It's really depressing how the US system seems to have existed "on belief". Once somebody set out to damage or destroy it, away it went. Pretty much without a whimper.
As I recall, the system was set up with 3 branches of government in tension. Obviously, that was naive.
The framers noted that the system was vulnerable to a single "faction" [1]. The solution was to have many competing factions. I think first-past-the-post, corporate election influence, and mass media consolidated power into a single faction that ended up causing the system to break down (in that the branches don't seem to be checking each other's power right now).
I don't think corporate election influence or mass media really have anything to do with it.
The issue first showed up in 1828 election, when some of the Framers were still alive, and the US basically did nothing about it over the ensuing 200 years.
Remember it was Andrew Jackson who went around ignoring Supreme Court decisions and saying "they made their decision, let's see them enforce it".
And his abuse of executive powers during the Bank Wars to punish political enemies led to the formation of a new political party.
> The framers noted that the system was vulnerable to a single "faction" [1].
That was hundreds of years ago; when Madison says "domestic faction", he doesn't mean "a faction", he means what we would today call "factionalism". The 18th-century use is a pretty direct mirror of the Latin word factio, also meaning factionalism.
The idea that "checks and balances" are built into the US governmental structure is interesting. It would make sense if governmental positions were held by right of heredity. They aren't, but you can see how the Framers would be working with that mental model.
As the US government is actually constructed, Congressmen, for example, have no incentives to preserve anything as a power exclusive to Congress, because they have no lasting affiliation with Congress.
All societies are consensus realities wholly dependent upon participation.
The system was fine but no one has yet constructed a system that can withstand weaponized mass stupidity. Even the ones created to combat corruption fail to account for this danger.
Germany has learned this lesson the hard way, with a 'defensive' constitution post-1945. You don't have 100% free speech in Germany, and it is possible to make parties illegal. It's not without its issues (currently, the far-right AfD might be banned using these laws but the whole system has been dragging its feet) but it is a lesson the US should have learned after the first Trump term.
Democracies by default assumed that all players in the system are supportive of the system itself, kind of like all early Internet protocols assumed that there are no malicious users.
It's not going away with a whimper, the supreme court is killing it on purpose. There are laws that created departments that the president does not have the power to destroy. There is also the impoundment act that forbid a president from redirecting or not spending appropriated money. These laws are being ignored because the supreme court has gone full partisan.
One study estimates that the Supreme Court will be "conservative" [1] for at least the next 100 years. If Dems don't try to do something to represent 50% of the country that is panicking then they're complicit.
[1] tearing down hundreds of years of precedent is not conservative, this is an extremist court.
By your definitions, the Roberts court is the most conservative court, and the Warren Burger court from 1969 to 1986 was the most extremist.
You don't care about overturning precedent. The above facts will not change your mind about the Roberts court. The real issue is there in the article I linked to:
"What distinguishes the Roberts court is ideology. In cases overruling precedents, the Warren court reached a liberal result 92 percent of the time. The Burger and Rehnquist courts reached liberal outcomes about half the time. The number dropped to 35 percent for the Roberts court. Since 2017, it has ticked down a bit, to 31 percent"
The Roberts court is in fact conservative. It does not often overturn precedent, but when it overturns precedent it does so with conservative results. That's why you and other liberals don't like it.
> There are laws that created departments that the president does not have the power to destroy.
That's true but what you're leaving out is that those laws were passed by Congress to give their authority away to these agencies and give the management of them away to the executive branch.
Congress is wholly at fault for all of the power they've ceded to the executive.
Trump has the authority, granted by Congress, to appoint the people in charge of those agencies and has the authority to dictate their agenda (by appointing someone who will carry it out).
> One study estimates that the Supreme Court will be "conservative"
First of all, "one study..." isn't a great way to make a point but, regardless, "conservative" justices doesn't mean politically conservative, it means judicially conservative and that is a completely separate concept.
Trump has been ruled against several times already on judicially conservative grounds.
> One study estimates that the Supreme Court will be "conservative" [1] for at least the next 100 years.
Not really. A party needs 2/3 majority to impeach a judge. There’s a possibility Democrats can have that majority after next midterms. But the problem with Democrats is that they almost always follow laws and aren’t radical lunatics like republicans. Even after last election, HN felt pretty Red leaning, so that stupidity fever caught a lot of otherwise sane people.
It is more than depressing. During my PhD/Postdoc, we had excellent collaboration with the EPA on stuff which then really improved the life of people in the US. These agencies need to do research to stay ahead of/keep up with the development.
Context: we developed chemicals toxicity prediction models. This was 20 years ago, this allowed the EPA to quality check applications made by chemical companies.
Yet we have Microplastics, PFAS, & a slew of other dangerous contamination across the planet. And the military industrial waste is rarely mentioned.
It seems the EPA cares more about enforcing CO2 production & making sure a homesteaders doesn't build a pond...than it does about extremely harmful & destructive chemicals dispersed across the planet by industrial & military waste.
So I suppose the research is good but the emphasis & enforcement is what really matters. And while there have been historical wins, the agency seems increasingly like a political revolving door to entrench industrial incumbants.
It's really depressing how the US system seems to have existed "on belief".
Word up.
Most people that ever lived, lived under some authoritarian or unjust rule. Some lived in a full terror state. Americans are just so lucky and take so much for granted. One can ponder, “what was the moment it all happened?” - there wasn’t a moment. It’s a total frog boiling in water situation. We’ve been boiling. Taste the water, it’s frog soup. Given that this admin has 3 more years, it’ll be frog bone broth once the bones melt.
It is so fucking crazy that if you actually let the unintellectual border-line savage illiterates fulfill their chaotic fantasies that you truly do get a backward bumble fuck country. Anyway, I’m going back to my regular programming of watching Mexican farmers jump from buildings to their death as they run from ICE, and my president sell scam crypto and sneakers and shit.
> the unintellectual border-line savage illiterates fulfill their chaotic fantasies that you truly do get a backward bumble fuck country
it's ok if you don't have energy to understand otherwise rn, but please know that there's more to it than this. to understand is the only way out that's not total war.
America was always just an idea. For the idea to work, the masses need to ascribe to and appreciate it. Americans willfully took the country in this direction. It’s democracy at work but delivering a “different agenda” than many anticipated.
> Americans are just so lucky and take so much for granted.
As an American living abroad this seems to be the general consensus with the people I talk to. At some point American exceptionalism became expected without the work and investment required.
We haven’t really followed the Constitution for about 100 years now, sadly. We pay lip service to it but it’s mostly a historical curiosity at this point.
If anyone doubts this, take a moment to read the document in one sitting. It’s remarkably short. Compare what you read to the government you’ve had all your life.
I don’t think that’s a fair assessment. The document was meant to be a living adaptable document. In many cases rather than adapting the document directly, laws and interpretations were layered outside the document to keep most the initial structure solid. Amendments came about largely once something was deemed so important it absolutely should be embedded (like the abolishment of slavery) so few mistakes could be made.
The structure should really have a few more obvious significant layers where things could shift around over time.
If we followed the constitution the EPA wouldn’t even exist! Clearly the founders didn’t create this complicated three-branch system only to have most of the government being run by “independent agencies” exercising executive, legislative, and judicial powers.
The key failure is Congress seems not to care to defend or execute its power. They care about getting elected and their ability do obstruct... but they barely do anything. And the republicans are apparently all terrified of the executive. The democrats are meek and assume they ought to win just for showing up because they're "right".
The EPA is in the executive branch and Americans recently hired a CEO of the executive branch that promised to cut a lot of stuff in that branch. This is entirely consistent with what you learn about american government in high school.
That seems to be the major mis-step in trying to structure the government to be secure from capture; obviously the whole experiment was new so they can be forgiven for not addressing it.
But we know now, and would be well-served to identify how to restructure things if given the chance. Unfortunately, the coup by the current regime seems to have been successful and it's going to have to get a lot worse before it blows up and we get something different.
Its a bit sad to me that the tech community here on HN doesn't seem to take any responsibility for all this.
Surely some non-trivial percentage of the commenters / lurkers that are proud to talk about their mono-repo or their favorite react library had some part in the fact that millions think the covid vaccine has 5G.
Many developed nations made fun of our delusional checks and balances concept for a long time
We collectively dismiss external criticism on flimsy rationales like there never being a military coup here, or even more amusingly “at least we can talk about it” as if that is good enough, or is unique to the US at all
> As I recall, the system was set up with 3 branches of government in tension. Obviously, that was naive.
The zero-day bug in the system that had not been exploited until now is that two of the three branches don't actually have any power of enforcement. So if the executive branch decides to just flat out ignore them, there are no consequences.
All of this stuff was hacked into the executive branch to begin with. People have been pointing out that the CFR is way longer than US code for a long time and someone finally dealt with it.
All systems exist ‘on belief’. And it’s objectively done better than all other known systems it has been running concurrently with (in both longevity and impact).
> it’s objectively done better than all other known systems (in longevity and impact)
I think the US is probably the country which has had the greatest positive impact on the world in the last 150 years (purely a personal opinion). But even so, we’ve only been around like 300 years total. It’s crazy to say that we have _objectively_ had the biggest and longest impact, when there are civilizations that existed for so much longer, and which made massive contributions to the world.
One of the most onerous regulation regimes in the USA comes from the FAA.
When people question these regulations, and the cost of certifying aircraft and aircraft parts, someone always rightly responds "these regulations are written in blood."
The same can easily be said about environmental regulations, except in their case, the pool of blood is orders of magnitude deeper.
Do people really think that President Richard Nixon created the EPA to stick it to big business?
Ran the math and and it's factually incorrect to say there's not enough blood in the world to write out all these rules.
There's about ~8 billion people in the world today. Estimates say an average adult has 5 liters of blood in their body, so let's say 2.5 liters per person to account for children. That's about 20 billion liters of blood for available for your macabre comparison.
Looking at the federal register[0] and running some javascript on the page [1], we get an estimate of 4.1 million pages in the federal register in it's whole history. We could get into page yields for various types of printing and how that effects how many pages could be printed, but at a generous one liter per page, it's obvious it could be done.
Skipping some more estimates, but the federal register would require about 1 oil-drum of blood or 115 liters to write out, which would only take one person donating blood at the recommend safe rates about 40 years to complete by themselves. A long time for sure, but if you start today, you could hopefully see just how wrong you were before the end of your life.
A lot of comments are rightfully pointing out the destructive nature of this move. But looking at it from another angle, is it possible this is a symptom of a deeper problem?
What if a significant portion of the electorate no longer believes institutions like the EPA are neutral arbiters of science, but instead see them as political actors pushing an agenda? If that belief is widespread, is an action like this seen not as 'destruction', but as 'dismantling a biased system', even if it seems counterproductive to the rest of us?
> What if a significant portion of the electorate no longer believes institutions like the EPA are neutral arbiters of science, but instead see them as political actors pushing an agenda?
This is clearly the case. The next question is, how did this happen? Did these people come to this conclusion based on their own diligent research, or were they led to this opinion by supremely funded vested interests that influence every branch of our society?
> or were they led to this opinion by supremely funded vested interests that influence every branch of our society?
I hope you realize the irony that this argument applies to both sides of the argument here. In other words, how do you know that your research was done in an unbiased way?
For sure Fox et al. have been pushing the idea that scientists have biases, but it can also be true that science has become more biased.
Update: a little evidence. This doesn't cover change over time, but it strikes me as fairly extreme, unless you are willing to go very far down the "reality has a liberal bias" road: https://github.com/hughjonesd/academic-bias
Its a fact that the EPA added ~6000 employees during the Biden administration and also instituted DEI policies to follow President Biden’s Executive Order 14035 (2021). This included employee-led special emphasis groups, LGBTQ+ events, and justice-oriented programs. All this is out of focus from the EPA's goal to safeguard the natural environment.
It should be NO surprise that there is massive push-back after a republican administration came to power. Donald Trump explicitly campaigned to cut the EPA’s size and funding and to eliminate DEI and environmental justice programs in the federal government.
A significant portion of the electorate believes that the government is hiding aliens, or that the political leadership are all secretly lizard people (whether this is meant literally or as a metaphor for Jews or whether they think Jews are secretly lizard people depends on the person). There are vast and necessary government functions that most of the electorate doesn't understand or doesn't value or completely misunderstands.
Even on hacker news I frequently see people completely misunderstanding how, for instance, scientific research gets funded in the US. And the readership of this site is far more likely than a random sample of Americans to know about scientific research.
Dismantling chunks of the government based on the ignorance of some portion of the electorate is just bad policy.
"Do you believe that shape-shifting reptilian
people control our world by taking on human
form and gaining political power to manipulate
our societies, or not?"
11% said yes or were unsure.
That's from 2013, so I can't even begin to imagine what a poll from today would look like.
> What if a significant portion of the electorate no longer believes institutions like the EPA are neutral arbiters of science, but instead see them as political actors pushing an agenda?
They do, but it’s not a belief they came upon accidentally. It was pushed over decades using billions of dollars and multiple media conglomerates.
Arguably, institutions like the EPA exist to moderate extremes. The EPA simulatenously prevents industry from causing cancer clusters and extinctions while also preventing eco-terrorism. All the science, surveys, and purple prose done by the EPA and consultants is arguably kinda bullshit, but it is very useful bullshit because its a whole lot better than assassinated mining executives and hospitals full of throat cancer victims.
They believe that because an elite few (Project 2025 authors and others) want all science to be demoted in the eyes of the public. Because that way lies control of the masses.
The last thing an authoritarian leader wants is a challenge to his authority, one that scientists will almost certainly provide.
This is sad. I have worked with many federal agencies including EPA and have seen firsthand how large corporations try to influence or circumvent the law without regard for people or the environment. The EPA isn’t as bloated as people think. Contrary to public perception, there are many talented and hardworking federal employees. The real culprits are the large federal contracting companies that deliver subpar results and hide behind federal procurement bureaucracy. I wish DOGE would focus on that.
During the next administration, it will surely be a priority to restore the functions of government dissolved throughout these years. However, these functions will be filled by private companies and will come with a large bill to U.S. taxpayers. There's a large vacuum being left, with a talent pool of government-wage workers, and a new cohort of politicians whose campaigns will need funded.
I have no stake in being right or wrong, which I think leads to sounding confident. But, I believe the incentives are there for privatization.
Those opposed to the current administration will see restoration of gutted services as a win. Talent (researchers, scientists, and anyone with knowledge of processes) is being made available to the private sector. The private sector makes significant contributions to political campaigns and will want contracts in return. Therefore, a campaign can be sold as:
"We will fix what has been broken, and bring back jobs to the critical areas of our sovereignty. We will make good on the promise of increasing efficiency and reducing waste by opening up opportunities across all areas of industry, both old and new.
What we've witnessed over the past four years was the dismantling of the American dream. What we endured was "an honest day's work" being turned into "work a day and a half for half the pay".
But now, we will rebuild. And as we do, we will no longer be vulnerable to the whims of ivory tower bureaucrats. We are taking the power back. We are keeping our taxpayer dollars focused where they should be. You are getting the respect you're owed and reminding Washington that they work for you."
Step 2: Cut taxes on the rich. <---------- You are here
It works every time. Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson said: “If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.”
Let’s see how the rural poor feel when their hospital closes, they can’t get medicaid, health insurance is wildly out of reach, they have no ability to borrow money thanks to insane medical debt that they can never repay, and their wages are garnished for student debt from a degree they never finished. How long until debt becomes a crime?
> Let’s see how the rural poor feel when their hospital closes, they can’t get medicaid [...]
There's been research on that [1]. They become even more likely to vote Republican. Here's the abstract:
> Who do citizens hold responsible for outcomes and experiences? Hundreds of rural hospitals have closed or significantly reduced their capacity since just 2010, leaving much of the rural U.S. without access to emergency health care. I use data on rural hospital closures from 2008 to 2020 to explore where and why hospital closures occurred as well as who–if anyone–rural voters held responsible for local closures. Despite closures being over twice as likely to occur in the Republican-controlled states that did not expand Medicaid, closures were associated with reduced support for federal Democrats and the Affordable Care Act following local closures. I show that rural voters who lost hospitals were roughly 5–10 percentage points more likely to vote Republican in subsequent presidential elections. If anything state Republicans seemed to benefit in rural areas from rejecting Medicaid and resulting rural health woes following the passage of the ACA. These results have important implications for population health and political accountability in the U.S.
The trend you described has been going on since Reagan, and the "rural poor" haven't budged. I have no expectation that attitudes will change in Rural America, not matter how bad things get.
These are the reasons many voted for Trump. His ability to tear down American institutions is a direct result of the apathy born out of decades of successful corporate corruption, or lobbying, if you prefer, that we failed to stop democratically.
But it is wrong to think all American generations before ours didn't have to fight. The lie is that democracy was ever easy. There are millions of Americans mobilizing, sharing their stories, marching, talking to their representatives, protesting, and following their conscience. It is easier than ever to find and join the peaceful opposition.
Well, that leads to another narrative trick called “see these are examples of how big government doesn’t work and the other side asking for increased government and hospitals are socialist and going to waste your tax dollars or give to freeloaders like immigrants etc”. Destroy government based support, blame it as failure of government, rinse and repeat.
LBJ, JFK, and FDR are what we need more of in future leaders. People not in it for themselves and savvy enough to not prostrate themselves every time to corporate or sectarian factions while accumulating political capital to spend on worthy causes to advance humanity and create a better future.
Readit News
As I recall, the system was set up with 3 branches of government in tension. Obviously, that was naive.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federalist_No._10
The issue first showed up in 1828 election, when some of the Framers were still alive, and the US basically did nothing about it over the ensuing 200 years.
Remember it was Andrew Jackson who went around ignoring Supreme Court decisions and saying "they made their decision, let's see them enforce it".
And his abuse of executive powers during the Bank Wars to punish political enemies led to the formation of a new political party.
That was hundreds of years ago; when Madison says "domestic faction", he doesn't mean "a faction", he means what we would today call "factionalism". The 18th-century use is a pretty direct mirror of the Latin word factio, also meaning factionalism.
The idea that "checks and balances" are built into the US governmental structure is interesting. It would make sense if governmental positions were held by right of heredity. They aren't, but you can see how the Framers would be working with that mental model.
As the US government is actually constructed, Congressmen, for example, have no incentives to preserve anything as a power exclusive to Congress, because they have no lasting affiliation with Congress.
Deleted Comment
The system was fine but no one has yet constructed a system that can withstand weaponized mass stupidity. Even the ones created to combat corruption fail to account for this danger.
So.
Democracies by default assumed that all players in the system are supportive of the system itself, kind of like all early Internet protocols assumed that there are no malicious users.
Deleted Comment
One study estimates that the Supreme Court will be "conservative" [1] for at least the next 100 years. If Dems don't try to do something to represent 50% of the country that is panicking then they're complicit.
[1] tearing down hundreds of years of precedent is not conservative, this is an extremist court.
Yes, they've refused to do certain things until lower courts rule, but I dont see that as a huge incongruence.
Uh. What are they supposed to do with a Republican trifecta? Do you mean "win votes in future elections so they can govern?"
The Roberts court has overturned precedent less often than any other recent court. See https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/29/us/supreme-court-preceden....
By your definitions, the Roberts court is the most conservative court, and the Warren Burger court from 1969 to 1986 was the most extremist.
You don't care about overturning precedent. The above facts will not change your mind about the Roberts court. The real issue is there in the article I linked to:
"What distinguishes the Roberts court is ideology. In cases overruling precedents, the Warren court reached a liberal result 92 percent of the time. The Burger and Rehnquist courts reached liberal outcomes about half the time. The number dropped to 35 percent for the Roberts court. Since 2017, it has ticked down a bit, to 31 percent"
The Roberts court is in fact conservative. It does not often overturn precedent, but when it overturns precedent it does so with conservative results. That's why you and other liberals don't like it.
That's true but what you're leaving out is that those laws were passed by Congress to give their authority away to these agencies and give the management of them away to the executive branch.
Congress is wholly at fault for all of the power they've ceded to the executive.
Trump has the authority, granted by Congress, to appoint the people in charge of those agencies and has the authority to dictate their agenda (by appointing someone who will carry it out).
> One study estimates that the Supreme Court will be "conservative"
First of all, "one study..." isn't a great way to make a point but, regardless, "conservative" justices doesn't mean politically conservative, it means judicially conservative and that is a completely separate concept.
Trump has been ruled against several times already on judicially conservative grounds.
Deleted Comment
Not really. A party needs 2/3 majority to impeach a judge. There’s a possibility Democrats can have that majority after next midterms. But the problem with Democrats is that they almost always follow laws and aren’t radical lunatics like republicans. Even after last election, HN felt pretty Red leaning, so that stupidity fever caught a lot of otherwise sane people.
Context: we developed chemicals toxicity prediction models. This was 20 years ago, this allowed the EPA to quality check applications made by chemical companies.
It seems the EPA cares more about enforcing CO2 production & making sure a homesteaders doesn't build a pond...than it does about extremely harmful & destructive chemicals dispersed across the planet by industrial & military waste.
So I suppose the research is good but the emphasis & enforcement is what really matters. And while there have been historical wins, the agency seems increasingly like a political revolving door to entrench industrial incumbants.
Word up.
Most people that ever lived, lived under some authoritarian or unjust rule. Some lived in a full terror state. Americans are just so lucky and take so much for granted. One can ponder, “what was the moment it all happened?” - there wasn’t a moment. It’s a total frog boiling in water situation. We’ve been boiling. Taste the water, it’s frog soup. Given that this admin has 3 more years, it’ll be frog bone broth once the bones melt.
It is so fucking crazy that if you actually let the unintellectual border-line savage illiterates fulfill their chaotic fantasies that you truly do get a backward bumble fuck country. Anyway, I’m going back to my regular programming of watching Mexican farmers jump from buildings to their death as they run from ICE, and my president sell scam crypto and sneakers and shit.
Shout out to the American Dream.
it's ok if you don't have energy to understand otherwise rn, but please know that there's more to it than this. to understand is the only way out that's not total war.
and yes, i'm angry too.
Deleted Comment
As an American living abroad this seems to be the general consensus with the people I talk to. At some point American exceptionalism became expected without the work and investment required.
If anyone doubts this, take a moment to read the document in one sitting. It’s remarkably short. Compare what you read to the government you’ve had all your life.
The structure should really have a few more obvious significant layers where things could shift around over time.
And therefore both parties represent corporations and the wealthy, not the voters.
There are limitations, but if a research arm was created purely by executive power, then it can be stopped through executive power.
The system works as intended.
That seems to be the major mis-step in trying to structure the government to be secure from capture; obviously the whole experiment was new so they can be forgiven for not addressing it.
But we know now, and would be well-served to identify how to restructure things if given the chance. Unfortunately, the coup by the current regime seems to have been successful and it's going to have to get a lot worse before it blows up and we get something different.
Social media has allowed the masses to be manipulated in a targeted way like we've never seen in history.
Surely some non-trivial percentage of the commenters / lurkers that are proud to talk about their mono-repo or their favorite react library had some part in the fact that millions think the covid vaccine has 5G.
We collectively dismiss external criticism on flimsy rationales like there never being a military coup here, or even more amusingly “at least we can talk about it” as if that is good enough, or is unique to the US at all
The zero-day bug in the system that had not been exploited until now is that two of the three branches don't actually have any power of enforcement. So if the executive branch decides to just flat out ignore them, there are no consequences.
Dead Comment
I think the US is probably the country which has had the greatest positive impact on the world in the last 150 years (purely a personal opinion). But even so, we’ve only been around like 300 years total. It’s crazy to say that we have _objectively_ had the biggest and longest impact, when there are civilizations that existed for so much longer, and which made massive contributions to the world.
When people question these regulations, and the cost of certifying aircraft and aircraft parts, someone always rightly responds "these regulations are written in blood."
The same can easily be said about environmental regulations, except in their case, the pool of blood is orders of magnitude deeper.
Do people really think that President Richard Nixon created the EPA to stick it to big business?
Deleted Comment
No, that's just a lazy ignorant response, there is not enough blood in the world to provide enough ink to write all those rules.
There's about ~8 billion people in the world today. Estimates say an average adult has 5 liters of blood in their body, so let's say 2.5 liters per person to account for children. That's about 20 billion liters of blood for available for your macabre comparison.
Looking at the federal register[0] and running some javascript on the page [1], we get an estimate of 4.1 million pages in the federal register in it's whole history. We could get into page yields for various types of printing and how that effects how many pages could be printed, but at a generous one liter per page, it's obvious it could be done.
Skipping some more estimates, but the federal register would require about 1 oil-drum of blood or 115 liters to write out, which would only take one person donating blood at the recommend safe rates about 40 years to complete by themselves. A long time for sure, but if you start today, you could hopefully see just how wrong you were before the end of your life.
[0] https://www.federalregister.gov/reader-aids/federal-register... [1] $("tbody > tr > :nth-child(9) ").text().split("\n").map(function(l){return parseInt(l.trim().replace(",",""))}).filter(function(l){return l ? l: 0}).reduce(function(a,b){return a+b},0)
What if a significant portion of the electorate no longer believes institutions like the EPA are neutral arbiters of science, but instead see them as political actors pushing an agenda? If that belief is widespread, is an action like this seen not as 'destruction', but as 'dismantling a biased system', even if it seems counterproductive to the rest of us?
This is clearly the case. The next question is, how did this happen? Did these people come to this conclusion based on their own diligent research, or were they led to this opinion by supremely funded vested interests that influence every branch of our society?
Abortion, gun control and releasing the Epstain list are have popular support but the are against it.
Sometimes a small influential group can push for an agenda. That are more organized and have more money
I hope you realize the irony that this argument applies to both sides of the argument here. In other words, how do you know that your research was done in an unbiased way?
Update: a little evidence. This doesn't cover change over time, but it strikes me as fairly extreme, unless you are willing to go very far down the "reality has a liberal bias" road: https://github.com/hughjonesd/academic-bias
It should be NO surprise that there is massive push-back after a republican administration came to power. Donald Trump explicitly campaigned to cut the EPA’s size and funding and to eliminate DEI and environmental justice programs in the federal government.
Even on hacker news I frequently see people completely misunderstanding how, for instance, scientific research gets funded in the US. And the readership of this site is far more likely than a random sample of Americans to know about scientific research.
Dismantling chunks of the government based on the ignorance of some portion of the electorate is just bad policy.
https://www.publicpolicypolling.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/...
"Do you believe that shape-shifting reptilian people control our world by taking on human form and gaining political power to manipulate our societies, or not?"
11% said yes or were unsure.
That's from 2013, so I can't even begin to imagine what a poll from today would look like.
They do, but it’s not a belief they came upon accidentally. It was pushed over decades using billions of dollars and multiple media conglomerates.
This is nothing more than Project 2025 at work.
It is so fucking sad that people, voting on vibes and single issues, sleepwalk into situations like this.
The last thing an authoritarian leader wants is a challenge to his authority, one that scientists will almost certainly provide.
Seems to me like a fading empire elected the wrong person to lead them due to nonsense reasons and will now stagnate faster.
Those opposed to the current administration will see restoration of gutted services as a win. Talent (researchers, scientists, and anyone with knowledge of processes) is being made available to the private sector. The private sector makes significant contributions to political campaigns and will want contracts in return. Therefore, a campaign can be sold as:
"We will fix what has been broken, and bring back jobs to the critical areas of our sovereignty. We will make good on the promise of increasing efficiency and reducing waste by opening up opportunities across all areas of industry, both old and new.
What we've witnessed over the past four years was the dismantling of the American dream. What we endured was "an honest day's work" being turned into "work a day and a half for half the pay".
But now, we will rebuild. And as we do, we will no longer be vulnerable to the whims of ivory tower bureaucrats. We are taking the power back. We are keeping our taxpayer dollars focused where they should be. You are getting the respect you're owed and reminding Washington that they work for you."
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Step 2: Cut taxes on the rich. <---------- You are here
It works every time. Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson said: “If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.”
We’re gonna recreate serfdom in the USA.
There's been research on that [1]. They become even more likely to vote Republican. Here's the abstract:
> Who do citizens hold responsible for outcomes and experiences? Hundreds of rural hospitals have closed or significantly reduced their capacity since just 2010, leaving much of the rural U.S. without access to emergency health care. I use data on rural hospital closures from 2008 to 2020 to explore where and why hospital closures occurred as well as who–if anyone–rural voters held responsible for local closures. Despite closures being over twice as likely to occur in the Republican-controlled states that did not expand Medicaid, closures were associated with reduced support for federal Democrats and the Affordable Care Act following local closures. I show that rural voters who lost hospitals were roughly 5–10 percentage points more likely to vote Republican in subsequent presidential elections. If anything state Republicans seemed to benefit in rural areas from rejecting Medicaid and resulting rural health woes following the passage of the ACA. These results have important implications for population health and political accountability in the U.S.
[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11109-024-10000-8
But it is wrong to think all American generations before ours didn't have to fight. The lie is that democracy was ever easy. There are millions of Americans mobilizing, sharing their stories, marching, talking to their representatives, protesting, and following their conscience. It is easier than ever to find and join the peaceful opposition.
That's the process.
There is a book titled "What's the matter with Kansas?" which dives into this a bit (hint: they will continue to vote against their best interests)
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