> Granted, the infrastructure of the country has been under-funded for at least 25 years. But that isn't the fault of DEI initiatives.
Of course not. It's also the fault of corporate lobbying, misapplication of funds, neglect, wrong priorities, greed, ideology, and a few other things."
We completely agree. And it's interesting how that affects the workings of Federal bureaucracies (many of which which serve a population at least 4x too large to do the job right in the first place, and 4x centralized employees would only make things worse, not better). Because the source of bureaucratic power is funding, which is appropriated through Congress. And the first-order direct hookup with lobbyists is with the Representatives and Senators, and their staff members. The bureaucrats "lobby" the House and Senate Committees with their own budget proposals, of course. But as a rule, Federal bureaucrats don't have nearly as much to offer the funders of the Legislative Branch, compared to the private sector lobbyists. (As I've said, I oppose at-will employment in public sector bureaucracies. As a solution, it's simple, easy,and wrong. But I'm also dubious about public sector unions. There ought to be a better way to do it.)
The hookup of bureaucrats with lobbyists in a few agencies, like the FDA, is often somewhat porous, partly out of the practical necessity to rely on the large pharma companies to assist in testing and regulation (and I'm not calling on a public project of $7 trillion for FDA to get AI to do it, either.) Which should be primarily about a shared common interest in improving public health, not just the power trip of "too big to fail."
And no, I don't like having the majority of prescription drugs sold in America made in foreign countries around the globe, either. I'd rather have a public option for Stateside drug manufacture (contracted, of course, as with EPA projects) without public health care, than public health care with the shots are called on prescription drugs manufacture and price by private owners running businesses for profit. The US is currently THE cash cow of Big Pharma. (People need to be more diligent about their own medicine, in the direction of cutting back. And I think the negativity about vaccinations is overinflated. But so is the hype insisting that everyone in every age demographic has to get vaccinated. And Pfizer did reap $35 billion in profits from their Covid vaccine, the most profitable patent pharmaceutical in the history of civilization. In one fiscal year alone. And that bottom-line number is from a while ago.)
The real direct bureaucrat-lobbyist hookup takes place on retirement, when "former" Federal bureaucrats retain communication with peers and subordinates. And also members of Congress and the Senate.
We agree; it's really that bad. The only place we might disagree is that in my experience, in few Federal agencies (other than education!) does "DEI" loom large as a concern, particularly in office politics. Most Federal workers get along with each other, just like most private sector offices with a multiracial makeup get along with each other. Which is one of the worst things about "antiracism"- it goes in assuming--insisting on--a problem, whether or not there is one. That isn't even psychologically helpful for the "antiracism" speaker. (Although, financially... ) I think most offices anywhere take a background noise level of DEI bulletins and papal bulls as a minor annoyance.
"Is the "DC" in your username implying that you are a swamp resident and perhaps a bureaucrat yourself?"
No. Not now, or ever in the past. Granted, I'm often located in one of the zip codes, like many other residents of the Region. But otherwise not. ("The Region", I like that. Branding away, here. "...he chose the name 'The Region' for its surefire appeal to the upscale cohort of prospective buyers." See how easy that was? And suck it, Henry George. Nah, he's a good man. Georgist tax policy would be perfect for The Region. Although it would have been much more beneficial if enacted 50 years ago. Much like an overhaul of the drug laws,)
I recommend that you stick to quoting and critiquing my content.
"Public infrastructure? City safety? Places that were thriving or regular few decades ago, have turned into dangerous or shit or both."
Yes, like needles in the sandboxes of public parks, and vagrants with their panst down around their ankles down the sidewalk, and occupants of bathroom stalls nodding off in their own very private Xanadu all day long, maybe for last time ever...that's 50 years of Intensified Drug War for you. Beginning with 1964-1974, the time period when the consumer base expanded (at least) 20-fold, mostly within one age demographic cohort, the Youth. Followed by the Cocaine Era of the Roaring 1970s and the rise of ( by historic standards, EXTREMELY) well-heeled youth gangs in the crack era of the 1980s. Surpassed handily as a dysfunctional drug epidemic in the 1990s by the new brand-name product Oxycontin, developed solely because the MS-Contin patent held by Purdue was expiring and becoming a generic medication. https://www.statnews.com/2019/12/03/oxycontin-history-told-through-purdue-pharma-documents/
Another crucial component of the great Novel Opioid Epidemic was the failure of Congress to fund DEA requests to use the new computer capabilities of the late 1990s in order to increase physician, pharmacy, and warehouse accountability, of the sort that's only been achieved very recently with a central database to which nearly all 50 states subscribe (except Missouri and California, iirc. California has always been very strict about demanding DEA triplicates--long after other states were no longer requiring them)--and not filling out of state prescriptions for controlled substances, and it's current opioid-related problems began long after opioids had ravaged the East Coast, South, and Midwest.) Was denying funding to that "bureaucratic project" about striking a courageous blow against Government Power?
Just in case you don't know what I'm talking about: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ex-dea-agent-opioid-crisis-fueled-by-drug-industry-and-congress/ This is what the mission of DEA should be: supervising oversight and regulation of "controlled substances." Similar to the BATF, the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms. But--shined on by companies like Purdue and McKesson-- instead of the DEA establishing a central database of accountability for opioids, every one of the 50 States were making their own rules, and few if any were sharing information across state lines. As if one of the cornerstones of the DEA Charter and the CSA 1970 didn't even exist. Meanwhile, on August 24, 2000, the DEA (and several other police agencies) were busy raiding a plot of industrial hemp on the Lakota reservation: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2001/02/drug-war-comes-rez/
That's one example of The Swamp you're talking about. That sort of thing is routine inside the Beltway, and examples can be found as far back as as the existence of the US government. Inevitable as a bug, but never to be accepted as a feature. Which it appears to have been, by rough bipartisan consensus, since the late 1980s. (see the chapters on "Washington" in Partners In Power, by Roger Morris.) The narcotization effect of Privilege. The professional guild acceptance of the lobbyist-legislator embrace with that "out of sight, out of mind" compartmentalization, a tacit conspiracy of silence. When (Roger) Stone's Rules started into running things. Although not all of them, even today, Although that would likely change if Stone (or one of his proteges) was ever put in charge of officially dismissing Dissident Bureaucrats.
Now we've had (and still have) a fentanyl epidemic on our hands. Ever since the DEA crackdown on Oxycontin that began in the second term of the Obama administration, shutting the gate 10-15 years after disaster had already struck. Most of the street addicts of the Fentanyl Age were originally manufactured by a combination of
in some States, no inventory or accountability for the "Schedule II Controlled Substance"; no effective oversight of suppliers, pharmacists, and physicians (as if no one in power had ever heard of a pill mill- the scary part is that while it's dead-bang certain that the commission salespeople--and everyone who looked at the booming sales numbers--at Purdue and the other companies knew, I'd venture that the Bipartisan Clean And Straight Congresspeople in the Class of 2000 really didn't know what a Pill Mill is. None of them. Or maybe they were all daydreaming, all the way through the hearing testimony..."wonk wonk wonk possibility of quantity diversion wonk wonk wonk" 'Yo, got any more that Lobbyist Money')
And then, the criminalization of everyone else in the diversion supply chain, including the users. Until the DEA woke up, the game went cold, and some of the doctors and a few of the execs also joined the pariah junkie fellahin in getting locked up.)
Bureaucracy. There are all sorts of aspects. It's obvious--at least to me--that the bureaucracy known as the Drug Enforcement Administration doesn't work nearly as effectively as the bureaucracy known as the US Post Office. The questions of importance are "what are we doing this for? What are the results?" So maybe--instead of a Regime that fires any Dissident Bureaucrat that gets in the way of the Autocrat--is a stronger ombudsman. Which is, come to think of it, the beat of websites like Propublica.com (and no, I don't know or especially care who might be funding work with that standard of quality.) Too bad that ProPublica reports aren't given more attention, or even read all that much. Especially by Congress.
(No, I'm not with ProPublica either, reader. Bore me to death already.)
Bureaucrats? Each one of them is a different case.
On further recollection, contrary to the mistaken recollection I wrote at the top of this post, I was a temporary hire as a census enumerator for the 2000 Census. In locales far, far from The Swamp. Just in the interest of full disclosure. It was sometimes terribly easy money. But it's generally agreed that we did a good job. I was sometimes assigned to second-check the work of other enumerators. By contrast, some bureaucracies are tasked with duties so futile--and so iatrogenic in effect--that some of their members have been known to get outright, eh, cynical:
Yes, let's take a good look at what "ranked choice voting" has done for California. When I grew up there, the state was functional; opportunity, reasonable taxes, reasonable policies, great schools, amazing infrastructure. It is now nearly a third world hellhole, with a dominant political party that almost totally ignores the need to invest in maintaining or improving infrastructure as the state grew, instead passing environmental and anti- business regulations that drove out hundreds of thousands of tax payers while giving billions in freebies to non citizens; all to create permanent votes; while simultaneously decriminalizing pedophilia, theft and drug use. What could go wrong? That dominant party has been "voted in" through "ranked choice voting" (put in place by themselves) to keep the most prosperous state in the country firmly in their control. The problem is not the system - the problem is PEOPLE - POLITICIANS who only serve themselves. I also lay blame on feminism in politics; women more interested in "safety" and "equity", creating a nanny state that has strangled innovation, creativity, mental health, destroyed our military and demoralized our men. America is NOT a democracy, (two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner), it was brilliantly formed as a Republic. The Federalists put a brilliant government in place and over the years, GREEDY, POWER LUSTFUL PEOPLE and FEMINIST WOMEN have destroyed it. There is no government system on earth safe from human corruption and ego. It is a pipe dream to believe that. THIS IS the human condition.
"Yes, let's take a good look at what "ranked choice voting" has done for California."
But California doesn't have ranked-choice voting. (edit: not for statewide offices or national offices, at least.) So whatever points of the rest of your paragraph might be worthy of more discussion----taken as an argument against a ranked-choice ballot system, your opening claim and everything that follows it is invalid. As far as an argument against a ranked-choice ballot system.
Furthermore, it's worth pointing out that ranked choice voting is not a magic wand that instantly changes the entire character of the political system instantly. Or after two elections, or even three elections. Think that through. Turn that over in your mind. I'd much prefer that people draw their own conclusions about what it could do. This is a thoughtful blog, and thoughtful people contribute here. Learn about it and think about how it would actually work. How it does work, in Maine, the one state that has it (but it's still brand new there! Only since 2020, iirc.) And don't expect visibly noticeable improvements after only one election. I'd grant it at least as much of an opportunity as the string of failures of the status quo ballot system. (My personal position is that only two candidates for each office need to be ranked. In the interest of transparency and simplicity. There's no practical benefit in overcomplicating it.)
Incidentally, I lived in California for nearly 25 years- the second time for 20-years in Sacramento, ending in 2005. I'm acquainted with the history. From the other end of the country, California currently looks like one-party rule to me, and with some of the usual pitfalls of such a regime, even when it's achieved by popular election. But the residents live there, and I don't. Newsom didn't ride into the Capitol in the aftermath of a military coup. And not too long ago--between 1/2003 and 1/3/2011--the Governor was a Republican.
Potentially, ranked-choice voting could overcome even a quasi-hegemonic level of Democratic Party rule as readily as it could overcome an even quasi-hegemonic level of Republican Party rule. Hint hint.
There are suggestions in the comments to disperse the bureaucrats from the Swamp into the States, but note that the IRS has offices in every city in Flyover Country with nothing notable to show for the dispersion. OK, everyone who seeks to address the metastasizing managerial state and its fellow travelers: war, inflation, woke oppression - understands that reducing Federal govt. head-count is a necessary condition, but that cannot be enough.
Self-described conservitives think that if only we could turn back the clock all might be well, but history only moves in one direction: forward. The never-ending task of delaying and bemoaning progressivism only serves to exhaust and discourage. A prerequisite for restoring a non-insane version of America is to stop trying to compromise with the progressive world view and instead offer an alternative vision. An alternative vision should not be shy about dissing the shibboleths that the left uses as weapons. The left has made a holy cult of of the following words: equality, democracy, diversity, feminism. In my opinion, an argument that doesn't start by attacking these four holy words is destined to keep failing.
No, no. Just kidding. It would never happen that way. Surely Mencius Himself would remain a Loyal Minister, rather than join a successor Triumvirate regime. Too much of an Oligarchy for his taste.
If, on the other hand, Yarvin could manage a transition to Monarchical Autocracy for himself alone...
Whenever I tell people that democracy is an illusion in Europe and north America, they ask me to explain.
This is one of the better answers
In the spirit of reacting before even reading the whole piece here by NS, I will point out a possible error in transliteration on the part of Lyons. I believe the three letter acronym, OPM, does not refer to the Office of Personnel Management, but rather Other People's Money.
Shoot, I believe you are quite right!
My thoughts exactly.
the good news is…the Elite are panicking.
the bad news is…the Elite are panicking.
One thing that could potentially help would be decentralization of the Federal Government. Department of Interior in Montana. IRS Kansas. Etc
this is a great idea long overdue. drain the swamp, share the wealth, let the rest of the country feel that the nodes of power are nearer to them, and staffed by people like them and who care about them (at least theoretically). representation matters!
As a long term federal underling I can only say that there are many feds that hop to implement their preferred policies of their preferred party and foot drag or actively sabotage the desires of elected officials of the less-desired party..certain agencies are worse (energy not so much, epa pretty much overtly hostile).
I don't know what the answer is , but some agencies do better than others. A rational government would approach this as a problem worth working on.. snd important for democracy to work.
I have been looking everywhere and hoping someone would address this topic. My stomach has been in knots over this blanket admission and no one thought to cover it beyond a basic statement. Now, I'm hoping you'll tell me there's a way to ignore, override, or change this and other entrenched "rules" put in place by bad actors. Please?
It's clearly unconstitutional, but N.S. Lyons had an article on March 26, 2024, "Why the Constitution Won't Save You." It looks bleak, but the sands are shifting. It's just going to take perseverance.
Yes. I read that one, too. I just really, really don't want GenX and older Millenials to be the generations that let freedom die on our watch.
I totally agree. All my kids are Gen Z, and I am ashamed of what they might inherit. More people are waking up, and some of them are powerful. CEO of J.P. Morgan, Jamie Dimon, released his “Letter to Shareholders.” A man who literally genuflected to BLM in 2020 has seen the light, or at least left the dark side.
Who is willing to cross the Rubicon? The managerial state will go to war. They are at war with Trump and trump voters. It will need to become kinetic.
“The U.S. funds wars, while China funds development.”
Yellen Dispatched to Beg China for Face-Saving Slowdown – Simplicius - Apr. 9, 2024
https://substack.com/inbox/post/143376573
Worth careful reading -- Such a thought / analysis is VERY rarely stated:
Seems to me that they are removing the schedule F as a pre-emptive measure or a "just in case" anyone gets "in" that could use it to get ride of these manager types.
This said, I hold that Trump is simply being cycled into office to bleed off those that are opposed to the system that are on the 'right-wing'.
Essentially staving off actual opposition to the actual rulers.
With that said I do not hold the same opinion as regards my home in Britain, the situation here as regards the structure is very different.
How so? In Britain I mean. That would be interesting to hear about.
Well for one, there are absolutely zero, nill, an empty void of any Actual Opposition to the rulling system, everything is practically captured so there is no actual threat other than that of paranoia for the managers here in Britain.
And even those that appear to be opposition are actually Toadies for the regime such as UnHerd and GBnews, and such figures like Farage, Richard Tice and Mary Harrington.
All captured by the regimes castle called the Torie Party, when the Labour 'Government' is cycled into power at the next general election those people I've mentioned will tone flip.
I am likely missing some bits but this will do for now.
Here is a link to a video tonight at 7pm GMT that will likely cover some of this;
https://www.youtube.com/live/iv_bZbyyZkk?si=eLtK4dzxudtHrkA7
When I read your comment, I said to myself, “this guy gets it.” And then when I pressed on the YouTube link you provided in your follow up, I realized why. You’re from Scrumpmonkey, a channel to which I am subscribed. You produce great content.
Btw, in case you didn’t know, some of N.S. Lyons’ articles have been posted at Unherd (as well as City Journal—Manhattan Institute). Something to keep in mind.
I see, I have been having some suspicion for a while now that there are many 'right wingers' on substack that are also compromised, but I don't know.
I didn't know that Lyons had pieces published to UnHerd.
I do believe, however, that there are many people who are not necessarily compromised, but they are simple blind or unaware of the connections of certain groups behind the curtain.that they are not allowed to see, and are not invited to such face to face meetings.
Like you, apparently, I'm always trying to figure out the nodes and networks. Realizing that everyone has bills to pay, I'm vigilantly attentive to where each influencer's funds are sourced. Furthermore, I also try to discern whether someone is a true believer, an opportunist, or downright grifter. A tricky task, indeed. The true believers are impossible to convince, whereas the other two types are somewhat persuadable. I'd like to think that those who are compromised can influence their paymasters rather than the other way round, but I'm just not that naive. Ideally, influencers like Lyons (and Auron at The Blaze) maintain their intellectual integrity and eventually build their own networks of support, thus freeing themselves from their current ideological prisons. Otherwise, they'll end up convincing themselves at some point that they have always been true believers--as human nature dictates.
Anyhow, keep plodding. You're doing great work!
I myself don't have the sufficient time or know how to figure out who is and is not, I personally don't hold any devot semitic believers (Jewish, Muslim or Christian) as being able to deal with the actual rulers.
Their belief systems are made in a way that prevents them from seeing this in a 'true' sense, inability to perceive you could say.
As an aside, I'd hold that their (Aurons' and Lyons') freedom would be in serving their own clans/ ehtnos/ blood ect ect not as in the current modern/ post-modern? sense of Alister Crowley 'do as thou wilt' 'frewdom.
Brilliant - thank you for explaining this so clearly...
I agree with the sentiment; Schedule F is a very good idea. But consider the counterpoint of a nation in which a future president, call him perhaps Hunter Biden, can replace people with really important jobs of keeping the lights on and so forth with his cronies. The kind of stuff that can happen and has happened in not so rule-of-law countries like Venezuela and South Africa. Like, I don’t want Frank Biden’s son in law’s cousin of whomever in charge of our water quality, you know what I mean?
It isn't just marginal regimes and borderline failed states. The same situation applies to a very long list of countries around the world. I do not want the US to join that list.
Avoiding the turnover of party affiliated bureucrats when the vote changes, by giving unelected bureucrats belonging predominantly to a single party tenure and unaccountability to voters, is hardly an improvement. If anything, it's worse...
Of course if you agree with/benefit from that party, it's fine! It's even "non political", it's just "good sense".
“A nonpartisan civil service is essential to governmental effectiveness and fairness because who you vote for should never affect your rightful access to government benefits and services. This regulation will work to protect a civil service that implements the laws of the people and protects the rights and benefits of the people against partisan manipulation.”
I'm not sure what Raskin is inhaling or smoking but this cuts to the heart of what is wrong in the imperial capital.
I have believed for decades, that the administrative state is by far the more dangerous of the administrative/deep state dichotomy. Un-elected and unaccountable which is a frightening reality.
I guess, we the people, wait for the great conflagration to cleanse this deeply corrupt and evil beast. What form that comes in I'll leave to the imagination of the discerning reader.
For an enlightening and short read, I would recommend "Confessions of Congressman X". It is as insightful, as much as it is, a depressing take, on our "elected representatives". After all is it not they who appoint these parasites? Yet we overwhelming re-elect these folks. So one could say that you get what you deserve.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QjadCd0VRBw&list=WL&index=10
That documentary comes to mind about how the deep state played Trump during the pandemic.
I'm not sure how this situation isn't leading us towards a civil war. If it becomes more and more apparent that the government is essentially a possession of HALF of the country. When the other half 'wins' an election, they're undermined in every way possible. That's not heading anywhere good.
Bureaucracies are a conundrum; the larger a polity is and the more materially developed a society is, the more requirement there is for them. And the larger a bureaucracy is, the more tendency there is toward overcomplexity, hierarchical fiefdoms, petty turf wars, bloating, inefficiency, and unaccountability.
Those problems deserve addressing, and continual vigilance. But it's crucial to take care about the remedies. The cure proposed in the post is much worse than the disease.
In my experience, American bureaucracies- whether Federal, state, or local- work reasonably well, as a rule. I've had problems, but they've been rare. IRS tax forms are worse than ever. But my local post office and DMV work great. I've heard and read complaints about American bureaucracies for decades. Some of the horror stories about bureaucrats and bureaucracies get wide exposure. But no one ever does stories on civil service employees complaining about the iron-headed ignorance, exaggerated entitlement, dishonesty, and obnoxiousness of some of the citizens that they're required to serve- up to and including incidents of physical violence directed at them.
In comparison with the other nations of the world, American government bureaucracies are rated quite highly. Probably the main reason is that our civil service is built on a baseline standard of merit and tenure- rather than bribery, nepotism, and political chicanery. ALL of those problems proliferate to a regime of pervasive corruption once a civil service bureaucracy is converted to "at-will-employment" at the hands of a partisan regime and its elected officials.
The situation is already bad when it's found as an "unofficial" problem. An Official Policy to institutionalize politicization is intolerable. At any level, but especially at the national level. We're supposed to be electing Presidents, not Autocrats. American Presidents have already been ceded the ability to overstep their authorized powers in arenas like foreign policy. Granting them--or their deputized surrogates in the Executive branch--the power to transform Cabinet departments into political patronage plums from top to bottom is no kind of answer for the problems that ail those bureaucracies. Such a regime doesn't enhance transparency in government; it undercuts it.
Also, don't kid yourselves, the size of the bureaucracies doesn't shrink as a result. In fact, they're more likely to balloon. It should be easier to ensure transparency, accountability, and competence in bureaucracies, along with keeping them in check with more reliance on measures like temp staffing projects with a mission expiration date. But political patronage employment only leads in one direction- more of it. Simply in practical terms, the notion of mass staff layoffs and a frenzy of rehiring with politically acceptable minions is a juvenile Revanchist Fantasy. Come on. This is basic.
If the goal is reducing incompetence in the American government, what we really need to be addressing is the current electoral ballot system. Without ranked-choice voting, electoral democracy has degraded into a rigged system that the professional loyalists of the two established political parties and their ordained candidates have learned to work for their own venal private ends at the expense of a functioning democratic republic. Both parties have learned that all they have to do is scare a plurality of voters about the horrors of a victory by the nominee of the opposing major party, and whichever candidate succeeds at that pathetic mission becomes the President of the most powerful nation on the planet.
That bar is too low. We need a ranked choice of two candidates: the candidate we most want in office, and the one we'll settle for. The current system only allows us the second choice- at best. Imagine, a Presidential election reduced to casting a single vote for the candidate who--we hope--might edge out the candidate that we find to be least acceptable. That's a description of nearly every Presidential election in my lifetime. (Then there's this indicator--number of newly elected Presidents since 1976 who entered office with a popular vote majority: two, out of eight.)
The real way to trim or dissolve bureaucracies and Cabinet agencies is through the Congress denying funds to them. That's the appropriate Constitutional check and balance. But see above. My comments on the ballot system also apply to the way nearly all American voters are cornered into electing our Representatives and Senators.
There's some truth in that "Bureaucracies are a conundrum; the larger a polity is and the more materially developed a society is, the more requirement there is for them". But at this point, most of their presence is busywork and over-stepping boundaries (nanny state), not some real "requirement" for them.
According to your comment, the bureucracy has mastered the difficult arcane art of delivering packages and issuing car licenses (or not, since neither the post office or the DMV are seeing that fondly by the vast majority of the population, but let's ignore this).
Big deal. They still are miserable failures in managing the tech and telcos, healthcare, education, infrastructure, development policies, and most other things that actually matter. And what they do do competently might not be worth to be doing in the first place, or even be actively hostile to the population, including all the indoctrination initiatives.
And when you say "in comparison with the other nations of the world, American government bureaucracies are rated quite highly", you mean compared to the developing and the third world or ex-Eastern Bloc countries? Like, they beat Nigerian and Bulgarian bureucracies? Perhaps the richest nation on Earth also gives Mongolian and Portuguese bureucracies a run for their money? And how much of this "good job" is momentum from more balanced and less partisan bureucracy eras, that is being lost year after year past 2000 or so?
"We're supposed to be electing Presidents, not Autocrats".
Are presidents supposed to be figureheads for photo-ops, or to represent the general will of the voters? Are unelected bureucrats for-life meant to do the actual policy work (including resisting policies and preventing the enforcement of changes and laws they don't like)?
"That bar is too low. We need a ranked choice of two candidates: the candidate we most want in office, and the one we'll settle for".
Given that we just established that Presidents are just figureheads with no importance, what exactly would that accomplish? Not to mention how limited it is in any real bite and scope. Talk about "too low a bar"...
To quote the exchange up thread: "We need a ranked choice of two candidates: the candidate we most want in office, and the one we'll settle for".
>"Given that we just established that Presidents are just figureheads with no importance, what exactly would that accomplish? Not to mention how limited it is in any real bite and scope. Talk about "too low a bar"..."
For one thing, I've rejected your contention that Presidents are "mere figureheads." Secondly, we need ranked-choice voting for Congresspeople and Senators, too.
The present reality is that neither the Democrats or the Republicans allow "change from within" their party structure. Some might say that Donald Trump proves that the Republican Party allows for exactly that sort of change, but all it's really proven is that Donald Trump was able to adjust some of his formerly expressed political views in the direction of wooing constituencies of the Republican Party, while picking up on the widespread dissatisfaction of the electorate with a stagnant party regime of Democratic Party candidates prefabricated to suit the Funders, with nowhere to assert dissent except for voting for a Republican. (Which some of them did, in the example of Trump. But that doesn't mean that "the system works.") By contrast, Trump managed to take over the national Republican Party and turn it to his ends. Followed by a perfect storm.
But that doesn't solve the problem of introducing more dynamism into the Republican Party, or into American political parties in general; it's merely effectively converted it to the one-man rule of Donald Trump, Maximum CEO. Temporarily. That's an unstable system.
Under ranked-choice voting, Republicans who find Trump's exclusive hold over the GOP unacceptable could reorganize outside of the GOP and run a candidate slate- and a Presidential nominee- closer to the aspirations of them, and GOP-affiliated voters who have enough concerns about a re-elected Trump that they would rank a different candidate at the top. But they could still choose to include Trump as a second choice, instead of the way it is now- where, as a practical reality, everyone opposed to Trump is in the position of voting Biden. Or staying home- and under the current system, that's all a 3rd party vote amounts to: an abstention.
That's where ranked-choice voting changes the system: it induces the priceless capability of pressuring the Established parties from outside. That's "parties", plural. For example, a No Labels (aka anti-Trump trad GOP) candidate in a ranked choice system would have the potential to draw away Democrats and Independent voters from D-nominee Biden, not just from the Republican base. And since the second slot is open, voters who loathe the Democrats are still able to vote for Trump as something like an insurance choice. Their non-duopoly votes are no longer consigned to the Spoiler bin, ineffectual at best- and, at worst, actively working in favor of the candidate that they least want in office.
Pressure From Outside of the Party Hierarchies: this is crucial to effective electoral democracy. Because under the status quo, dissidents are permitted, but they're routinely subordinated and dismissed by the workings of the Party Institution. Both the Democratic Party "Progressive Caucus" (House: 100/213; Senate: 1/50) and the Republican Party "Liberty Caucus" (House: 9/218), Senate: approximately 10/50) are confined to dismissable niches; some of their "outlier" views may even be shared by a majority of Americans across ideological lines, but those views have no Push. Not from within. Not within either hidebound Party establishment.
Ranked choice voting- and a first and second choice is sufficient to be a major upgrade, and possibly optimal- and it's a whole new game.
Finally: my advocacy for ranked-choice is based on principle. I'm seeking nonpartisan assent. I don't want to see the advocacy of ranked-choice become associated with one side. Unfortunately, when I look at the institutional effort nowadays, it resembles a takeover by Establishment Liberals associated with the Democrats- to the point where I'm suspicious that the ultimate result will be slow-walk the ranked-choice reform until it bogs down and is forgotten. Both Democrats and Republicans have given lip service to ranked-choice voting, but the right thing to do would be to advocate for the reform as a nonpartisan effort, not reducing it to the tin-eared partisan effort by branding it as a "progressive cause." So I frankly doubt the sincerity of most of the endorsers on the list in the link: https://fairvote.org/our-reforms/ranked-choice-voting/endorsers/
It's easy for elected leaders to SAY that they want something, as long as they don't have to DO anything about it.
I also think that if every national-level "third party movement" in the country with a base of support of more than 100,000 voters joined together and put their combined energies in common cause to focus on the SINGLE ISSUE of enacting Ranked-Choice Voting all over the country, it would beat the hell out of all the wheel-spinning performances that parties like the Libertarians and the Greens put on in Presidential election years, to obtain the passing notice of The Media.
I do not rule Russia: ten thousand clerks do. - Nicholas II of Russia
More like 10 million in the modern US but the point remains which is that the US is too big.
I agree. The question is how to properly solve it.
It would be a lot less complicated without having to contend with the array of responses, reactions, power trips, etc. from all those other countries out there. But that's like complaining about the weather.
You could shrink the government while retaining the functions established by the Founders which includes dealing with other countries.
Or you could partition the country. A smaller and perhaps weaker country would still be pretty big. And retain the nukes. There is an interesting counterfactual as to whether the Dulles doctrine of massive retaliation would have worked had we not tried to be globocop. Not complete safety as we would need to maintain a robust militia. Israel illustrates both points or would had they not forgotten the militia part with armed citizens.
As an elevator pitch, devolution of government power is an easy project to get behind. My impression is that the idea is really popular. The devilment is in the details. I'd like to see a set of competing plans, in outline form. And then the best features of the plans could be combined.
I think it's something AI could help with, as long as AI had no final decision-making status whatsoever in terms of calling the shots. AI is for advice, not wielding Power. Not that this would solve that other Power problem, the human one, lol. But that isn't a hopeless situation. One of the best features of the founders of the US is that they understood the practical value of compromise, and none of them made it all about their own exclusive private ends. No one was bidding to be dictator. George Washington was offered the Presidency for life, as if he were to be a King. After all, monarchy was the status quo, the system everyone was used to back then. Washington turned it down...how many people get an offer like that, and turn it down?
But the 1776 Project wasn't all wrong, even if they really went overboard in some ways. Slavery really is the thing that fucked up the national charter of the Constitution from the beginning. Most of the compartmentalized hypocrisy in the original draft has since been successfully addressed. But the Electoral College is a hangover from the era of slavery, even after most of the original reasoning for it was long gone.
The Electoral College isn't the source of the real problem, though. The real problem is that the US grew from coast to coast- and up to Alaska and out to Hawaii- with a system of adding States that never had any logic to it. It was just ad hoc: here's Rhode Island, and there's Alaska. Here's Massachusetts, and there's Montana. Here are the headwaters and tributaries, divided up in ten different states, and there's the river mouth, in another state somewhere else.
I don't think that it's an overly ambitious project to get things to make more rational sense in that regard. It isn't some soup-to-nuts Utopian overhaul. But it's a huge project, and probably one that would require 20 years to complete in terms of shifting the, yes, bureaucracies. It would be a much bigger deal than simply adding or repealing a Constitutional amendment. Which is why there's so little energy for even proposing it. Every State capital has its own set of special interests, for instance. The amount of support for the project would have to verge on consensus. Not just majority, or supermajority. Most every American citizen and associated enterprise, public and private, would have to be down with it. Even given that some of them would lose private advantages.
So maybe what we need is a more rational set of regional structures, for some purposes. And also some lessening of both Federal and state power hoarding. I think one of Trump's more commonsense ideas is to take away State chartering of medical insurance companies and allow them to sell their policies in every state, for example. What's the rational argument against that? Maybe there is one. But I haven't heard it.
"They [bureaucrats] still are miserable failures in managing the tech and telcos, healthcare, education, infrastructure, development policies, and most other things that actually matter.'"
Performance can be improved. Considerably, in some cases. My impression is that the efficiency of administration of a polity drops off drastically once its population exceeds 90 million people. But that problem isn't solved by politicizing the bureaucracy. And "miserable failures" is just hyperbolic rhetoric.
"And what they do do competently might not be worth to be doing in the first place, or even be actively hostile to the population, including all the indoctrination initiatives."
That's trivial, compared to the amount of stuff that gets done competently, often so unobtrusively that most of us don't give it a second thought.
"And when you say "in comparison with the other nations of the world, American government bureaucracies are rated quite highly", you mean compared to the developing and the third world or ex-Eastern Bloc countries? Like, they beat Nigerian and Bulgarian bureucracies? Perhaps the richest nation on Earth also gives Mongolian and Portuguese bureucracies a run for their money? And how much of this "good job" is momentum from more balanced and less partisan bureucracy eras, that is being lost year after year past 2000 or so?"
More rhetoric. And you sound really mad. As if everything around you stopped working. Granted, the infrastructure of the country has been under-funded for at least 25 years. But that isn't the fault of DEI initiatives. The problems of the VA almost entirely the result of an overnight switch to war footing to carry out American aggressive invasions and occupations halfway around the planet, and the worst of it follows from tens of thousands of tragedies that no amount of funding can fix. And I'll put the responsiveness of Federal government bureaucracy up against the way large private bureaucracies treat consumers any day. That said, both public and private sector bureaucracies are contending with a massive number of demands. Complex modernity exacts a price. The population of the country has doubled in my lifetime. And Americans used to make do with a lot more self-reliance, a lot less Stuff, and a lot less Entitlement. Problems that aren't confined to any one partisan side or ideology. Or matter of ethnic ancestry, or level of household income. The Terrible Twos.
For crying out loud, get a grip. You're straining at gnats, as if Americans haven't assented to swallowing camels for decades on end. War On Drugs propaganda was more pervasive than the most nonsensical of CRT-related indoctrination in the schools in the 1980s, and it was backed up by Hard Power. To this day, even Elon Musk still has to submit to a Federal government order for a Drug Screen- on account of a policy that dates back to the 1980s. Presidents have been unilaterally deploying military power around the world for as long as I've been alive, which is not exactly "figurehead" behavior. Republicans in Congress toppled a Democratic Party Congressional near-supermajority under a Democrat President in 2010 by neutering Obama with filibuster threats and a scare narrative, and followed it up with government shutdowns. Obama's legislative legacy amounts to the ACCA, and maybe a t-shirt. He even kept most of the Bush tax cuts in place. Over half of his timid half-stimulus consisted of tax holidays and unemployment extension. I think orthodox Democratic Party liberalism is full of bien pensant ineptitude, cheezy patronage, tin-eared paternalism toward some voting constituencies and hostile condescension toward others, along with sharing many of the same bad priorities as Republicans. But at least they understand the need to fund clean water and pay working people enough to keep themselves housed. Too bad the Republicans made such a show of standing on Ideological Dogma instead of taking note of practical reality, because they held up the works for 20 years on those problems.
> More rhetoric.
Yes, it's called making a case. Just like your rhetoric about how efficient and underappreciated the bureucrats really are. Or was the praise to the efficiency of your local DMV and the hard working bureaucracy based on numerical stats?
> And you sound really mad.
Since we've come to ad-hominens ("mad", really? can't even reply without stooping to that) is the "DC" in your username implying that you are a swamp resident and perhaps a bureaucrat yourself?
> As if everything around you stopped working.
Compared to the momentum and position the US had 30, 50 and even 80 years ago? It might have not stopped (at least not everything has), but it sure as hell has hit the breaks.
In STEM education and research for example, if it wasn't for the continued stream of (raised and educated abroad until at least college) incoming Asians (Chinese and Indian), the US would have sank already.
Public infrastructure? City safety? Places that were thriving or regular few decades ago, have turned into dangerous or shit or both.
> Granted, the infrastructure of the country has been under-funded for at least 25 years. But that isn't the fault of DEI initiatives.
Of course not. It's also the fault of corporate lobbying, misapplication of funds, neglect, wrong priorities, greed, ideology, and a few other things.
> Presidents have been unilaterally deploying military power around the world for as long as I've been alive, which is not exactly "figurehead" behavior.
It is, when the President could not care less either way, and it's the MIC, related advisors, and deep state, that push for those military deployments. They're just the figureheads to "give the order" and look nice on TV while talking macho.
> But at least they understand the need to fund clean water and pay working people enough to keep themselves housed.
Funnily enough, they had made (at least since Clinton) the same concessions to corporate greed and neoliberal policies than prevent those working people from being "housed". And Obama and Biden continued the same war machine, just like Bush and Bush Jr (which the latter, they're even all pals now, and have photo-ops together). Sorry, did you think you were talking to some GOP partisan?
I'm not even local. I have no horse in this race. Just don't like these kind of bureaucracies and especially unelected unaccountable ones, which are all the rage for the last 20 years or so. And can see the signs.
"That is, when the President could not care less either way, and it's the MIC, related advisors, and deep state, that push for those military deployments. They're just the figureheads to "give the order" and look nice on TV while talking macho."
Oh, the US President always cares about those decisions, and the consequences of them. It's just that it's become something of a practical requirement for over a century for the Chief Executive to have already accepted the American National Prerogative to order US military strikes to kill people. I mean, read the biography of Smedley Butler. But one of the objections to Trump is that he's liable to go off and abandon any prudence or restraint, because Trump believes the same narrative, only more so.
"In STEM education and research for example, if it wasn't for the continued stream of (raised and educated abroad until at least college) incoming Asians (Chinese and Indian), the US would have sank already."
You're slighting all of the other immigrant nationalities, heh. And you're also somewhat underestimating the situation; in the medical professions, around 27% of physicians are foreign born; also16% of registered nurses, 25% of nursing aides. It's work that native-born Americans don't flock to. Business administration is still the most popular undergraduate major- followed by all "health professions" combined, on this list of 12:
https://www.collegetransitions.com/blog/most-popular-college-majors/
Engineering is the 4th most popular major on the list, so there's that. And Biology is 5th place. The next indisputably hard science listed is Computer Science, #7. And that's it. The numbers are not that bad, really. It's just that so much of the demand for a technologically advanced level of medical services and industrial base R&D is concentrated in the US.
"> Granted, the infrastructure of the country has been under-funded for at least 25 years. But that isn't the fault of DEI initiatives.
Of course not. It's also the fault of corporate lobbying, misapplication of funds, neglect, wrong priorities, greed, ideology, and a few other things."
We completely agree. And it's interesting how that affects the workings of Federal bureaucracies (many of which which serve a population at least 4x too large to do the job right in the first place, and 4x centralized employees would only make things worse, not better). Because the source of bureaucratic power is funding, which is appropriated through Congress. And the first-order direct hookup with lobbyists is with the Representatives and Senators, and their staff members. The bureaucrats "lobby" the House and Senate Committees with their own budget proposals, of course. But as a rule, Federal bureaucrats don't have nearly as much to offer the funders of the Legislative Branch, compared to the private sector lobbyists. (As I've said, I oppose at-will employment in public sector bureaucracies. As a solution, it's simple, easy,and wrong. But I'm also dubious about public sector unions. There ought to be a better way to do it.)
The hookup of bureaucrats with lobbyists in a few agencies, like the FDA, is often somewhat porous, partly out of the practical necessity to rely on the large pharma companies to assist in testing and regulation (and I'm not calling on a public project of $7 trillion for FDA to get AI to do it, either.) Which should be primarily about a shared common interest in improving public health, not just the power trip of "too big to fail."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9164582/
And no, I don't like having the majority of prescription drugs sold in America made in foreign countries around the globe, either. I'd rather have a public option for Stateside drug manufacture (contracted, of course, as with EPA projects) without public health care, than public health care with the shots are called on prescription drugs manufacture and price by private owners running businesses for profit. The US is currently THE cash cow of Big Pharma. (People need to be more diligent about their own medicine, in the direction of cutting back. And I think the negativity about vaccinations is overinflated. But so is the hype insisting that everyone in every age demographic has to get vaccinated. And Pfizer did reap $35 billion in profits from their Covid vaccine, the most profitable patent pharmaceutical in the history of civilization. In one fiscal year alone. And that bottom-line number is from a while ago.)
The real direct bureaucrat-lobbyist hookup takes place on retirement, when "former" Federal bureaucrats retain communication with peers and subordinates. And also members of Congress and the Senate.
We agree; it's really that bad. The only place we might disagree is that in my experience, in few Federal agencies (other than education!) does "DEI" loom large as a concern, particularly in office politics. Most Federal workers get along with each other, just like most private sector offices with a multiracial makeup get along with each other. Which is one of the worst things about "antiracism"- it goes in assuming--insisting on--a problem, whether or not there is one. That isn't even psychologically helpful for the "antiracism" speaker. (Although, financially... ) I think most offices anywhere take a background noise level of DEI bulletins and papal bulls as a minor annoyance.
Apologies for not getting to your entire post yet. I'll take it in small bites. I do promise to read it all.
"Is the "DC" in your username implying that you are a swamp resident and perhaps a bureaucrat yourself?"
No. Not now, or ever in the past. Granted, I'm often located in one of the zip codes, like many other residents of the Region. But otherwise not. ("The Region", I like that. Branding away, here. "...he chose the name 'The Region' for its surefire appeal to the upscale cohort of prospective buyers." See how easy that was? And suck it, Henry George. Nah, he's a good man. Georgist tax policy would be perfect for The Region. Although it would have been much more beneficial if enacted 50 years ago. Much like an overhaul of the drug laws,)
I recommend that you stick to quoting and critiquing my content.
"Public infrastructure? City safety? Places that were thriving or regular few decades ago, have turned into dangerous or shit or both."
Yes, like needles in the sandboxes of public parks, and vagrants with their panst down around their ankles down the sidewalk, and occupants of bathroom stalls nodding off in their own very private Xanadu all day long, maybe for last time ever...that's 50 years of Intensified Drug War for you. Beginning with 1964-1974, the time period when the consumer base expanded (at least) 20-fold, mostly within one age demographic cohort, the Youth. Followed by the Cocaine Era of the Roaring 1970s and the rise of ( by historic standards, EXTREMELY) well-heeled youth gangs in the crack era of the 1980s. Surpassed handily as a dysfunctional drug epidemic in the 1990s by the new brand-name product Oxycontin, developed solely because the MS-Contin patent held by Purdue was expiring and becoming a generic medication. https://www.statnews.com/2019/12/03/oxycontin-history-told-through-purdue-pharma-documents/
https://www.mcgilldaily.com/2021/09/how-purdue-pharma-got-away-with-it-all/
Another crucial component of the great Novel Opioid Epidemic was the failure of Congress to fund DEA requests to use the new computer capabilities of the late 1990s in order to increase physician, pharmacy, and warehouse accountability, of the sort that's only been achieved very recently with a central database to which nearly all 50 states subscribe (except Missouri and California, iirc. California has always been very strict about demanding DEA triplicates--long after other states were no longer requiring them)--and not filling out of state prescriptions for controlled substances, and it's current opioid-related problems began long after opioids had ravaged the East Coast, South, and Midwest.) Was denying funding to that "bureaucratic project" about striking a courageous blow against Government Power?
Just in case you don't know what I'm talking about: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ex-dea-agent-opioid-crisis-fueled-by-drug-industry-and-congress/ This is what the mission of DEA should be: supervising oversight and regulation of "controlled substances." Similar to the BATF, the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms. But--shined on by companies like Purdue and McKesson-- instead of the DEA establishing a central database of accountability for opioids, every one of the 50 States were making their own rules, and few if any were sharing information across state lines. As if one of the cornerstones of the DEA Charter and the CSA 1970 didn't even exist. Meanwhile, on August 24, 2000, the DEA (and several other police agencies) were busy raiding a plot of industrial hemp on the Lakota reservation: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2001/02/drug-war-comes-rez/
Also, this: https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-care/former-dea-official-now-working-oxycontin-maker-purdue-pharma-n984646
That's one example of The Swamp you're talking about. That sort of thing is routine inside the Beltway, and examples can be found as far back as as the existence of the US government. Inevitable as a bug, but never to be accepted as a feature. Which it appears to have been, by rough bipartisan consensus, since the late 1980s. (see the chapters on "Washington" in Partners In Power, by Roger Morris.) The narcotization effect of Privilege. The professional guild acceptance of the lobbyist-legislator embrace with that "out of sight, out of mind" compartmentalization, a tacit conspiracy of silence. When (Roger) Stone's Rules started into running things. Although not all of them, even today, Although that would likely change if Stone (or one of his proteges) was ever put in charge of officially dismissing Dissident Bureaucrats.
Now we've had (and still have) a fentanyl epidemic on our hands. Ever since the DEA crackdown on Oxycontin that began in the second term of the Obama administration, shutting the gate 10-15 years after disaster had already struck. Most of the street addicts of the Fentanyl Age were originally manufactured by a combination of
Pharma- especially Sackler--snake oil salespeople (the secret of Sackler's early success was direct advertising sales to physicians in magazines. Wouldn't you know, his breakthrough product was VALIUM.) https://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/2019/03/29/sackler-oxycontin-opioid-crisis-art-janna-malamud-smith
in some States, no inventory or accountability for the "Schedule II Controlled Substance"; no effective oversight of suppliers, pharmacists, and physicians (as if no one in power had ever heard of a pill mill- the scary part is that while it's dead-bang certain that the commission salespeople--and everyone who looked at the booming sales numbers--at Purdue and the other companies knew, I'd venture that the Bipartisan Clean And Straight Congresspeople in the Class of 2000 really didn't know what a Pill Mill is. None of them. Or maybe they were all daydreaming, all the way through the hearing testimony..."wonk wonk wonk possibility of quantity diversion wonk wonk wonk" 'Yo, got any more that Lobbyist Money')
And then, the criminalization of everyone else in the diversion supply chain, including the users. Until the DEA woke up, the game went cold, and some of the doctors and a few of the execs also joined the pariah junkie fellahin in getting locked up.)
Bureaucracy. There are all sorts of aspects. It's obvious--at least to me--that the bureaucracy known as the Drug Enforcement Administration doesn't work nearly as effectively as the bureaucracy known as the US Post Office. The questions of importance are "what are we doing this for? What are the results?" So maybe--instead of a Regime that fires any Dissident Bureaucrat that gets in the way of the Autocrat--is a stronger ombudsman. Which is, come to think of it, the beat of websites like Propublica.com (and no, I don't know or especially care who might be funding work with that standard of quality.) Too bad that ProPublica reports aren't given more attention, or even read all that much. Especially by Congress.
(No, I'm not with ProPublica either, reader. Bore me to death already.)
Bureaucrats? Each one of them is a different case.
On further recollection, contrary to the mistaken recollection I wrote at the top of this post, I was a temporary hire as a census enumerator for the 2000 Census. In locales far, far from The Swamp. Just in the interest of full disclosure. It was sometimes terribly easy money. But it's generally agreed that we did a good job. I was sometimes assigned to second-check the work of other enumerators. By contrast, some bureaucracies are tasked with duties so futile--and so iatrogenic in effect--that some of their members have been known to get outright, eh, cynical:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/the-drug-war-is-a-game-collaborating-with-cartels-money-laundering-how-a-dea-agent-became-the-agencys-most-corrupt
https://apnews.com/article/dea-corruption-drugs-fentanyl-cocaine-mexico-colombia-10be9ba84b73752683a8492a62f732f2
Yes, let's take a good look at what "ranked choice voting" has done for California. When I grew up there, the state was functional; opportunity, reasonable taxes, reasonable policies, great schools, amazing infrastructure. It is now nearly a third world hellhole, with a dominant political party that almost totally ignores the need to invest in maintaining or improving infrastructure as the state grew, instead passing environmental and anti- business regulations that drove out hundreds of thousands of tax payers while giving billions in freebies to non citizens; all to create permanent votes; while simultaneously decriminalizing pedophilia, theft and drug use. What could go wrong? That dominant party has been "voted in" through "ranked choice voting" (put in place by themselves) to keep the most prosperous state in the country firmly in their control. The problem is not the system - the problem is PEOPLE - POLITICIANS who only serve themselves. I also lay blame on feminism in politics; women more interested in "safety" and "equity", creating a nanny state that has strangled innovation, creativity, mental health, destroyed our military and demoralized our men. America is NOT a democracy, (two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner), it was brilliantly formed as a Republic. The Federalists put a brilliant government in place and over the years, GREEDY, POWER LUSTFUL PEOPLE and FEMINIST WOMEN have destroyed it. There is no government system on earth safe from human corruption and ego. It is a pipe dream to believe that. THIS IS the human condition.
"Yes, let's take a good look at what "ranked choice voting" has done for California."
But California doesn't have ranked-choice voting. (edit: not for statewide offices or national offices, at least.) So whatever points of the rest of your paragraph might be worthy of more discussion----taken as an argument against a ranked-choice ballot system, your opening claim and everything that follows it is invalid. As far as an argument against a ranked-choice ballot system.
As far as I know, only a few cities in the Bay Area have ranked-choice voting. https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/01/14/opinion-new-ranked-choice-voting-system-worked-should-be-california-model/ There's a very large difference in impact between the way ranked choice plays out in local politics (and for posts with a lot of plural members); the way it works out at the State level, and the way it would work at the National level.
Furthermore, it's worth pointing out that ranked choice voting is not a magic wand that instantly changes the entire character of the political system instantly. Or after two elections, or even three elections. Think that through. Turn that over in your mind. I'd much prefer that people draw their own conclusions about what it could do. This is a thoughtful blog, and thoughtful people contribute here. Learn about it and think about how it would actually work. How it does work, in Maine, the one state that has it (but it's still brand new there! Only since 2020, iirc.) And don't expect visibly noticeable improvements after only one election. I'd grant it at least as much of an opportunity as the string of failures of the status quo ballot system. (My personal position is that only two candidates for each office need to be ranked. In the interest of transparency and simplicity. There's no practical benefit in overcomplicating it.)
Incidentally, I lived in California for nearly 25 years- the second time for 20-years in Sacramento, ending in 2005. I'm acquainted with the history. From the other end of the country, California currently looks like one-party rule to me, and with some of the usual pitfalls of such a regime, even when it's achieved by popular election. But the residents live there, and I don't. Newsom didn't ride into the Capitol in the aftermath of a military coup. And not too long ago--between 1/2003 and 1/3/2011--the Governor was a Republican.
Potentially, ranked-choice voting could overcome even a quasi-hegemonic level of Democratic Party rule as readily as it could overcome an even quasi-hegemonic level of Republican Party rule. Hint hint.
There are suggestions in the comments to disperse the bureaucrats from the Swamp into the States, but note that the IRS has offices in every city in Flyover Country with nothing notable to show for the dispersion. OK, everyone who seeks to address the metastasizing managerial state and its fellow travelers: war, inflation, woke oppression - understands that reducing Federal govt. head-count is a necessary condition, but that cannot be enough.
Self-described conservitives think that if only we could turn back the clock all might be well, but history only moves in one direction: forward. The never-ending task of delaying and bemoaning progressivism only serves to exhaust and discourage. A prerequisite for restoring a non-insane version of America is to stop trying to compromise with the progressive world view and instead offer an alternative vision. An alternative vision should not be shy about dissing the shibboleths that the left uses as weapons. The left has made a holy cult of of the following words: equality, democracy, diversity, feminism. In my opinion, an argument that doesn't start by attacking these four holy words is destined to keep failing.
President Trump's chief of staff needs to be...Curtis Yarvin!
Only way to solve this.
"...et tu, Curtis?"
No, no. Just kidding. It would never happen that way. Surely Mencius Himself would remain a Loyal Minister, rather than join a successor Triumvirate regime. Too much of an Oligarchy for his taste.
If, on the other hand, Yarvin could manage a transition to Monarchical Autocracy for himself alone...