What. The. Actual. Fuck.
Dude, you've got four years to destroy democracy. You don't have to do it week three.
this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2025
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This is going to seem pedantic, but the distinction matters to me. Musk isn't destroying democracy here as much as he's blowing the legs off the administrative state. This is 100% going to have serious consequences for a lot of people, including for the Trump administration. The upshot here is that they're going to need the administrators and administrative infrastructure they're throwing away here when they go to do their Nazi shit, and it's not going to be there.
There's a distinction, but not one that I'm seeing. This is an unelected oligarch making these calls. If that's not a failure of democracy, we set the bar in different places. But while it's nice to think that gutting the administrative state would result in incompetence at Naziing, they aren't looking to remove it, just replace everyone with loyalists to the junta.
That's a fair point
Closing up 7500 federal offices basically overnight is going to be a goddamn disaster in so many ways. On the bright side, they're going to flood the states with competent administrators, so that makes another argument for balkanization being likely in our future.
Trump is supposed to be working for property owners. Vacating leases at any scale, let alone this, works against their interests. There just aren't going to be any winners not named Trump or Musk in this regime.
I've been wondering if the ultimate goal here isn't the re-establishment of feudalism
Maybe in the hinterlands, but any town of a size to exercise real influence will have its own democratic institutions thoroughly enshrined in local and regional laws.
Anything Trump tears down at the Federal level will likely be re-worked into inter-state, regional, or even intra-state agreements. Except in the rural areas, which, let's be real, are mostly run by local oligarchs, if at all, anyways.