Those who stay will be doing so with the full understanding of the vindictive nature of the current administration. What makes you think these employees will stand up to illegal requests? What makes you think they'll go the extra mile? It's a bad situation all around, and it's going to get worse before it gets better.
And nobody has has seen America as the “good guy” in my lifetime. We’re the country that destabilizes Latin American and Asian countries, bombs the Middle East, etc. I used to think there was at least a logic to all that, but it turns out our elites were just ideologues and morons.
I'm no economist but a trade deficit in the hundreds of billions[0] suggests otherwise.
[0] Wikipedia says 773B for 2023.
Again, I'm not an economist, bear with me and explain what that's got to do with the trade deficit being a deficit? You could have a GDP of a quintillion dollars a year but if you're consistently running a trade deficit (which the US has for decades), that strongly implies you cannot close your borders with impunity.
If you could supply the goods cheaper than importing them, people would, no? Simple capitalism!
There are boycott’s afoot and I wouldn’t be surprised if canada and Europe will choose more Chinese and domestic in the future.
Basically, the US closing its borders will lead to a Chinese world leadership which is not good for the US either.
When it comes to isolation I think of this:
The word invasion itself is a good example of this.
A French ironmaster says: "We must protect ourselves from the invasion of English iron!" An English landlord cries: "We must repel the invasion of French wheat!" And they urge the erection of barriers between the two nations. Barriers result in isolation; isolation gives rise to hatred; hatred, to war; war, to invasion. "What difference does it make?" say the two sophists. "Is it not better to risk the possibility of invasion than to accept the certainty of invasion?" And the people believe them, and the barriers remain standing.
And yet, what analogy is there between an exchange and an invasion? What possible similarity can there be between a warship that comes to vomit missiles, fire, and devastation on our cities, and a merchant vessel that comes to offer us a voluntary exchange of goods for goods?The US isn't far less dependent, China is at 37% GDP from trade to the US's 27% but doesn't have the structural dependency on trade from having the reserve currency.
But after having spent years living in China, and being very familiar with the political situation there and their global ambitions, I'm afraid that the alternative to the US is even worse.
Have a democratic system has somewhat of a moderating effect on the worst impulses of the US elite. China has no such guardrails.
At least China’s unelected bureaucrats are competent and actually focused on what’s good for the public: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/07/long-term-sur...
There's a lot you don't know about how things actually work in China. The levels of autocracy, corruption and lack of true legal framework, make the US look like a democratic haven.
It might hard to unscramble that omelet if we want the rule of law back later.
But if not then it must at least be democratically responsive. When republicans win the presidency—or a progressive or populist democrat—the 90% of the administrative state that’s comprised of Acela liberals should be asking how high to jump. Otherwise you have a system that’s not worth saving.
That's bibliolatry, directed to a long-obsolete interpretation of the Constitution and the role of the federal government. FDR was analogous to Copernicus and Kepler, rescuing the country from Ptolemaic interpretations of the Constitution that were based on outdated data sets. He pushed successfully for a pragmatic reinterpretation — not inconsistent with the text — that allowed effective federal government action to deal with a global crisis.
No, FDR's New Deal didn't end the Great Depression (that was done by World War II). But the New Deal did help hold off what could easily have turned into authoritarianism of the Huey Long variety.
Says who? The Constitution is in essence the basic operating manual for American national government. Conditions on the ground have changed — and we've learned more about the world — since 1787. It'd be unpragmatic (read: insane) to insist that the original modus operandi MUST stay the same forever and ever, just because that's how they did things in 1787, as long as the new M.O. can fairly be said not to be inconsistent with the constitutional text.
It doesn't help your case that Article V provides an amendment process: Nothing in the Constitution prohibits reinterpreting the existing language to accommodate new evidence and new insights, at least not as long as the reinterpretation doesn't do violence to the text.
"The executive power" in Article II is just as open to interpretation as anything. Interpreting that power as being subject to Congress's Article I authority is clearly well within the hash marks, to say nothing of the playing field as a whole.
Article I can fairly be read as allowing Congress to expand, and/or to cabin, presidential authority. That includes creating, and delegating power to, administrative agencies under general presidential supervision; that could include delegating expansive powers to agencies and perhaps limiting the president's ability to hire and fire agency personnel.
The "unitary executive" interpretation — with a president asserting the right to unilaterally disregard or revoke congressionally-enacted arrangements — is dangerous in the extreme. We've seen that in other countries, and we could well see the same thing happen here.
Decades ago, the head of the Reactor Department on my ship [the USS Enterprise] had a list on the office wall of Great Naval Quotes that we were forbidden to use. The #1 prohibited quote on that list was, "But we've always done it that way!" followed by #2, "But we've never done it that way!" Both of those are violated by using a bibliolatry-based approach to the Constitution as a purported justification for unilaterally up-ending longstanding practices — especially when, on the whole, those practices have worked passably well.
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> that just makes it more exigent to "pragmatically reinterpret" the law to ensure effective presidential control over the administrative state
That's clearly one of your ideological priors, but it wasn't handed down from Mount Sinai on stone tablets.
But the “living constitution” is nothing more than imposing one’s ideological priors onto the document. I happen to think the crisis of a permanent bureaucracy that is ideologically divergent from the population is far more “dangerous” than anything else the country faces. If we are going to “pragmatically reinterpret” the constitution, that’s the challenge that such interpretation needs to meet.
That overlooks a key distinction: An "ideological prior" that's proved to be supported by real-world evidence (i.e., experience) is no longer an ideological prior.
Analogously: Special- and general relativity were just theories in 1905 and 1915 (their respective publication dates). Over decades, real-world evidence proved that they were, in the main, correct — but we still don't treat either as a sacred, immutable text.
The unitary-executive view is an untested theory, an ideological prior. In contrast, our existing administrative state is supported by close to a century of real-world experience.
That's not to say that modifications aren't needed in the modern state. We don't want to make a golden calf of the granular details of FDR's or the Warren Court's approaches, any more than we want to enshrine the unitary-executive model or the Alito-Thomas perspective.
But in a country with some 340 million people that's been the source of the reasonably-successful Pax Americana, it's incredibly risky to go unilaterally f*cking around — it's the equivalent of a teenaged driver insisting that he can refuel his car and change the oil while driving 75 mph on a crowded freeway.
Regardless, we find ourselves in a new time. If the Old Republic could be overthrown by “emanations from penumbras” we can just as easily wave away the current imperial interregnum in which we find ourselves.
"Far from perfect, but reasonably serviceable" ≠ "total shit"
The “Acela class” is a term used, often pejoratively, to refer to the elite political, business, and media class concentrated along the Northeast Corridor of the United States, particularly in cities like Washington, D.C., New York, and Boston. The term comes from the Acela Express, Amtrak’s high-speed train that runs between these cities, symbolizing the connectedness of this group.
Critics use it to describe a political and economic elite perceived as out of touch with the rest of the country, especially with working-class and rural Americans. It’s often associated with establishment politics, bureaucratic power, and coastal liberalism.
Professionals might have a housekeeper or get their lawns done, but they're not employing a kitchen or construction site full of people.
The government is not a corporation and the president is not a unilateral dictator. You're right about other cultures having values alien to Americans, and perhaps you need to do some introspection there before making political arguments.
But sanctioning riots because their ideology tells them “racism is a public health problem?”
That's one way to put it.
https://bsky.app/profile/twlldun.bsky.social/post/3lic2x56dv...
Why should Americans care what foreigners think of them? Most people in the world aren’t Americans and have values alien to Americans. We’re in the middle of sorting out a disloyal administrative state that needs to be brought to heel. Eggs will get broken to make the omelet. But outside the Acela class (https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/politics-podcast-are-th...) nobody wants to be governed from DC. Many want more funding for their local schools or bigger social security checks, and they’ll caucus with the Acela class because they must. But they’re not going to worry about personnel changes in government bureaucracies. And their opinion is the only thing that matters.