hmm. i read the whole thing and i'm not sure the point you're making. in the first paper, Wilson points out:

* it is better for government to own its own infrastructure than to depend on private business -- and if the government must depend on business, he stresses the government should be in a position to exert control over the business.

* it is easier for a monarchy to initiate administrative efficiencies than a democracy, therefore great care must be taken to design administrative policies without inadvertently introducing popular sovereignty.

and the rest mostly pontificates and the distinction between a bureaucrat and a legislator. care to connect the dots between this and a "hostility to democracy"?

It's in your own summary, in your own words:

> * it is easier for a monarchy to initiate administrative efficiencies than a democracy, therefore great care must be taken to design administrative policies without inadvertently introducing popular sovereignty.

Wilson believed in "scientific governance" over popular sovereignty. He was unpersuaded that America's diverse electorate could efficiently govern itself, so sought to institute an administrative state to manage the electorate. These paragraphs in Part I are revealing:

"Even if we had clear insight into all the political past, and could form out of perfectly instructed heads a few steady, infallible, placidly wise maxims of government into which all sound political doctrine would be ultimately resolvable, would the country act on them? That is the question. The bulk of mankind is rigidly unphilosophical, and nowadays the bulk of mankind votes. A truth must become not only plain but also commonplace before it will be seen by the people who go to their work very early in the morning; and not to act upon it must involve great and pinching inconveniences before these same people will make up their minds to act upon it.

And where is this unphilosophical bulk of mankind more multifarious in its composition than in the United States? To know the public mind of this country, one must know the mind, not of Americans of the older stocks only, but also of Irishmen, of Germans, of Negroes. In order to get a footing for new doctrine, one must influence minds cast in every mold of race, minds inheriting every bias of environment, warped by the histories of a score of different nations, warmed or chilled, closed or expanded by almost every climate of the globe."

Wilson's ideology was an outgrowth of the political situation in which he found himself. He was a WASP in a political party dependent on massive numbers of Catholic immigrants for political viability. The administrative state was a way to maintain WASP control of the government while leveraging the votes of non-WASPs. That's something that has persisted to this day. Federal government agencies, particularly the intelligence agencies and foreign service, are the last bastion of WASP America.

i think i see the picture you're painting now. thanks for elaborating; i'll do more reading.

The Great MAGA Cultural Revolution has shifted the overton window enough among right wing elite that anti democracy propaganda is now strong and spreading. But it's still our foundation, "we the people" and all that. If the right keeps pushing dictators I see a civil war in our future.

The MAGA cultural revolution fundamentally is an opposition to Wilsonianism and liberal universalism. That's why MAGA's authoritarian impulses are directed to the organs of Wilsonianism--such as executive agencies permanently captured by one party--rather than the public at large.

The deeply unpopular destruction of government institutions in 6 months that were built over decades by hundreds of laws passed by thousands of elected representatives is not democracy. It is a billionaire coup, they're blowing up all the safeguards that generations of Americans put in place to protect us from them.

> destruction of government institutions in 6 months that were built over decades by hundreds of laws passed by thousands of elected representatives

Republicans made the case to their voters that these institutions were permanently controlled by Democrats, and expressly promised to dismantle them. And Republicans won the Presidency and both houses of Congress. There's no principle of "democracy" that says changes to longstanding institutions must proceed slowly.

In fact, the only thing that's preventing Trump from living up to even more of his campaign promises is the anti-democratic check of the filibuster.

> billionaire coup

Every objective analysis shows that the majority of billionaires supported Kamala Harris. She raised $1.65 billion against Trump's $1.05 billion: https://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2024-11-15/trump-har.... She went into the home stretch with a huge cash advantage over Trump: https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/21/politics/campaign-fundraising.... This was the second time Trump won despite being outspent and swimming against the opposition of Wall Street.

> that these institutions were permanently controlled by Democrats

the lies is what got us here

Not only is it true, it's not even debatable. 84% of federal employee campaign contributions went to Kamala Harris: https://www.govexec.com/workforce/2024/11/federal-employees-.... If you exclude DOD, it's like 90%. In State and Commerce, it was like 95%.

To put that into context, replacing the federal workforce with random voters from AOC's district in New York City would double the percentage of Republicans! (https://nypost.com/2024/11/09/us-news/aocs-district-saw-mass...)

From your first link:

> Those donation totals may be explained, at least in part, by the former president’s policies related to those agencies. Trump has repeatedly vowed to eliminate Education if he is elected. He maintained an adversarial relationship with EPA, proposing in each of his annual budgets to decimate the agency’s spending and meddling in its scientific work. Trump instituted a longstanding hiring freeze at State and referred to it as “the Deep State” Department. Trump has also vowed to do away with a merit-based civil service for much of the federal workforce.

"Employees at institutions being threatened to be dismantled by a presidential candidate do not support that candidate" does not prove what you think it proves. In fact, the same link says Trump got 40% of federal employee donations in 2020, which is much more balanced.

Also donation amounts don't map to votes. From another link on the same site, https://www.govexec.com/pay-benefits/2016/10/federal-employe... --

> The lopsided donations do not necessarily reflect how the federal workforce is voting. The former State Department secretary led the businessman by 5 percentage points among federal employees in a July poll by the Government Business Council, the research arm of Government Executive Media Group, with 42 percent of respondents saying they would vote for Clinton, compared to 37 percent who said the same for Trump.

We'll need more substantial evidence to believe that these institutions are "permanently controlled by Democrats."

This is perhaps confounded somewhat by the fact that Trump's platform included mass layoffs of federal workers. Trump, contrary to past Republicans even, represented an existential threat to the livelihood of every federal worker.

So what?

Really? Wow. It does not matter one iota who employees vote for. That is a dark and ugly slope. Maybe we should extend such dystopian views to the periphery, too, such as lobbyists.

It is not a surprise to anyone that people who see themselves as Republican, "the party for smaller government" are less likely to work for said government.

But the insult (and I am not even a public servant) that because people are democrats, they are somehow beholden to that over doing their job professionally, is a strong one. You've basically accused them of having a loyalty to party over their jobs.

Education has a left leaning bias, in spite of some prime examples to the contrary in this thread (it's statistics, after all, and not about particular individuals). So given that to become a federal employee (rather than, say, an elected official) you need to have some education and some skills it should be no surprise that they would skew left leaning as well. If there is an argument to be made that the 'deep state' exists and is democratic leaning that would be the one. But it isn't a bad thing and has - until recently - kept the USA from devolving even faster. But now the brakes are off and the train is gaining momentum. Whether it is too late to stop it or not I do not know.

There is an interesting concept in chemistry: activation energy. If there is a fuel/oxidizer mixture it takes a certain amount of energy to get the chain reaction started. Too little and the proto-fire will burn out by itself. But pass the threshold and it will continue to blaze until there is nothing left to burn. There is a good chance that we have passed the threshold as a society even though the fire has really only properly begun to burn a few months ago. Maybe it is not too late. But I wouldn't bet on that, too many people are spoiling for a fight, they'd harm their own interests happily if they believed it harms the other guy more.

It is an opposition to reality.

I had really hoped that by now you'd have seen that the things that you voted for and hoped to see come to pass are not the universal sweet that you thought they would be. But all I see is that every time more news about the disastrous political direction that USA has taken is that you shift your goalposts with it and declare that this too is what you wanted. As a dad of bi-racial kids I would be super worried that those chickens would come home to roost. These are not just paper games and plenty of people who thought their situation in the USA was a safe as houses - and who voted for Trump - have seen that assumption invalidated.

But as they say: a conservative is a liberal with a daughter.

I mean, the US did have literal nazis publicly espousing fascism in the US before Pearl Harbor.

There have always been portions of the US electorate enamored with authoritarianism.

I'd point out that, at the time American went to war against the Nazis, it was in the 3rd decade of an immigration policy so restrictive that the foreign-born population dropped from 15% in 1920 to under 5% by 1970. Even though Europe was utterly devastated from war in the post-war period, there was no mass immigration of europeans to the U.S. because of restrictive immigration laws.

So yes, there were Nazis in the U.S. But modern liberals also would've called Eisenhower or FDR a Nazi.

>Roosevelt himself called Mussolini “admirable” and professed that he was “deeply impressed by what he has accomplished.” The admiration was mutual. In a laudatory review of Roosevelt’s 1933 book Looking Forward, Mussolini wrote, “Reminiscent of Fascism is the principle that the state no longer leaves the economy to its own devices.… Without question, the mood accompanying this sea change resembles that of Fascism.” The chief Nazi newspaper, Volkischer Beobachter, repeatedly praised “Roosevelt’s adoption of National Socialist strains of thought in his economic and social policies” and “the development toward an authoritarian state” based on the “demand that collective good be put before individual self-interest.”

https://www.cato.org/commentary/hitler-mussolini-roosevelt#

Now I haven't read the book "Looking Forward." If I can get my hands on a copy it promises to be an interesting read. But I would like to follow up on the other ideas presented.

‘Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…’ - Winston Churchill

Democracy for all its imperfections, is symbolic of the idea that the people give power to the government, and that it is the government's duty to give power back to the people. To me, this is exactly what Roosevelt did. Did the people not give money (taxes) and power (accept rule of law) to the government? Is it so bad for the government to return some of that money and power to the people through the New Deal? Is it so bad for the government to lay the foundations for the economic security of its people? Or at least attempt to? I don't care if a crazy person was supposedly "impressed" at what Roosevelt was doing, because they were attempting to reframe it in terms of their propaganda. From the quotes you can see how they are twisting the ideal of democracy "power to the people" to instead focus solely on power (to the government), and thus authoritarianism. To disregard that the government is a powerful institution is foolish, of course, as is to assume that it somehow will magically work toward the betterment of the people. But to disregard the extreme differences between the social contract in a democratic state and an authoritarian one is insane, and the article you posted, when read in its entirety, agrees.

You make a good and necessary point:

>...to disregard the extreme differences between the social contract in a democratic state and an authoritarian one is insane...

> I don't care if a crazy person was supposedly "impressed" at what Roosevelt was doing, because they were attempting to reframe it in terms of their propaganda

Praise is often used in a diplomatic context as well. Just because bad actors praised FDR, it doesn't necessarily follow that FDR is equally odious.

That said, at the time the US had shifted from the high growth, individualistic era of the Gilded Age, into the collectivism of the Progressive Era. When people talk about fascism here it is often in the accusatory, partisan context.

If you examine collectivist projects, you will find that they almost always require an authoritarian backstop to enforce the agenda. There are direct parallels between the Corporatist economic model and many of the progressive era reforms. Instead of using the word 'Fascism' as a partisan cudgel, it may be more informative to examine the parallels. Specifically here in economic doctrine.

>Is it so bad for the government to lay the foundations for the economic security of its people? Or at least attempt to?

In my view, yes absolutely. While it maybe fair to presume good intent, we could also judge the programs on their outcomes. Cynics typically look towards the special interests which benefit from the state's largess and dismiss the good intentions as a mere marketing ploy. Is self-professed altruism enough?

Federal Reserve (a public private partnership, see Corporatism) Chairman Ben Bernanke famously observed, "You're right, we caused the Great Depression. We're sorry. But thanks to you we'll never do it again." The comment was directed towards Milton Freedman, at his 90th birthday party. This was before Helicopter Ben presided over the 2008 financial crisis.

As for FDR, his new deal programs are widely regarded as deepening and prolonging the Great Depression.

So from an empirical perspective, yes these were specifically bad attempts.

However, I'm going a bit long here, and the main topic of the discussion is Democracy. Aside from empirical evaluations we can also reason about the premises of the democratic process in relation to FDR's programs. One of the key objections to Democracy as an ultimate good, is that the sum of the democratic process, Democracy the ideal, becomes greater than the whole of the participants. Axiomatically, if no single individual has the power to coerce another into an internment camp or force him to sell his labor at a fixed rate; Then by what magical incantation, did the votes of these individuals empower FDR to intern Japanese Americans or enact price controls?

I agree that there is an order of magnitude of difference between history's worst and FDR. However, many of the rationales and some of the methods are similar. If we are truly opposed to those outcomes or ideals, then we should call out the similarities.

> As for FDR, his new deal programs are widely regarded as deepening and prolonging the Great Depression.

That is absolutely not true. That idea is not widely accepted among mainstream historians and economists.

The generally accepted lesson from the depression is that the fed policy was wrong. That theory has been mostly successfully deployed to subsequent recessions.

Who cares what they said 100 years ago? The institutions have mostly served us well. The big lie is that they haven't.

I mean, it's also the bedrock of the Constitution as compared to the Articles of Confederation. Most of the "founding fathers" haaaaaaatttteeeedd democracy, equating it with Mob Rule.