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Rebuilding the Agencies

When the next administration is sworn in, January 2029, they are going to have some major challenges. Every time you read about another career prosecutor leaving the DoJ over some prosecution they refuse to file, it’s another person that put their agency and their profession above politics. Everyone that stays, and is willing to file those charges, is someone who caves. It’s likely that a number of senior people being promoted, who will promote other people underneath them, at best put their career above their ethics. At worst, they put their politics above their ethics. Perhaps so much so that they will undermine a Democrat administration.

Some of these folks will see the writing on the wall and will leave to start a podcast, “telling all” about the failed Democrat justice department. And with no sense of irony, will talk about how they were pushed toward political prosecutions. They will join a long line of other former federal law enforcement that quit to specially crap on Democrats. That’s nothing new. I would be surprised if the bulk of federal law enforcement didn’t lean Republican. And they’re not above the tribal fighting that the current administration is promoting. What’s happening is the ones who may vote Republican, but put their professional ethics and their agency above politics, are being pushed out. The saving grace, if there is one, is craven people are usually less competent.

But what does the next administration do? Does it start to go through the agencies, with a wire brush, making it clear they want the nakedly partisan people gone? Pam Bondi and Cash Patel will be gone the moment a Democrat president’s hand comes off the bible, January 2029. There will be, and should be, no discussion of keeping those unqualified political hacks in place one minute longer than necessary. Along with many of their deputies and assistants, who would normally be held over into a new administration, at least for a time. I don’t think it will take long for them to see that some people are the result of four years of intentionally injecting politics into prosecutions. And those people have to go.

In a sentence, the next administration will be accused of exactly what this administration is doing. Even if their goal is to simply get rid of the lackeys and hacks.

In the same way the Supreme Court is giving the administration a free hand on even long stand precedent regarding independent agencies, they will try to curtail the new administration. If the Democrat fires commissioners at the FCC, for example, I’m sure they’ll suddenly rediscover the error of their previous decisions. And I’m sure when it comes to suits by civil servants being pushed out because they are brazenly political, they will be horrified that a Democrat would politicize the justice department.

I have no illusions about the Federal Courts any more. I think they mostly follow the law, and some cases depend on how you see the world in interpreting the law, but the result of the Trump appointments (and the failure of Obama and then Biden to fill those appointments) is a more political judiciary. One that will impede the return back to a professional, ethical Federal law enforcement bureaucracy.

Tit for Tat When It’s The Chicken Game

Game Theory was part of my economics education and later my computer science education. Game theory analyzes interactions between competitors to understand the strategies, given the incentives and the rules of the game. The overused example is the prisoner’s dilemma. Two prisoners locked in separate interrogation rooms have two options: to stay quiet or rat out the other prisoner. They are unable to communicate. If both stay quiet, they will get convicted of a crime with a short sentence. The prisoner who rats out the other prisoner, while the other prisoner stays quiet, gets off. The prisoner who stays silent, while the other rats him out, gets the worse sentence. The player that is silent while the other player rats is called the patsy. If they both rat each other out, they get a medium sentence.

Without getting too deep into the weeds, if you play the game repeatedly, players do best if they adopt a tit-for-tat strategy. One player stays silent, and on the next iteration the other player also goes silent. If they both stay silent, they do much better. If one player decides to “get one over” on the other player by ratting them out, the other player goes back to ratting. And the player who ratted has to accept the cost of staying silent and being the patsy to get back to a better outcome. Therefore, no one has an advantage when cheating, except it will cost them more than if they hadn’t cheated. I’ve heard the argument made the Democrats need to start playing tit for tat instead of being a permanent patsy.

The Republicans keep ratting (abandoning norms and breaking the law) and the Democrats keep silent (playing by norms and rules). In game theory speak, the Republicans are defecting (not cooperating) and the Democrats are cooperating. But I’m not sure that’s we are playing the prisoner’s dilemma. There’s another game called the chicken game. (Named for the “sport” of two drivers hurtling toward each other in their cars, with the one who swerves becomes the loser). In this game there are different payouts. If player 1 does not swerve, but player 2 swerves, player 1 gets their best outcome. Player 2 loses some face. The worst outcome (they both die) happens when the both do not swerve. Unlike the prisoner’s dilemma, where if they both rat on each other, the outcome is not their worst. For the chicken game, this is not just the worst outcome, it is a catastrophically bad outcome. If they both swerve, it’s a draw and neither wins or loses face. In this game swerving is cooperating strategy and not swerving is considered the defecting (not cooperating) strategy.

A slightly modified chicken game is the game I think Republicans are playing. They can reign in the administration, by cooperating with Democrats, but that costs them their job during primary season. Unlike the normal chicken game, where if both parties cooperate it’s a tie, any cooperation with Democrats is loses face. But the the country is in tact. Or, they can defect and not reign in the administration, expecting the Democrats will cooperate by obeying norms and laws, and the Republicans expand their power. That’s their best outcome. But what happens if we apply tit-for-tat to the chicken game and Democrats stop cooperating until Republicans cooperate? We get a catastrophic outcome. In the cold war days, this was the strategy of mutually assured destruction (MAD). The US can back down and lose face, the Soviet Union can back down and lose face, but if neither backs down, there aren’t enough bulldozers to scrape up all the dead bodies.

Look at what happened when Joe Biden came to power. Initially, the goal was to prosecute just the protestors breaking into the Capital. The norm was to never prosecute the opposite party, lest that open up a Pandora’s box of criminal accusations at every transfer of power. The restrained effort to hold the ex-President accountable moved through bi-partisan commissions and through Congress, not the White House. They retained Republican appointees at Justice for their full terms. Republicans didn’t cooperate, while the Democrats reliably cooperated. As the Democrats had cooperated by preserving order in the Senate during the made up “norms” Mitch McConnell discovered about Supreme Court nominees. The Republicans are fully expecting the Democrats to swerve again, should they lose the presidency in 2028 or the house, and maybe the Senate, in 2026. Republicans are not expecting something like a two year delay on the a Supreme Court appointment, if Clarence Thomas leaves the bench.

The idea the Democrats will fall back to norms partially preserves the system. If there’s a transfer of power we can all take a breather. We might get lucky and everyone goes back to norms from here on. At least half of the political machine is still invested in the system. If Democrats play tit for tat and stop cooperating until the Republicans cooperate? If no one is invested in the system, it completely breaks down. At that point it’s no longer a democracy. It’s mob rule and he who has the biggest mob rules. Instead of an orderly transfer of power it’s a shoving match at the end to see who comes out on top and woe to him that does not. There are countries like this all over the world, where once power changes, people flee the country to avoid being arrested. And we could very well become that kind of country. (Although some people think we’re already there because they’ve never traveled to any one of these places and are deluded).

The more brazen the Republicans get, the less tied they are to norms and rules, the bigger the stakes if the Democrats apply tit for tat. With the conduct of ICE, and the the highly politicized FBI covering for ICE, we may already see the people they’ve killed as extra-judicial murders. What if Democrats come into power and decide to arrest hundreds of ICE agents and arraign them on Federal murder chargers and others with felony murder? (Felony murder is charging someone with murder if they aid or abet a murder. Even lending a car, without knowing there was a murder, has been grounds to charge someone with felony murder). And what if the DoJ and Treasury (no longer independent and summarily replaced with partisans) go after the right wing pod casters and big Republican donors. (I suspect there’s something Elon can be charged with without even stretching the truth). Maybe start charging anything crypto related with money laundering, unless they buy into the new Democrat run “clean” crypto. Maybe force the companies Trump has bought into to higher key Democrats into the C-suite?

And let’s be clear about something. In countries where norms don’t form or where norms are abandoned, corruption follows. As long as you have power you need to extract wealth and create a system of patronage, just as the Republicans are doing now. To hold power, you need people who are vested in you maintaining power. That flows by bestowing money or status. Tim Cook and Apple would be just as happy to give a Democrat a gold iPhone, if it meant some kind of special treatment. They might grumble, but even oil executives will happily line blue as well as red pockets. And if enough executives are getting snatched up for tax evasion, they could be incentivized to behave themselves. And if those that behave are rewarded, even better. Especially if they were were afraid the arrest would involve a degree of physical violence.

So what’s the out, if we don’t want to become as ineffective a government as your stereotypical banana republic? Are Democrats turned into eternal patsies, while Republicans take increasing liberties with the constitution? Unlike the prisoner’s dilemma, chicken game participants can and do communicate. The Democrats can signal they will stop cooperating next round and that they will be just as bad, if not worse. To make this threat credible, they really need to gin up the base. This isn’t easy, but some of the administration’s actions are making it easier. This is not something Chuck Schumer, or his imaginary friends the Baileys, can do. Or the Obamas, frankly. As Amanda has said, this “we go high” strategy doesn’t always work. Sometimes, if they spit in your face, you need to make them spit out their teeth. Nor is the far left useful. They are more willing to tear apart the slightly less politically correct left, than do anything particularly useful.

Of course, the Republicans may not believe it. This was the real danger of MAD (mutually assured destruction). If the other side mistook your actions as guaranteed cooperation, and lost confidence in your willingness to respond, you could very well wind up in nuclear war. To avoid nuclear war, you had to convince the other side you would respond quickly and robustly. But we don’t have to completely convince every Republican, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that it would be the end of the American system. We would only need to make them think it is sufficiently likely. Unless they moderate and return to norms, and look at cooperating as not so bad compared to other outcomes, they have no incentive to change. Right now, I don’t think Republicans believe Democrats have the balls. If things get bad enough, the danger is the Democrats get pushed into a tit for tat strategy when the base demands they don’t chicken out this time. And we wind up not with the third worst outcome (from prisoner’s dilemma), but with the destruction part of mutually assured destruction.

Finally, Someone Engaged with Reality

In the effort of appearing statesmen or scrupulous guardians of norms and decorum, too many politicians and members of the press have used language mask the illegal, brazen, and power hungry nature of the administration’s actions. They couch the actions in terms of difference of opinion or something on which they can “work with the administration.” I never expected the Chairman of the Federal Reserve to be the one that calls out, in plain language, exactly what is happening.

Politicians on the left and the right have been intentionally or unintentionally legitimizing an illegal authoritarian drive toward power by not wanting to directly confront the problem. Too many in the press have treated insane statements by the administration not as the crazy they are, but as something on which “legal experts disagree,” as if there is a legitimate debate. Their inability to face reality is leading us down a road to the end of the American experiment. A country that is a constitutional republic in name only. The irony is America’s experiment may be coming to an end as we approach its 250th birthday.

If it were just this action, I would assume it was petty, vindictive, and likely a dead end. But this is just one more data point in a long line of data points where complicit republicans and compliant democrats largely rolled over. And a supreme court that uses the shadow docket to “let it slide for now.” (Don’t worry, they’ll re-discover limits to executive power when a Democrat is president).

The drive to establish a fraud prosecutor tied directly to the White House instead of the DoJ smacks of the kind of political prosecuting that happens in dictatorships. Putin didn’t start by throwing his enemies in jail for what they said, they were often prosecuted for “tax fraud.” Xi didn’t purge his opposition by charging them with personal disloyalty, he arrested them for corruption. In America the indictment may not result in an automatic conviction, but even if it doesn’t, the defendant has to hire lawyers capable of defending them in Federal criminal court. That may be multiple attorneys, each billing in the neighborhood of $500 an hour on up.

I have a friend who believes that Trump didn’t do anything wrong on January 6. That the rioters were not criminals, or were let in, or were driven to it by FBI provocateurs. I can’t bring him back to reality. That people were prosecuted as part of the January 6 riot as part of a concerted effort to undo the 2020 election. To replace legitimate electors with frauds. To effectively overturn the election to keep the previous Trump administration in power. I could sit him in a room with Jack Smith and have Jack Smith walk him through all the evidence and I don’t think it would make a difference. It’s because my friend isn’t engaged with reality. And he’s representative of many of the people who voted for Trump. People who sometimes felt Trump had been treated unfairly, even if they didn’t understand all the facts about what was being alleged.

Republicans who bemoan this state of affairs in private, or sometimes in public, have often failed to step up when asked, picking their party over the country with devastating consistency. To those Republicans who stick their heads in the sand, or wish things were different in private, I say “fuck you” and grow a pair of balls. To those democrats looking for a middle ground that isn’t confronting this for what it is, I say “fuck you” and wake the hell up or get out of the way. To the media that tries to sound balance at the expense of excusing this illegality, I say “fuck you,” and grow a spine. At the end of the day, the lot of you seem like you’ve disconnected from reality. That you inhabit another country where the president is normal and maybe just a little ‘colorful.’

This is the very real hellscape we’re in. Most Americans are more focused on the memes they can get out of it, rather than the fact a sitting president is trying to indict the Chairman of an independent body, in order to force him to change policy. If you think “well, he is the president, he gets to set policy” I say you are a fucking moron ignorant of basic American civics. You don’t understand our system of government. These independent agencies and the Federal Reserve were created by acts of congress and signed into law by previous presidents to keep their operations specifically out of the political spoils system. That made us not like some banana republic or tin-horn dictatorship. Now the courts are largely political and they have eroded the separation between the executive and the independent agencies to the point that we can’t really call them independent. The Federal Reserve is one of the last bastions.

To the “don’t worry, it’ll be fine in the end,” crowd, I say fuck you. I’m not sure why you think everything just turns out fine. To the “courts will deal with it” crowd, I say fuck you. There’s no guarantee you won’t get an Eileen Cannon who wouldn’t be in the tank for Trump.

For all those who wonder what the Germans, or the Italians, or the Russians were doing when their countries slid into dictatorship, it was exactly what we’re doing now. Trying to find the reasonable middle path, or trying to appear even handed, or moderating your tone to keep your press access, or sticking your head in the sand because at least your party was staying in power. There wasn’t any one day when someone could say “well, it’s official, we’re a dictatorship now.” Bit by bit they got there as everything soured. Each day a little more spoiled and rotten. This is starting to smell like the end.

Prostitution is Next

It’s arguable there should never have been a ban on marijuana. That said, I think what’s important to the psyche is the relaxation of the ban. And there can be many good reasons why the ban should have been relaxed and how many people will benefit more than be harmed by relaxing the ban. The point is it was a vice we were all told it was wrong for so many (sometimes fabricated) reasons. The ban was relaxed. The same is happening with gambling. It was once illegal, immoral, and even predatory. Now it’s available on your phone in every state, courtesy of sports books and prediction markets. The last serious prohibition left is prostitution. Something which is legal and regulated in some countries and strictly not illegal in others. But in the United States, outside of a few particular counties, is illegal.

There are reasons it is illegal. Some of these reasons are good. Some are bad. Some are documented through rigorous study, but some harms are largely the byproduct of its legal status. Remove the incarceration of women for solicitation, and the risk of getting labeled a sex criminal, and some of the harms go away. But as we sail past broad legality for intoxicants and gambling, prostitution is the only vice still left standing. And many are arguing it should not be illegal. I don’t know that I agree or disagree because many people are disingenuous in their arguments around vices. Some argue for it because they don’t want to be arrested (as a customer or provider), rather than a genuine appeal from reason or data. And some argue against it because of their desire to impose their morality on others. It doesn’t invalidate the arguments, but the motivation makes it harder to judge the argument as honest. I don’t know the correct answer, but given the track record of those that profit from the sale of (often women’s) bodies are rarely the women sold.

It will be a chip shot to the green for Only Fans or a dating site to offer in-person or compensated dating experiences. Ashley Madison was a scam, but how long before a dating app with low prospects allows women to start advertising? (I say women but the same applies to some men, where economic vulnerability has made some men exploitable by other men). After all, this ‘disrupts’ dating, something “we all know isn’t working.” And I can imagine the excuse would be that policing this in practice is impossible, anyway. That many people just use these apps to ‘hook up.’ Like gambling, once the apps move in, and there are investors, it will be legitimate. It will be a business out in the open. And if you don’t like it, it’s because you are a prude or not ‘with it.’ People will do it, so why not offer it through the convenience and safety of an app?

Would prostitutes be better off, if they were able to openly solicit? I could see benefits, such as screening out out violent clients. Although, given the track record of safety in the hands of tech bros in other contexts, it might be a ban is voided by quickly creating a new account. I could see women more willing to file rape charges against clients because they don’t fear arrest. However, I could also see apps black-balling any woman who did file such charges. These disruptive companies are often more subtly exploitive than the pimp. Uber has been accused of manipulating fares to give the impression a living is possible as an Uber driver, but the reality may be a below minimum wage grind. Uber doesn’t need to exploit them, the drivers exploit themselves by chasing smaller and smaller payouts. How well silicon valley would treat sex workers is practice may be as exploitive as the worst pimp.

How likely do I think this is? Ironically, more likely because of the Epstein scandal. With so many establishment men, including David Brooks, Larry Summers, and Bill Gates being seen around Epstein, it could perversely make the prohibition of seeking sex workers a class-based rule. (Not that I have any indication any of these men actually did anything illegal or even unsavory – other than their association with a vile person). If you’re wealthy and elite, it’s accepted, but if you’re not, it’s prohibited. And as we all know, the United States is a country full of temporarily embarrassed billionaires. Why shouldn’t Trey Schifflet from Beckley, WV (a made up persona) be treated to the same earthly delights as his favorite president? Trey, who sits at home smoking weed and playing Call of Duty in his parents’ basement. Who burns up his Uber money gambling through Kalshi on sports. Who has found every dating app frustrating because he’s not a “high status male.” Who looks at his jaw or his height or the slightly more pronounced ears as the real reason he’s passed over. And nothing to do with the fact his app profile features his sucked-in, two-pack abs, and actually calls women ‘females.’

And we live in a world where the pursuit of money is almost a dispensation for wrong-doing. Even Sam Bankman-Fried has has a moment or two of seriously attempted rehabilitation, including possibly restarting his exchange (in name only) FTX. The President and his family are openly grifting using meme coins. It’s not a bribe if you squint your eyes so hard they close. Whose family business works with and may become a prediction market, like Kalshi, to openly take bets. Who has turned the pardon into a coin-operated dispenser, giving pardons to wealthy, well documented, easily convicted, and unrepentant fraudsters. The pursuit of profit is sacred, beyond question, and insured against prosecution if the potentate is given his vig.

In this environment, where subsidizing illegal activity is just “disruption,” why should this last taboo stand? To be fair, there are many who want to see the laws prohibiting sex work repealed because they see women whose exploitation is facilitated through the risk and fear of arrest. Or whose avenues for legitimate work are proscribed because of a prostitution related conviction. But if the tech bros smell blood in the water, or rather money to be made, they will pounce on your resistance to legalizing prostitution. Posts on X, undisclosed sponsorships to creators, and AI slop comments, will drive you to feel bad for believing it should be illegal. It should be just as easy as Uber to order up a date. After all, it’s just like Only Fans, but IRL. It will happen anyway, so in-person access should be legal and available through an App, with the App taking a cut to profitably cover expenses like payment processing and client screening. And once Andreessen-Horowitzes of the world are behind it, it will be a legitimate enterprise, an investment, a company to IPO, and much more than simply pimping and profiting from the vulnerable.

First Time Claims Make Less and Less Sense

The number of first time jobless claims (a weekly statistic measuring the number of folks filing their first claim for unemployment insurance when they become unemployed) has been bouncing around 250,000 for the last year and change.

A related number, the continuing claims, which measures the number of unemployment claimants who are continuing to file for benefits has also been remarkably steady.

While it looks like there was a big jump in May, it was a change from 1,800,00 to about 1,940,000, of about 7-8%. And then it stayed steady. Meanwhile, unemployment has been slowly creeping back up over the last two years.

Meanwhile, we see a definite softening of new jobs created. The change in non-farm employment shows a degree of cooling in the economy.

What would we expect to see, if job creation is slowing, along with an up-tick in the unemployment rate? We’d expect to see more claimants for unemployment insurance. Fewer jobs, more layoffs, and lots of stories about graduates that can’t find jobs (who cannot apply for unemployment insurance), indicate a soft labor market. We see the average weeks of unemployment (how hard it is to find a job once you lose your job), tick up slightly but not decisively, by about 2 weeks, but still within statistical noise.

With today’s CPI coming in a lot softer than expected, this will give the Fed a green light to cut. But as much as we see evidence of a slowing job market, we don’t see more and more people applying for unemployment, what gives? Is this just what a more normal employment market looks like after the go-go job markets of 2021 to 2023? When there were many times more jobs open than there were candidates?

First, we have to remember a few things that may be complicating the first time claims picture. First is that the new graduate cannot claim unemployment. If a new high-school or college graduate cannot find a job, they cannot claim benefits because they haven’t worked for an employer that paid into the insurance pool. If you quit because your commute would be 2 hours (after you moved because even your boss was saying WFH would be the new normal), you are not eligible. If your employer claims it was for cause, you are not eligible. That’s why many employers will try to cite ’cause’ as the termination reason, even though they’re firing dozens or hundreds of people at the same time. Nor are independent contractors. if you were an independent IT contractor at US AID and your contract was terminated, you are not eligible. You basically have to work on a “W-2” basis for an employer that terminates you for non-performance (or criminal) reasons.

Then there are other reasons, such as deciding not to claim benefits, because you can make more money driving for Uber. (Or at least you think you can make more money driving for Uber). If you make more money than your benefit check at a part time job, you can’t claim benefits. Some people won’t claim it out of principle. And some people live in states that felt too many workers were getting cushy at home instead of returning to the workforce and made it harder to claim benefits.

Does an increase in first time claims (or continuing claims) predict a recession? No. It is a trailing indicator. Generally corporate profits fall, along with Wall Street’s expectations of future profits, as the economy slows. At that point corporations realize revenue won’t grow, so they have to cut costs to keep their margins. One quick way is to lay off staff. Often, this is a time for the company to prune their deadwood projects. These are projects they’re putting money into because it seemed like a good idea at the time, but no one seems to be able to kill it now that it’s shown to be a dud. Managers are human, too, and subject to biases like the ‘sunk cost’ fallacy. This is the push that management needed. But sometimes they just reduce head-count to the point of pain, because they can coast on their accumulating inventory until business improves. Only after output falls (a recession begins) does employment really contract.

But it is still striking there’s been so little movement in first time claims. It feels like you could place bets on it being between 220,000 and 240,000 next week and the week after. Do I think it’s being manipulated? No. While it was popular among the right to say Biden’s numbers were all fake and made up, I never thought that claim was based in reality and I don’t think there’s any skulduggery now. Did Trump send a worrying signal by firing statisticians? Yes, but I believe the core of the process is still very much intact. Are the numbers massaged? Yes, sometimes seasonality needs to be taken into account, otherwise the increase or decrease would be overstated and the period to period changes are harder to compare. And if you think that’s an issue, most numbers are also released without seasonal adjustment. So, go look for yourself. Are numbers revised? Yes – because sometimes data doesn’t come in on time. This is especially true of the employment survey, with some employers submitting data weeks after the data was due.

What we may be seeing is a change, or a beginning of a change, in the relevance of this number. Due to a variety of factors, it’s becoming less sensitive to changes in the health of the labor market. If you lose your job, your ability to access smaller benefits may be reduced. And employers may be getting better at incentivizing you to quit and unable to access your benefits. For example, we need you to report to work 3 states away and we won’t help you move. The first time claims may be very slow to move, if at all. Like we are seeing unemployment hit 4.6% but little to no change in the first time claims.

Authoritarians Are Toxic

My previous post touched on nationalism. The weakest leg of the “fascism” or “Nazism” stool. My statement that those labels are grossly overused still stands. The second leg is authoritarianism. What most people decry as “fascism” or “Nazism” bears little resemblance to the ideas and ideology of either the Italian or Germany movements. But both those movements were deeply authoritarian. Authoritarians can have different excuses as to why they need power, and National Socialism or Fascism were movements appealing to Germans and Italians, respectively. Unlike nationalism, there’s no healthy level, or positive light, for authoritarianism. Authoritarians subvert the law, custom, and social order to enforce their will, and will do so with the full violence of the state. And once in power, the goal of an authoritarian is to remain in power. In many autocracies, they are willing to stack their citizens dead bodies like cord wood before losing power.

At what point is a country authoritarian? Is Singapore, with its strict laws and harsh punishments authoritarian? Or is Saudi Arabia authoritarian? Is a benevolent dictator or good king (about as real as unicorns and dragons), an authoritarian? Some believe one man’s authoritarian is another man’s hero. For example, a college president decides to send a message by suspending the rules and expelling anyone accused of sexual assault. A no-tolerance approach can be lauded as a positive step toward finally treating sexual assault seriously. But if we stop and think about it, authoritarians are never heroes. And if we’re honest with ourselves, we will see that we will have blind spots regarding the abuse of authority that we are willing to tolerate. Why is our relationship to authoritarianism so complex?

Prior to the 17th or 18th centuries there is largely no concept of modern authoritarianism. Many countries had monarchs and they were sometimes checked by a parliament or council. The average 18th century Russian would not have the lexicon or frame to discuss authoritarianism. They might say a policy is harsh, unfair, or unjust. But the idea that the government was constrained in any way would be alien. You might have more luck with the average Brit or American, who had varying levels of suffrage and civil rights. It isn’t until you get to the late 19th and 20th centuries that the notion of authoritarianism is a widely accept concept.

What changed is the belief that we have rights, even when those rights are in conflict with the state. In some cases these rights are simple and direct, for example, we don’t believe the state can imprison you, for no reason, and as long as it wants. In many countries the right to a trial is explicitly enumerated, there are legal precedents enshrining that right, and popular opinion that creates a politics that secures that right. In the US, the Constitution enumerates the right, the body of precedent protects that right, and the expectation of that right by the people checks the local, state, or Federal authority. That doesn’t mean a sheriff will never violate the law. But consequences ranging from criminal indictment to losing their next election have been real. This is an improvement over almost all of human history. But this is a recent 20th century concept for most of the world.

The authoritarian believes that just the authority of the state, or the needs of favored groups, is sufficient to set aside your rights. The college president that sets aside the due process to expel students accused of sexual assault is behaving as an authoritarian. The police officer that ignores a white supremacist carrying a gun at a protest, but arrests a black counter-protester with a gun, is an authoritarian. They are operating outside the law, and either granting special rights to a group they like or taking rights away from another. As citizens we have to understand we are not free of authoritarian tendencies. We all have a special group, special rights, or cases we think are too important to be left to anachronistic or ineffective laws.

If one sheriff arbitrarily abuses their authority, the country itself is not authoritarian. It is a continuum and we may never visit the extremes. As long as there are consequences for acting as an authoritarian, I would argue the country is the opposite of authoritarian. Someone who takes away the rights of people and then faces prosecution or loses their office, is evidence of a healthy response. But excusing or pardoning their behavior is the start of an authoritarian slide. When enough of the electorate indulges their authoritarian leanings, we slide away from a healthy democracy. Years ago an Arizona sheriff made headlines by violating the rights of people he arrested, resulting in the unnecessary deaths of some of his prisoners. When people like Joe Arpaio in Arizona find broad support, that is a canary.

When people no longer see authoritarians as dangerous, the political will to hold authoritarians accountable falls away. A large portion of the electorate is willing to punish their representatives at the primary ballot box, should they challenge the current administration. The Republican party’s lack of will to challenge unconstitutional behaviors by the administration is a reflection of an electoral reality. They are often followers more than leaders. Their willingness to approve judges and appointees that are clearly unqualified authoritarians is part of the peoples’ slide away from rule of law. Had it been imposed on a healthy population, there would have been a sudden backlash. A healthy population would think any destruction of rights could be applied against them. I would argue we are far from a healthy polity.

Authoritarians will always probe the limits of what is acceptable. They need to go just over the line, but not far enough to create a popular reaction that removes them from power. The ability to jail journalists or arrest people for non-violent political speech does not happen on the first day. It’s only when the window of public opinion has been moved to the point where that arrest is just over the line. And maybe the next time it isn’t just an arrest for speech, it’s to root out their “collaborators.” The slippery slope is not a logical fallacy in this case. It is part of the plan. To sudden a change too quickly creates problems for them. A steady slope rather than big steps is how the movement toward dictatorial rule is facilitated. It is the plan that has been repeated in many “backsliding” countries to date.

Authoritarians often accelerate their concentration of power by declaring emergencies. Many have the mistaken belief that democracy is only for peace time. They believe that during a crisis, a strong, dictatorial leader is needed. We consume plenty of entertainment where a ‘hero’ has to do illegal things, break the rules, or act without authority because of the emergency. The autocrat plays on this belief by bringing common social and economic problems forward as emergencies. Any excuse is valid to declare an emergency. The US courts have so far failed to deter the administration by deferring to the administration on whether an emergency exists. Is there a crime or immigration emergency that requires deploying troops to US cities? The learned judges in the US can’t say and will just take the administration’s word. Emergency measures are core to the dictator template. Whether it’s Turkey, Hungary, or Russia, emergency measures that strain any surviving laws and limits on power are constantly invoked.

Once the line is crossed, it becomes the new normal. Was it crossed? Yes. Was it legal? No, but it happened. Now on to the next distraction. Firing independent agency heads like the FCC, countering 90 plus years of precedent is dry, boring, and old news. That has been normalized. The window has been moved. The courts have been shaped. A plurality of the public supports it, but most are barely aware. Even the “liberal” press finds itself writing about the upside of troop deployments into cities to address a non-existent emergency. The mass firings of federal workers, and the data of those agencies turned over to the regime’s illegally appointed operatives, has now become old news. We rarely talk about our data. I sound like a broken record, still harping on some settled matter, like the lunatic at the bar screaming about a red card in a football match ten world cups ago. The very fact we have moved on from these issues shows how we can be lead down the road to dictatorship. The new “red lines” to cross have been moved so far that it’s sometimes hard to understand what will preserve the American rule of law and our basic rights.

One question, on the technical matter of the definition I stated above, does authoritarianism exist when legal means are used to empower authoritarians? Is a democratically elected authoritarian really an authoritarian? The answer is yes, in the same way we saw Italy, Germany, Pinochet’s Chile, Cuba, the USSR, etc. as authoritarian. The idea of “if that’s what the people want” is not a new “loophole”. I remember many on the left excusing communist countries as non authoritarian because there was a degree of consent by the population. That’s not a good argument. That form of apology ignores the violence and coercion used to shape that public will. Not willing to get your teeth kicked out over something you hate does not mean you consent. It doesn’t stand up to credulity, to say that North Korea is not authoritarian, even if most North Koreans like the regime.

States where authoritarians are cemented into power through legal means are still authoritarian. That these right exist is part of the modern mind and transcends specific situations. While it might not have been part of the 15th century mind, it is definitely part of the 21st century mind. The modern mind sees a right as being taken away, even if it is taken away through a legal process. Ideas like the equality of the sexes, racial minorities, or religious minorities before the law, and in all meaningful matters, is part of the modern mind. It might not be organically part of the a brain structure, the same way vision is part of our brain, but it is part of our mind. Even if the constitution of the United States is legally amended to provide the current administration with unchecked authority, that does not mean we would lose the notion of those rights.

Just as these ideas were created in the mind, they can be suppressed. Just as we have suppressed ideas from our past. Today’s kids are growing up in an era where adults have normalized the taking of rights. When they grow up, they may see this as normal. The change might take more than one generation, but I can imagine a world where teachers teach the fascist notion that the elected president should be supported in every way by good citizens. That society only moves forward if all members as bound together in the same struggle. And that blind obedience is what is expected. The popular will has been expressed and, like the sticks in the fasces, we must create an unbreakable whole. That was the road Italy was on in the 1920s. There’s plenty of polling to indicate upwards of around 70-80 million voting Americans are fine with this.

It is possible to have a degree of national love or national pride that is not pathalogical. However, there is almost no degree of authoritarianism that is healthy. How to deal with it is difficult. What happens after the current crisis, should the Democrats come to power? The next administration will find itself with a mess. Either it begins mass firings of the incompetent ideologues of the previous regime or they live with a mass of political saboteurs, leaking information and subverting policy. Democrats have based their legitimacy on opposing the illegal firing of staff. The are not likely to support mass firings. What do you do about senior military leaders that are ideologically opposed to the administration and push back on any order? Traditionally the military has avoided partisan politics, but the administration is pushing that taboo. And what happens when the courts find a 6-3 or 5-4 majorities to restrain the new administration, using the veneer of re-establishing old norms for brazenly political decisions?

The Republicans won’t lose their backers should they lose power. They will make the situation difficult for the new administration in a way the Democrats have failed to do for this administration. Part of which is a myopia that blinds them to the truth that adhering to laws in a lawless country can make little sense. The Republicans managed to attempt an insurrection in the way Democrats will not be able to do. There’s an unspoken asymmetry many pretend does not exist. The Republicans understand this and realize they can act with impunity because they won’t be subject to the same lack of norms. They learned this under the tutelage of Mitch McConnell, who realized he could cross norms and lie to the face of Democrats and not fear any consequences. They would negotiate with him in good faith, no matter how much bad faith he exhibited.

That’s the good scenario, where the party that facilitated authoritarian control of the government is rejected. The dark scenario is that they are not rejected. Or the power is ensconced in such a way that makes action by the other party virtually impossible. In which case any change in power becomes a brief respite between lurches toward a president that is, in effect, a 10th century king. Don’t the Americans have a ‘throw out the bums’ mentality that brings new people into power? Two simple statistics come to mind that make this feel different. About 79 million Americans voted for Donald Trump and around 90% do not regret their vote. I find absurd the idea that four years was enough to create a cultural amnesia about what Trump was and what he tried to do the first time. A large plurality has chosen to go down this path and does not want to change.

Beyond the abstract notion that rights are taken away, what is the problem? We are seeing it play out in small ways. When the authoritarian comes to power, corruption follows. Being in a position to stop business deals over politics becomes blocking business deals until you also get a ‘taste’ of the deal. The president asking for just under a quarter of a billion dollars for being prosecuted by the justice department may be a bridge too far, but giving his supporters sweetheart deals for private prisons, defense contracts, or government office space may not be. Ignoring insider trading by his supporters, assuming they contribute appropriately, will erode the quality and efficiency of the markets. We see a back-room channel through his crypto coins which are bribery behind a threadbare fig-leaf. Countries with this kind of corruption and authoritarianism have a non-abstract problem of dismal economic growth.

But that’s a feature. As it becomes harder to make money, and supporting the authoritarian is a way to make money, the authoritarian bakes in a base of support. It becomes easier to teach your kid to show up at the right rallies, donate to the right causes, and make the right friends than it is to teach abstract notions of rights. This ensures the poison spreads to the next generation. You can’t eat democracy, as newly liberated Russians would tell me. And that system of patronage helps the authoritarian retain power. The economic vassals formed through corruption have a natural interest in maintaining the status quo. Corruption may feed on self interest, but it is a key tool to retain power. We find ourselves with a vindictive FCC that can approve or deny deals for media companies. They allow the owners of compliant media companies to make lucrative deals. Had the president just ordered the Secret Service to arrest Jimmy Kimmel, there would have been a backlash. But now he has economic vassals that will help control the narrative for their own economic benefit.

In short, I don’t believe this is just part of the pendulum, or we’ve seen this before and come back from it. In an age of infinite access to information, enough of the people are willing to turn away from facts, reality, and their history to support an authoritarian. We can’t claim they were just simple pioneers, manipulated by fear of attacks by first Nations peoples. Or there was no education system to teach them basic civics. Or that books were expensive, and hard to come by, if they were literate at all. They believe setting aside our rights is acceptable. Or more correctly, they believe setting aside other peoples’ rights is acceptable. This is the freedom for my religion only crowd. Or maybe they derive pleasure to see people they don’t like hurt. There is a variety of motives, but I don’t see their support waning. They are fine seeing the law made into a cudgel of control. When they can’t deploy it as a weapon, they ignore it.

As I’ve said, we need to be honest with ourselves. There are things that irritate us to the point we might support suspending the law and the normal customs and just be rid of it. I would like to see militia leaders arrested and jailed. I would also like to see the incompetent, servile, political hacks in the bureaucracy drummed in the next administration. Even if it means mass firings at ICE. I would love to see the companies that benefit by supporting the autocrat (and may be ideologically aligned) be split apart. But either I am an authoritarian or I am one who believes in our rights. I can’t normalize what they do and I can’t just ignore the reality of what they leave behind. And that is why they are toxic. Because they pollute the water so that even if they lose power, it is befouled for whoever follows.