this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2024
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I forget where I was listening to it (perhaps the Chapo interview with Ryan Grim and Jeremy Scahill), but they brought up a very good point. The US federal bureaucracy is an absolutely leviathan and sprawling beast, encompassing many extremely specialized disciplines. Assuming executive power and firing everybody is easy. If you wish to debilitate an agency, this is good enough. But if you wish to effectively wield an agency as an ideological instrument, the pool of Steve Bannon-like figures you can staff it with is rather small, lacks the myriad of specific skills, and is completely insufficient.
These agencies are incapable of being effective without buy-in from the rank and file. You cannot simply fire all 35,000 employees of the FBI (for instance) and find suitable, ideologically pristine replacements on the street corner. You can give a lot of dumb guys guns and batons and run an effective police terror regime, but things like data analysis, resource management, logistics, public relations, maintenance of infrastructure, process improvement, research and development, etc. will all deteriorate. Such a regime is incapable of retaining global hegemony (or even significance) for long.
Yes, that's correct, however my counter or whatever is "they don't care." Like legitimately a ton of right wingers do not see the scheme you're describing. They're ideologically driven by "WE DUN WANT NO GUBBMINT!"
It's sort of an interesting source of infighting between the elite right wingers who want to milk shit vs the base right wingers who want to burn it all down. Well, it's less interesting when you consider that they want to cut all the good parts of the government (regulations, social security) or yeah fully openly weaponizing things like the FBI.
I have to just assume someone somewhere like maybe a Bannon or maybe a Jared is saying "no, no do not burn this down. We have to just change who is in charge." And yeah finding a "competent" guy to head the FDA but in a pure evil way is hard- I'd sort of argue though that the FDA, EPA, etc. are already totally captured and run in an evil way which raises questions of "what the fuck else more do you guys want?" besides the total destruction strategy.
It just seems like they got everything they wanted from back in the 1980s and now to justify their eternal war on "the libs" they're just cranking the insanity meter up but the people who have been enriched by the gutting of regulations are like "hello? No. We don't want this totally gone. We are milking the cow, dumbass!"
I hope I explained that well enough in my rambling
100%. The cow analogy is very apt. Milkers and Slaughterers. The majority of the big bourgeoisie are happy to milk the cow, but the consolidation of wealth and power is leaving a growing segment of the small bourgeoisie out in the cold. A class of small business tyrants, petty landlords, and entreprenerds have been sucking at the teat of empire for generations, while not truly understanding or caring how any of it works as long as they can sunbathe and drink a cold beer in their back yards next to their in-ground pool. The teat is drying up though. Less and less milk is coming out, despite all efforts, and there is not enough cream for everyone who feels entitled to it. Even if a handful of people are still getting cream, it is only a matter of time until the mob slaughters the cow. (We, the proletariat, are the cow in this analogy).
(This could be workshopped a bit more)
They’re the dog that caught the cat
Edit: I meant the dog that caught the car but that switch is really funny
Omg i hope they do it, please collapse