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.
asperous · 3h ago
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.
insane_dreamer · 2h ago
The Founders would never have approved of Citizens United.
rtpg · 2h ago
Sure they would have! The elite of the United States that lead the revolution were all extremely mercantile and many were coming to the colonies to run their own little fiefdoms away from the crown.
One should acknowledge how many of the freedoms locked into the founding ideology of the US is pretty close to what libertarians reach out for. I don't know many libertarians arguing against Citizens United.
That isn't to say that the US can't aim for something different, and that the core of the nation today likely believes many different things.
We can choose our own destiny without trying to ascribe every good idea to what a group of people thought at the founding of the country.
adrr · 2h ago
It didn’t help making senators directly elected. Makes them vulnerable to populists movements.
Loic · 3h ago
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.
ergonaught · 10h ago
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.
So.
a_bonobo · 4h ago
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.
No, and for good reasons. Even in a utopian liberal democracy, fundamental rights cannot be used to deprive someone else of their own fundamental rights. You cannot have freedom for all without limitations to that freedom.
the far-right AfD might be banned using these laws but the whole system has been dragging its feet
How is this any different than how in the US, the far-right insurrectionist that orchestrated Jan6 should have been banned from pursuing public office but the whole system had been dragging its feet? It sounds nice in theory, but as long as there is no active interest in wielding that lawful power, it really is just a piece of paper.
roenxi · 3h ago
They didn't "learn this lesson", they had a constitution imposed on them and were basically occupied for 50 years by multiple foreign powers; even up until 2020 as I recall there were about as many active US army personnel in Germany as German ones. There isn't a hugely compelling story that the constitution is the big factor in the German journey.
It isn't possible to build a paper system that consistently resists an incompetent elite and the people deciding to re-roll the dice on a new system because the current one isn't working. Corruption creeps in and people stop following the official rules.
triknomeister · 3h ago
Germans have this false belief that if you just create the correct laws, people will follow them and system would be good. When in reality, for most people around the world, they follow laws only till it makes sense for them.
pjmlp · 2m ago
This belief is stronger in Switzerland and Scandinavian countries, based on my experience.
impossiblefork · 1h ago
It's also worth noting that the mainstream German parties have actually supported ethnic cleansing abroad, in Nagorno-Karabach, etc. while the AfD opposed those things, so I don't think it's very clear cut that AfD is the dangerous party.
Personally I find the political inclinations of the German mainstream parties to be what appears to be dangerous, since what they're doing actually led to a large number of deaths and a large number of people being displaced, to the loss of sovereignty and to the expansion of a dictatorship.
I see very little difference between Aliyev and Hitler, and he is still tolerated (in fact, my perception of Azerbaijani hate attitudes is that they're actually more extreme that the Nazi hate attitudes, i.e. simply going further, the systematic teaching of this hatred to even younger children that the Nazis primarily targeted, etc.).
the_why_of_y · 14m ago
The thousands of peace-keeping troops in Armenia/Azerbaijan that looked the other way were not German, but Russian. By the way, both Russia and Armenia are members of the CSTO military alliance[1], while Azerbaijan is not.
The civic consens could only be undermined because people lack the contextual knowledge and (self) critical reasoning to not be vulnerable.
Germany tried to solve that problem by creating an extra-governmental body tasked with public broadcasting, with budget autonomy (collects its own pseudo tax) and supposed political independence.
But this falls short too. There are many positions occupied by people with political party affiliation and cases of corruption/embezzlement.
And the cherry on top are the austerity hawks chipping away at the school system for many decades now. The german school system is slowly collapsing, with state represantatives even boykotting a federal conference because their problems had been ignored for so long.
Limiting freedom of speech can be helpful in delicate, small scale cases but becomes unenforcable when the dipshit echo chambers grow and the overton window moves.
Germany has the same route ahead as the USA. I am certain :(
triknomeister · 3h ago
Germany has the same fundamental problems. Just the symptoms are different. Look at debt brake etc. And the banning at this point is just not politically possible. It is just a legal fantasy. Over a long term, laws can only reflect the politics.
Germans believe that legalities can ensure politics be conducted in a "desired" manner when the reality is, it just causes more and more factions of the politics to be done outside the legal framework. Politics is like time, it stops for no man and no law.
echelon · 4h ago
Weaponized social media. That's what wasn't predicted.
wyldfire · 4h ago
Maybe the abnormal thing was the
century or so we had of papers/radio/TV guided by ethics or professionalism or some delicate trustworthiness-equilibrium.
And now we have returned to a state where humanity is guided by inventive stories and manipulated by propaganda.
pfannkuchen · 4h ago
This implies that the period with massively more centralized control of information had a truer consensus reality.
That seems… unlikely?
beezlewax · 2h ago
It was better than the illusion of freedom of information a lot of people have now. In reality mass manipulation is happening on a global scale at unprecedented levels.
neltnerb · 3h ago
At least they mostly felt the need to pick a single consensus reality to approximate. How well it represented common experience, well...
oblio · 2h ago
You know what the weirdest thing about that century is? The Soviets.
A sort of seemingly valid communal society seemed possible so all the other capitalism based ones had competition and as a result were trying to improve the life of citizens.
I'm starting to become more and more convinced that as real fear of Communism disappeared at the top, our systems are regressing to the mean.
amelius · 1h ago
It wasn't predicted because freedom of speech is generally considered a good thing so its darker aspects were never considered.
Same reason adtech has free reign to bring down society.
ARandomerDude · 4h ago
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.
whycome · 4h ago
I’ve always thought that the electric chair would be the definition of “cruel and unusual” to the founding fathers.
exe34 · 3h ago
"interstate commerce" has a lot to answer for regarding the creeping scope of the executive powers.
rayiner · 2h ago
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.
kergonath · 31m ago
These agencies work with delegated powers. It is completely impossible for such a limited number of people as the American Congress to be experts on everything. They need advisors and structures to help them understand the world and make the right decisions, but also to make sure that these decisions are enforced.
This may not be fully developed in the US constitution because the world was much simpler back then, but it is entirely compatible with it.
rayiner · 2h ago
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.
mlyle · 2h ago
Silly me thought that congress had the power of the purse.
rayiner · 1h ago
They do. But you don’t need to appropriate from the Treasury to cut some department within the EPA.
guelo · 9h ago
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.
Aloha · 4h ago
I'm not a fan of this court - but what thing that was 100's of years of precedent was torn down by this court?
Yes, they've refused to do certain things until lower courts rule, but I dont see that as a huge incongruence.
anigbrowl · 3h ago
Birthright citizenship would be the issue to watch, because a previous Supreme Court ruled on the scope of the 14th amendment back in 1888 and conservatives have been aiming to reverse this for decades.
rayiner · 2h ago
Just five years after the 14th amendment was ratified, the Supreme Court said:
> The first observation we have to make on this clause is that it puts at rest both the questions which we stated to have been the subject of differences of opinion. It declares that persons may be citizens of the United States without regard to their citizenship of a particular State, and it overturns the Dred Scott decision by making all persons born within the United States and subject to its jurisdiction citizens of the United States. That its main purpose was to establish the citizenship of the negro can admit of no doubt. The phrase, "subject to its jurisdiction" was intended to exclude from its operation children of ministers, consuls, and citizens or subjects of foreign States born within the United States.
Wong Kim Ark, meanwhile, is a weird fucking case that spends a huge number of pages analyzing everything except the 14th amendment.
nradclif · 27m ago
From Gemini:
The Original Intent of the 14th Amendment
The 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868, primarily to overturn the Supreme Court's infamous 1857 ruling in Dred Scott v. Sandford. In that decision, the Court had held that no person of African descent, whether enslaved or free, could be a U.S. citizen.
The framers of the 14th Amendment intended to create a clear constitutional rule that would prevent this from ever happening again. Senator Jacob Howard, a key drafter of the amendment, stated that its citizenship clause "will, of course, include the children of all parents... who may be born in the United States." He specified only two exceptions: children of foreign diplomats and of enemy forces.
The language of the amendment was a direct refutation of the racist rationale of the Dred Scott decision. While the concept of "undocumented immigrants" as we know it today did not exist, the amendment's framers used broad language to ensure that citizenship was based on a principle of birth on American soil, not on race or the legal status of one's parents.
The Role of Wong Kim Ark
The Wong Kim Ark case became necessary because the government's interpretation of the 14th Amendment had narrowed. Following the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the U.S. government began arguing that Chinese people, even those born in the U.S., were not citizens. They claimed that Wong Kim Ark was not "subject to the jurisdiction" of the U.S. because his parents were still subjects of the Emperor of China.
The 1898 Supreme Court ruling in Wong Kim Ark was a crucial reaffirmation of the original intent. The Court's 6-2 majority opinion, written by Justice Horace Gray, systematically dismantled the government's arguments. The Court looked to the history of English common law and the intent behind the 14th Amendment.
It concluded that the phrase "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" applied to all persons who are subject to U.S. laws and not under the authority of a foreign government, such as diplomats. The Court found that Wong Kim Ark's birth in the U.S. automatically made him a citizen, despite his parents' ineligibility for citizenship under the Chinese Exclusion Act.
In short, the Wong Kim Ark decision did not create a new standard; it prevented the government from creating a new, more restrictive interpretation of the 14th Amendment. It affirmed the foundational principle that birth on U.S. soil is the basis for citizenship, a principle that has been a cornerstone of American law ever since.
loeg · 9h ago
> If Dems don't try to do something about to represent 50% of the country that is panicking then they're complicit.
Uh. What are they supposed to do with a Republican trifecta? Do you mean "win votes in future elections so they can govern?"
guelo · 8h ago
When they get power again they need to challenge the court's extremism. I've seen ideas like term limits or packing the court with more than 9 judges.
tmountain · 3h ago
They won’t get power again in a meaningful way. The last election was their “last stand”. The U.S. has a rigged court and gerrymandered senate. Kamala was right about one thing, “we’re not going back”. Unfortunately, the context was wrong. In this case, it’s, “we’re not going back to being a functional democracy”.
No comments yet
loeg · 7h ago
> When they get power again
Hard to see a path to Dems winning a Senate majority.
burnt-resistor · 4h ago
Yep. And the House is functionally irrelevant and basically a passive onlooker.
SCOTUS legislate from the bench as instructed and POTUS decrees from a throne.
galangalalgol · 4h ago
A majority isn't impossible, but they would have to remove the filibuster. Ideally I'd want the filibuster removed right this instant, but reinstated for judicial and really any confirmations. Let the party in power make their laws and remove old ones, but keep the judiciary independent.
Edit: When the democrats removed the filibuster for judicial confirmations they started us on this path. Predictably the Republicans responded by including the scotus. That was the end of an independent judiciary. It just took a while for it to be sufficient to kill democracy. And to be clear, no ratings agency in the world still considers the US a democracy. At years end it will be an official downgrade from flawed democracy to electoral autocracy or competitive authoritarian state.
SwamyM · 4h ago
> Edit: When the democrats removed the filibuster for judicial confirmations they started us on this path. Predictably the Republicans responded by including the scotus. That was the end of an independent judiciary. It just took a while for it to be sufficient to kill democracy. And to be clear, no ratings agency in the world still considers the US a democracy. At years end it will be an official downgrade from flawed democracy to electoral autocracy or competitive authoritarian state.
While this is technically true, it conveniently ignores why the democrats removed the filibuster which is that:
“In the history of the Republic, there have been 168 filibusters of executive and judicial nominees. Half of them have occurred during the Obama administration — during the last four and a half years,” Reid said.
As always Republicans cause a crisis and then take it to the extreme and Democrats usually end up taking the blame.
Not that they are blame free but they are also usually inept and they defer too much to 'rules and order' when the other party is not playing by the same rules.
burnt-resistor · 3h ago
Yep. R are using every dirty trick by treating politics like love and war, and D are treating it like a purity contest. Ultimately, though both are serving, as Gore Vidal put it, the Property party. I want fair and equal accountability, no one to be above the law, and no politician to engage in even the appearance of inappropriate, unethical behavior, or corrupt behavior; and them to get things done that advance the collective good without steamrolling over groups with sudden, huge surprises. But I want more of the good parts of a culture like Japan where people are decent and conscientious and Europe where other people are cared for besides oneself. The US is currently far, far away from anything remotely resembling healthy, long-term sustainable socioeconomic attitudes, policies, and actions.
No comments yet
nerdsniper · 8h ago
Ideally there will be enough representation in congress to remove justices like Thomas for blatant corruption / conflict of interest.
parineum · 4h ago
> 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.
mandeepj · 5h ago
> 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.
crucialfelix · 4h ago
Good people follow laws, bad people don't.
That's the core problem. The game is rigged
nielsbot · 3h ago
I think it’s rather that good (effective) politicians wield the law and power effectively and creatively. Good people don’t follow bad laws, for example.
The Democrats are not good, but it’s intentional. They work for their donors not their voters.
throwawaymaths · 9h ago
isn't this the separation of powers working though? for once the trump administration has waited for judicial review to act.
ivape · 10h ago
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.
Shout out to the American Dream.
patcon · 9h ago
> 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.
and yes, i'm angry too.
jfengel · 9h ago
I don't understand. And as far as the can tell, the only thing preventing total war is the belief that it might be possible to fix it next year.
And no matter who wins, the other side will be convinced it was by cheating. And that has no alternative but total war.
I have looked long and hard for an alternative but I'm not seeing one.
CalRobert · 3h ago
Peaceful secession perhaps? Long shot but it seems like the least distasteful outcome.
verisimi · 38m ago
The solution is to decrease your high investment in the politics show, and put your energy where it matters - the people around you, yourself. Do something real instead.
tmountain · 3h ago
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.
ujkhsjkdhf234 · 10h ago
Republicans have been attacking government and destabilizing society for decades. This has not happened overnight and it won't be fixed overnight.
msgodel · 58m ago
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.
colechristensen · 3h ago
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".
nielsbot · 3h ago
They care about getting re-elected, true. And are therefore vulnerable to lobbying and PAC dollars.
And therefore both parties represent corporations and the wealthy, not the voters.
triknomeister · 3h ago
For what it's worth. It's a democratic decision at the end of the day. It's not one man going about it.
refurb · 5h ago
The EPA sits under the executive branch. Thus the chief executive (President) has the say on how the executive functions.
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.
insane_dreamer · 2h ago
True. Doesn't make it any less stupid.
yieldcrv · 10h ago
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
lazide · 10h ago
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).
tbrownaw · 4h ago
The Catholic Church is still around, and historically had a pretty major influence on academia.
beezlewax · 1h ago
And it also protects sex offenders from retribution.
thuridas · 38m ago
Influence doesn't always mean positive influence.
The aids distribution in Africa is highly correlated with Christianity
pinkmuffinere · 10h ago
> 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.
lazide · 9h ago
You might want to re-read my comment.
I made no such long term or meta claims.
pinkmuffinere · 8h ago
I guess I’m just missing it, I’ve re-read the thread and it still seems like you’re discussing the US? What am I missing? The parent comment you replied to is
> 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.
lazide · 8h ago
‘systems it has been running concurrently with’. Aka during the same times.
What other gov’t during the same time period has lasted as long or longer (none that I am aware of), let alone has produced prosperity, etc. to the same extent?
And it isn’t actually gone yet, either.
andsoitis · 3h ago
> What other gov’t during the same time period has lasted as long or longer (none that I am aware of), let alone has produced prosperity, etc. to the same extent?
The constitutional system of the United Kingdom is over 1000 years old.
lazide · 3h ago
There is no plausible entity arising from that arrangement that one could refer that has survived even 1/10th of that time intact. Not even counting the devolving of numerous other additional territories.
Including the Sovereign, or Parliament.
It has kept the title, but so has France and how many Republics are they on now?
inejge · 2h ago
> It has kept the title, but so has France and how many Republics are they on now?
The US has also kept the title of the Senate, but I'd argue that it's been a very different institution since the 17th Amendment. Also, the Federal govt. until the Great Depression was much more hands-off (witness the overuse of the Commerce Clause since then.)
I'm not sure that the Founders would think of the present-day Republic as the same as theirs.
worik · 2h ago
> What other gov’t during the same time period has lasted as long or longer
Yes, very few last 250 years.
USA has had some close calls before, the Civil War was horrific.
Nothing lasts forever, but I would not bet against the USA's system perpetuating itself this time, too
jabjq · 10h ago
The system has existed on the taxpayer. Now the taxpayer has voted to get rid of it.
thisisit · 6h ago
People who keep parroting this take are the most hypocritical bunch I have ever seen. Because if the premise is true then when these institutions existed then those were also voted by taxpayers to exist, right? But that time these “taxpayers” made noise about how government can’t be trusted and majority is muzzling their right of speech and first amendment etc etc. Now they when they are in the majority they turn around and say stuff like majority rules, government can be trusted etc.
And I know people like to play both sides so let me add. The big government hoopla exists only on one side.
pfannkuchen · 3h ago
Well the behavior of agencies has changed quite a lot since that whole mechanism was voted into existence, no? Sometimes it takes awhile for the consequences of a change to play out.
thisisit · 3h ago
Another smoke and mirror argument. The “majority” government which decided that these agencies should get tax payers money was there till 6 months ago. So, it has not been “awhile”.
ujkhsjkdhf234 · 10h ago
The taxpayer was lied to repeatedly and under the belief of many many many lies, unwittingly voted to get rid of it.
throwawaymaths · 9h ago
well the republican party has been talking for decades about removing EPA, DOE, etc. and has gotten lots of votes on those premises, so "they" make good on that promise and now the "voter has been lied to"? you could have made the same claim if the republicabs did nothing.
beej71 · 6h ago
The lie is that getting rid of these agencies is a good thing.
tbrownaw · 4h ago
Saying that something is good (or bad) feels more like an "ought" statement than a proper "is" statement, ie not in a category that's capable of being a lie.
jabjq · 10h ago
Democracy is good until the public votes for something unpalatable. In that case they were lied to and/or they are unfit to choose for themselves.
intended · 9h ago
We can actually show that the American public are lied to, and continue to be lied to.
Yes - I can get the point you are making - “democracy for me but not for thee” is BS. Sure!
But the evidence is that theres one media network which is simply selling whatever story works, along side a 50+ year effort to kill trust in institutions. We can even show that the republican machinery gave up on bipartisanship - hell, it’s even public knowledge.
But that wouldn’t make a whit of a difference to voting patterns, or your point. Because your point doesn’t need to be based in the long history of complicated malfeasance that rots all English speaking democracies. It’s anchored in your current state and argument.
So yeah, people voted.
const_cast · 5h ago
> unpalatable
See, this is a weasel word. Nobody said it was unpalatable, they said it was bad, because it is.
Do you want bad things to happen? No? Okay then, everyone should be on the same page.
ujkhsjkdhf234 · 9h ago
Are you saying they weren't lied to? Like Trump saying he knew nothing about Project 2025 which was a lie.
consumer451 · 8h ago
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?
eviks · 42m ago
> someone always rightly responds "these regulations are written in blood."
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.
tdullien · 3h ago
Thank you for pointing out that it was Nixon that created the EPA.
No comments yet
globalview · 9h ago
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?
consumer451 · 7h ago
> 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?
thuridas · 36m ago
Republicans not always do what the electorate wants.
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
dash2 · 4h ago
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
discordance · 9h ago
Unfortunately you’re right, this is more about beliefs.
TrackerFF · 2h ago
I don't think the majority of electorates know that the EPA exists, let alone know what they do.
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.
mcphage · 8h ago
> 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.
guelo · 8h ago
I think the original sin of this political era is the Citizen United ruling that money is free speech and corporations are persons.
throwawaymaths · 9h ago
can we imagine no other ways besides the EPA to take care of the environment? if we can't, then it was always a precarious situation.
ImaCake · 2h ago
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.
apical_dendrite · 9h ago
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.
ivape · 9h ago
Do we have real proof that a sizeable portion of Americans believe in the secret lizard people thing? Best I could find:
"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.
freeone3000 · 4h ago
11% said yes or were unsure?! One in fucking ten people, in the most generous interpretation, did not know whether the government were secretly shape-shifting aliens. God, how did we get here.
Belief in aliens is fairly benign. Consider that half the population have an IQ below 50.
freeone3000 · 2h ago
Noooo, that’s not true. Below 100, as it’s weighted for this to be true: half above half below. It could theoretically be possible for the half below to also be below 50, but this would require the other half to all be above 150, and both are absurd, because there are a whole horde of people of completely average intelligence.
Checking IQ test results, we see they follow a Gaussian with a mean of 100 and a stddev of 15.
tbrownaw · 4h ago
Well are we talking literally (under the old definition, not the new definition that the kids are apparently using these days) or metaphorically?
burnt-resistor · 4h ago
Come to Texas. Qualitatively, the answer is a thunderous, enthusiastic "yes".
thomascountz · 3h ago
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.
Gud · 2h ago
What makes you so confident these functions will be performed by private enterprise?
Seems to me like a fading empire elected the wrong person to lead them due to nonsense reasons and will now stagnate faster.
tremon · 1h ago
What makes you so sure there will be a next administration?
Herring · 10h ago
Step 1: Point at immigrants/trans/blacks/etc
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.”
yakz · 10h ago
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?
We’re gonna recreate serfdom in the USA.
tzs · 10h ago
> 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.
In a nutshell that's why the South is so poor. They've been falling for this for generations.
tw04 · 10h ago
See step one. The hospitals closed and Medicaid had to be gutted because of illegal immigrants. Nothing to be done about it now.
carefulfungi · 9h ago
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.
That's the process.
rtkwe · 10h ago
Most annoying part will be the time delay so people will forget exactly who caused all this damage in the first place too.
thisisit · 6h ago
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.
burnt-resistor · 4h ago
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.
oulipo · 2h ago
America fucking itself in the ass, just for a few more dollars...
devoutsalsa · 1h ago
Not the first time, not the last time.
wpm · 10h ago
How stupid
dfee · 4h ago
There’s strong consensus in these comments. That gives me pause.
Was the prior system good? Was it great? If so, was it optimal? If not, what does better look like?
The discussion can splinter a thousand ways, and on HN it should as we seek truth.
impossiblefork · 26m ago
You can't protect the environment without research. Without research you can't know what's dangerous.
Even in tiny countries, for example Sweden, when we notice a statistical uptick of health problems in a particular area, we have government organizations that go there to investigate and figure out the cause.
rezmason · 4h ago
Should we destroy the thing we're questioning before we have that conversation, or after it?
TrackerFF · 2h ago
Time to pull out Occam's razor again:
A) The Trump admin has conducted rigorous analysis and audit of 55 years of EPA research, and concluded that it is so insignificant and ineffective that one can just dismantle the entire department.
B) The Trump admin rubber stamps anything the Heritage Foundation / Project 2025 wants done, and are desperate to find money for their tax cut funding.
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.
One should acknowledge how many of the freedoms locked into the founding ideology of the US is pretty close to what libertarians reach out for. I don't know many libertarians arguing against Citizens United.
That isn't to say that the US can't aim for something different, and that the core of the nation today likely believes many different things.
We can choose our own destiny without trying to ascribe every good idea to what a group of people thought at the founding of the country.
Context: we developed chemicals toxicity prediction models. This was 20 years ago, this allowed the EPA to quality check applications made by chemical companies.
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.
You don’t have it in the USA, either.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech_in_the_Unite...
Does any country?
No, and for good reasons. Even in a utopian liberal democracy, fundamental rights cannot be used to deprive someone else of their own fundamental rights. You cannot have freedom for all without limitations to that freedom.
How is this any different than how in the US, the far-right insurrectionist that orchestrated Jan6 should have been banned from pursuing public office but the whole system had been dragging its feet? It sounds nice in theory, but as long as there is no active interest in wielding that lawful power, it really is just a piece of paper.
It isn't possible to build a paper system that consistently resists an incompetent elite and the people deciding to re-roll the dice on a new system because the current one isn't working. Corruption creeps in and people stop following the official rules.
Personally I find the political inclinations of the German mainstream parties to be what appears to be dangerous, since what they're doing actually led to a large number of deaths and a large number of people being displaced, to the loss of sovereignty and to the expansion of a dictatorship.
I see very little difference between Aliyev and Hitler, and he is still tolerated (in fact, my perception of Azerbaijani hate attitudes is that they're actually more extreme that the Nazi hate attitudes, i.e. simply going further, the systematic teaching of this hatred to even younger children that the Nazis primarily targeted, etc.).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_Security_Treaty_Org...
Germany tried to solve that problem by creating an extra-governmental body tasked with public broadcasting, with budget autonomy (collects its own pseudo tax) and supposed political independence.
https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Öffentlich-rechtlicher_Rundf...
But this falls short too. There are many positions occupied by people with political party affiliation and cases of corruption/embezzlement.
And the cherry on top are the austerity hawks chipping away at the school system for many decades now. The german school system is slowly collapsing, with state represantatives even boykotting a federal conference because their problems had been ignored for so long.
https://taz.de/Laender-boykottieren-den-Bildungsgipfel/!5918...
Limiting freedom of speech can be helpful in delicate, small scale cases but becomes unenforcable when the dipshit echo chambers grow and the overton window moves.
Germany has the same route ahead as the USA. I am certain :(
Germans believe that legalities can ensure politics be conducted in a "desired" manner when the reality is, it just causes more and more factions of the politics to be done outside the legal framework. Politics is like time, it stops for no man and no law.
And now we have returned to a state where humanity is guided by inventive stories and manipulated by propaganda.
That seems… unlikely?
A sort of seemingly valid communal society seemed possible so all the other capitalism based ones had competition and as a result were trying to improve the life of citizens.
I'm starting to become more and more convinced that as real fear of Communism disappeared at the top, our systems are regressing to the mean.
Same reason adtech has free reign to bring down society.
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.
This may not be fully developed in the US constitution because the world was much simpler back then, but it is entirely compatible with it.
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.
> The first observation we have to make on this clause is that it puts at rest both the questions which we stated to have been the subject of differences of opinion. It declares that persons may be citizens of the United States without regard to their citizenship of a particular State, and it overturns the Dred Scott decision by making all persons born within the United States and subject to its jurisdiction citizens of the United States. That its main purpose was to establish the citizenship of the negro can admit of no doubt. The phrase, "subject to its jurisdiction" was intended to exclude from its operation children of ministers, consuls, and citizens or subjects of foreign States born within the United States.
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/83/36/
Wong Kim Ark, meanwhile, is a weird fucking case that spends a huge number of pages analyzing everything except the 14th amendment.
The Original Intent of the 14th Amendment
The 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868, primarily to overturn the Supreme Court's infamous 1857 ruling in Dred Scott v. Sandford. In that decision, the Court had held that no person of African descent, whether enslaved or free, could be a U.S. citizen.
The framers of the 14th Amendment intended to create a clear constitutional rule that would prevent this from ever happening again. Senator Jacob Howard, a key drafter of the amendment, stated that its citizenship clause "will, of course, include the children of all parents... who may be born in the United States." He specified only two exceptions: children of foreign diplomats and of enemy forces.
The language of the amendment was a direct refutation of the racist rationale of the Dred Scott decision. While the concept of "undocumented immigrants" as we know it today did not exist, the amendment's framers used broad language to ensure that citizenship was based on a principle of birth on American soil, not on race or the legal status of one's parents.
The Role of Wong Kim Ark
The Wong Kim Ark case became necessary because the government's interpretation of the 14th Amendment had narrowed. Following the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the U.S. government began arguing that Chinese people, even those born in the U.S., were not citizens. They claimed that Wong Kim Ark was not "subject to the jurisdiction" of the U.S. because his parents were still subjects of the Emperor of China.
The 1898 Supreme Court ruling in Wong Kim Ark was a crucial reaffirmation of the original intent. The Court's 6-2 majority opinion, written by Justice Horace Gray, systematically dismantled the government's arguments. The Court looked to the history of English common law and the intent behind the 14th Amendment.
It concluded that the phrase "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" applied to all persons who are subject to U.S. laws and not under the authority of a foreign government, such as diplomats. The Court found that Wong Kim Ark's birth in the U.S. automatically made him a citizen, despite his parents' ineligibility for citizenship under the Chinese Exclusion Act.
In short, the Wong Kim Ark decision did not create a new standard; it prevented the government from creating a new, more restrictive interpretation of the 14th Amendment. It affirmed the foundational principle that birth on U.S. soil is the basis for citizenship, a principle that has been a cornerstone of American law ever since.
Uh. What are they supposed to do with a Republican trifecta? Do you mean "win votes in future elections so they can govern?"
No comments yet
Hard to see a path to Dems winning a Senate majority.
SCOTUS legislate from the bench as instructed and POTUS decrees from a throne.
Edit: When the democrats removed the filibuster for judicial confirmations they started us on this path. Predictably the Republicans responded by including the scotus. That was the end of an independent judiciary. It just took a while for it to be sufficient to kill democracy. And to be clear, no ratings agency in the world still considers the US a democracy. At years end it will be an official downgrade from flawed democracy to electoral autocracy or competitive authoritarian state.
While this is technically true, it conveniently ignores why the democrats removed the filibuster which is that:
Source: https://apnews.com/united-states-government-united-states-co...As always Republicans cause a crisis and then take it to the extreme and Democrats usually end up taking the blame.
Not that they are blame free but they are also usually inept and they defer too much to 'rules and order' when the other party is not playing by the same rules.
No comments yet
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.
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.
That's the core problem. The game is rigged
The Democrats are not good, but it’s intentional. They work for their donors not their voters.
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.
And no matter who wins, the other side will be convinced it was by cheating. And that has no alternative but total war.
I have looked long and hard for an alternative but I'm not seeing one.
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.
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 aids distribution in Africa is highly correlated with Christianity
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.
I made no such long term or meta claims.
> 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.
What other gov’t during the same time period has lasted as long or longer (none that I am aware of), let alone has produced prosperity, etc. to the same extent?
And it isn’t actually gone yet, either.
The constitutional system of the United Kingdom is over 1000 years old.
Including the Sovereign, or Parliament.
It has kept the title, but so has France and how many Republics are they on now?
The US has also kept the title of the Senate, but I'd argue that it's been a very different institution since the 17th Amendment. Also, the Federal govt. until the Great Depression was much more hands-off (witness the overuse of the Commerce Clause since then.)
I'm not sure that the Founders would think of the present-day Republic as the same as theirs.
Yes, very few last 250 years.
USA has had some close calls before, the Civil War was horrific.
Nothing lasts forever, but I would not bet against the USA's system perpetuating itself this time, too
And I know people like to play both sides so let me add. The big government hoopla exists only on one side.
Yes - I can get the point you are making - “democracy for me but not for thee” is BS. Sure!
But the evidence is that theres one media network which is simply selling whatever story works, along side a 50+ year effort to kill trust in institutions. We can even show that the republican machinery gave up on bipartisanship - hell, it’s even public knowledge.
But that wouldn’t make a whit of a difference to voting patterns, or your point. Because your point doesn’t need to be based in the long history of complicated malfeasance that rots all English speaking democracies. It’s anchored in your current state and argument.
So yeah, people voted.
See, this is a weasel word. Nobody said it was unpalatable, they said it was bad, because it is.
Do you want bad things to happen? No? Okay then, everyone should be on the same page.
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?
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.
No comments yet
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
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
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.
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.
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.
Checking IQ test results, we see they follow a Gaussian with a mean of 100 and a stddev of 15.
Seems to me like a fading empire elected the wrong person to lead them due to nonsense reasons and will now stagnate faster.
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
In a nutshell that's why the South is so poor. They've been falling for this for generations.
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.
Was the prior system good? Was it great? If so, was it optimal? If not, what does better look like?
The discussion can splinter a thousand ways, and on HN it should as we seek truth.
Even in tiny countries, for example Sweden, when we notice a statistical uptick of health problems in a particular area, we have government organizations that go there to investigate and figure out the cause.
A) The Trump admin has conducted rigorous analysis and audit of 55 years of EPA research, and concluded that it is so insignificant and ineffective that one can just dismantle the entire department.
B) The Trump admin rubber stamps anything the Heritage Foundation / Project 2025 wants done, and are desperate to find money for their tax cut funding.