The number 1 responsibility of any system of government is how well it handles power transfers, not whether it produces good governments.

Improper transitions of power cause bad governance.

But I think the point also argues against having an extremely powerful administrative / regulatory state.

For instance, suppose you want to create a department to "fight misinformation" and it will have wide ranging power to push for censorship. But depending who is running it, it might censor vastly different kinds of speech.

If you believe such an entity should exist you should be indifferent to the kind of person running it. As an example, consider garbage removal. I'm relatively happy with my city's garbage removal. I wouldn't really be concerned if it was run by Kamala Harris or Donald Trump. Maybe there would be some graft in one way or another, but it's pretty obvious what the organizations' goals are.

So I think that there's a difference between "government takeover to shrink the size of the state" is different from "government takeover to add another layer of unelected bureaucracy to run our lives"

Maybe in the short term, but in the long term they are no different because the power separation is eroded in either case. If you want to reduce the size of the state you need to get congress on board with your plans.

In my opinion incremental change with a common passage toward a better future is the best way to have long term functioning democracies

I think this is key for other reasons as well. A country, especially a global superpower like the US, has an incredibly slow turning radius. Even more so when you need to stop and consider ripple effects, as politicians should be. For some reason, politicians like to sell that they'll be able to fix everything in a short term, and people continue to buy it. When really, anybody at a podium saying they can "fix the economy" in timescales measured in anything but decades should be a red flag.

I mean, I get it. If your adversary is promising to fix everything in months, you're going to look like a fool for saying it'll take you decades. I just find it interesting how the populace continues to buy into the fantasy.

You're assuming that there will be a successor, in a democratic sense.

There will certainly be elections. It’s pretty much required for basic legitimacy these days. Even North Korea has elections. Whether they’ll be free and fair, however, is a whole different question.

That there are still people that think these are jokes or "not what they really mean" speaks to a fundamental cognitive dissonance that can't be repaired. Their intention is right in front of you. It's just a question of who will enable their vision.

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_fake_electors_plot

As a side note, your post is no better than the one you replied to. "That's a reddit thing to say" is just as reductive. Maybe being an adult means realizing not everyone has to tip toe around reality.

Now that they are in power interfering with the election process seems to cause them more harm than good, after all if they try it makes their regime seem less legitimate.

Of course with Trump you never know, but I don't think he will be capable of doing more than shouting at governors of each state. If any voting changes go through it will probably be stuff that has bipartisan support.

I'm really unsure what to say about people who are this willfully ignorant. He literally tried everything he could to subvert the voting process in 2020. Like most of his followers, I'm assuming you buried your head on this one and decided not to read it because it's so damning:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_fake_electors_plot

They are, via gerrymandering, voter id laws, limiting voter registration, voter intimidation, constantly questioning results, etc.

Here's a high level view: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republican_efforts_to_restrict...

“I love you. You got to get out and vote. In four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not going to have to vote.”

Today, he still claims the elections were stolen, and freed the stormers of the capital. In one of his speeches for this election, he said “in four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not gonna have to vote.”.

Let's wait and see, but a clean democratic transition of power would certainly surprise me.

It follows, since he's talking about democracies.

So it behooves us to be a little jealous of our own rights, and to push officials to limit other officials.

There's an interesting fork here where you can argue for a very libertarian view, _or_ you can argue for a "government whose interest is in restraining government (the metagame of 'checks and balances')".

And here we are with only slightly less broken healthcare with the ACA, a plan originally from GOP, which is constantly hounded on for being terrible. All while drug and medical prices fleece every dollar from every pocket.

So this is what it comes back to when congress can’t do their job of helping the American people or balancing the budget. A populist comes in and smashes the norms.

And who favors the rich. You have to give Republicans credit, they are skilled at getting the poor to comprehensively screw themselves.

One of the interesting things is watching my upvote count change in this discussion. It reliably goes up during EU time and then goes back down during US time. It's amazing.

John Steinbeck

Almost all of congress’ problems are of their own making. At what point do we stop accepting the excuse from half of congress that their hands are completely tied and start holding them accountable for fixing it.

we should be willing to vote for that.

that seems to be breaking down, throughout the western world.

we should never denigrate or infringe upon the personhood of anyone. we should take the higher road. and I'm not arguing that the oppressed should accept their oppression: I'm arguing that the oppressors should listen to the oppressed, and change.

I live in Australia – our constitution is a strange mashup of the UK model (which is certainly the primary influence), and things gleaned from the US. Something I observe is that we're more willing to admit the possibility of non-partisan spaces. For example, rather than electoral commissions being bipartisan, they're non-partisan, with partisan input. It is a serious matter if an official of such an organisation is found to have publicly stated political views. We have some people who make it their profession to be boring, and to simply uphold the precepts of society: including the rights of minorities. That's a serious sacrifice, made routinely by judges and senior public servants.

I find myself quite terrified that this is being eroded. I don't know how we turn it around: but I certainly speak up for the dignity of all through my ministry. We all ought to speak up.

What is missing from this point of view are individual responsibility and willingness to contribute. From what I see online some people a fed up with this approach and this has caused the current backlash.

Perhaps dignity needs to be complemented by responsibility and we all ought to keep both in mind?

This sentiment you're speaking of is basically a racket created by conservative politicians and the media, designed to, as dang would say, "activate" the parts of the voter base. Since Reagan and probably before, they have hammered home catch phrases about "welfare queens" or whatever the buzzword of the day is with no substance behind it. It works for the base because they don't really know or make an attempt to know anyone being "othered" by the media or the politicians in this way.

In reality, it's people like Musk who get tons of tax payer money, privatize all of their gains and then contribute nothing back. They will then have the temerity to cry foul whenever someone tries to make them pay income tax, and they get their way, too, not because they work hard, but because they already have the capital.

Clearly the article had a racist agenda and the comments were filled with people that had never heard of empathy. It didn't occur to anyone that a huge percentage of people in Maine receiving these benefits looked exactly like them. That was the day I deleted Facebook.

While this may be a feeling based on what some choose to read or listen to, numbers don't back this up as reality. There are many fact-based cases I could make, but I'm going to just focus on top CEOs - https://www.researchgate.net/figure/White-male-CEOs-and-New-... indicates 85.8% of Fortune 500 CEO are white males, even though they are only ~38% of the population.

Adding back in white females, Fortune 500 CEOs are 92.6% white, even though they are 75.3% of the population (https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045224)

Flipping it for effect, only 5% of top CEOs are non-white even though those groups are 25% of the country.

One frustration that may of us disagree with the point you've articulated is that this perception is innacurate and largely a result of people self-selecting into "red-pill" type media ecosystems that are manipulative and spend greatly disproportionate amounts of time generating outrage and the perception of a crisis.

The American people voted them into office.

Power was transferred peacefully.

When the repubs are voted out we'll go through this "takeover" process again to whatever extent the dems can control the government.

These powers that are being utilized were in place with Biden, Obama, etc.

Trump hasn't taken anything new.

Honestly, people who don't like Trump will claim he's a dictator but it's mostly they don't like him and not that he's doing anything vastly different.

"It has become ever more apparent that to our president, the rule of law is but an impediment to his policy goals. The rule of law is, according to him, something to navigate around or simply ignore, whether that be for political or personal gain. Nevertheless, in this courtroom and under my watch, the rule of law is a bright beacon which I intend to follow. I said this two weeks ago, and I’ll say it again today. There are moments in the world’s history when people look back and ask, where were the lawyers? Where were the judges? In these moments, the rule of law becomes especially vulnerable. I refuse to let that beacon go dark today. As a judge, my job is not only to uphold the law, but to protect the rule of law itself. Birthright citizenship is a fundamental constitutional right. The 14th Amendment secures the blessings of liberty to our posterity by bestowing on all those born in the United States and subject to its jurisdiction the rights of citizenship. We are all citizens, subject to the rule of law. No amount of policy, policy debate can change that. And the fact that the government has cloaked what is effectively a constitutional amendment under the guise of an executive order is equally unconstitutional. The Constitution is not something with which the government may play policy games. If the government wants to change the exceptional American grant of birthright citizenship, it needs to amend the Constitution. Its that’s how our Constitution works, and that’s how the rule of law works. Because the president’s order attempts to circumscribe this process, it is clearly unconstitutional. The preliminary injunction is granted on a nationwide basis." - Judge Coughenour, Thursday announcing his decision to enjoin the Birthright Citizenship Executive Order.

The judge could not be more clear about how what is happening now is vastly different from previous presidents. This is not just a 'policy difference'. this is a callous disregard for the rule of law.

Here is the judge's bio if you are inclined to think he is politically biased, https://www.wawd.uscourts.gov/judges/coughenour-bio

To make this stuff permanent they would need to go through congress, then it is much harder for a future administration to repeal these changes.

They have no interest in doing any of that, though. Generally those in power in Congress support what Trump is doing and are happy to have it happen without them needing to lift a finger (or take the blame if there are problems). To the extent that they don't, they're also happy to rely on the courts and again not take the blame or blowback from their voters.

As the administration plows forward and gets a taste for operating outside the law, I do think you have a growing risk that even a Congress that wanted to resist would find itself unable. You see administration figures favorably citing arguments that they should ignore court orders even now, and some evidence that they're defying orders already.

If you want government that's responsive to the will of the people, then it has to be either directly elected by the people, or accountable to someone elected by the people.

The way this is supposed to work constitutionally is that Congress sets policy by law, and the executive "take[s] Care that the Laws be faithfully executed". The executive branch does not set domestic policy at all; it just implements the policy Congress set.

But what happens when the scope of government grows so much to the point where Congress cannot possibly set all policy itself? What did happen is that Congress started creating agencies and granting them broad powers over certain aspects of domestic policy. It then, as the constitution provides, became the executive's job to implement those agencies. And as any software dev knows, there's a lot of wiggle room in implementation details.

So now we end up in a situation where the executive has a huge amount of control over these agencies which in turn have a huge amount of control over us.

I'm old enough to remember nearly identical rhetoric during Bill Clinton's presidency. I suspect that somebody older than me would remember the same even further back. Claiming that the president is abusing his power in irreversible ways just seems to me to be an American tradition.

And I'd even recommend that the individual president position be replaced by a group of people each of which gets voted in on different years. The monarch-like persona does not belong in a democracy.