What Will Replace the Administrative State?


The chaos this administration has sown since inauguration has effectively begun to achieve its primary goal--the dismantling of the administrative state. This is not being done as one would suspect by passing laws or taking advantage of a shock event like a terrorist attack, but by simply weakening of our trust in our traditional institutions, including the presidency. All of our formerly beloved institutions now look weak and incompetent as they fumble their responses to Trump's unpredictable behavior.

Through all the noise, we are overlooking what will be left behind in the Administrative State's wake that fearful, stability-loving Americans will frantically scramble to embrace when their security is threatened--a justice system built on a resuscitated war on drugs, militarized law and order policing, voter suppression, and maximum sentencing; a national security apparatus focused more on deportation, blocking immigration, and stoking fear than preventing terrorism; invigorated churches now able to fully insinuate themselves into the political process and schools, involve themselves in policing, and freely discriminate against gays, women, and the undeserving poor; a severely diminished social safety net with the weakening or dissolution of the ACA, Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security; and the elimination of environmental, labor, and consumer protections that let the .1% run roughshod over our economy, political system, and society. This isn't a prediction--this is all happening now.

What is to come will not be the free, egalitarian America with healthy institutions that we have always known and loved, but the fear and punishment-oriented dystopia that we will inherit and will be forced to accept, no matter our political inclinations, when all of this is said and done.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Towards a Critical Religion Theory

Image
When judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, Evangelical Christian zealot and MAGA acolyte, rationalized his medication abortion opinion citing the dormant 1873 Comstock law earlier this year, he resurrected a vestige of Christian priggishness and bias in our jurisprudence long thought dead. By halting federal approval of mifepristone based on a willful misreading of the law, he defied not only decades of scientific consensus on the safety of the drug but also the long standing belief in the legality of and right to access medication abortion within our modern and  increasingly secular society. It's a move, like many of those on the religious right recently, designed to thwart the popular will and force an extremist Christian agenda. often through reviving anachronistic laws. The malleability of our existing legal system should not come as a surprise, for it rests upon ancient, at times sclerotic, foundations. It traces its lineage from the principles of Roman Law through the hallowed English Ma...
Read more

Reflecting on the American Narcissus

Image
What is most perplexing to me at this moment in American history, when we are at our wealthiest, most secure, and technologically advanced, is how we seem to be so completely riven with fear and anxiety when we come face to face with fellow citizens who hold a different world-view, that we are now willing to contemplate (and create ex nihilo ) utterly apocalyptic scenarios, even to the point of picking up arms and dehumanizing our neighbors as if they were wartime enemies. We faced down real Nazis, Communists, and bloody dictators within the lifetimes of living Americans with dignity and without fear, yet now panic at false shadows of the same. I never bought the media hyperbole that my grandparents belonged to the “Greatest Generation,” which had the benefit of strong leaders who were able to enforce compliance among the recalcitrant when it came to rationing, wartime belt-tightening, and military service, and who actively coerced them to adopt a sense of common purpose. But I do be...
Read more

Why Cold Assumptions are More Dangerous than Burning Crosses

Image
When I was around three years old, I remember my mother showing me a picture in one of our family photo albums, which we occasionally perused together while curled up on the couch. It was a new picture, one that I hadn't seen before. "Look," mom said, pointing to the chubby baby in a stroller wearing a blue onesie and a red baseball cap that had two triangular white patches on the front that made it look like my favorite car, a Jaguar XKE. He also had a pair of oversized adult sunglasses perched stylishly on his nose. One cool dude. "Who is this cute little guy?" mom asked. Tracing my tiny finger around the face in the picture I immediately lit up with recognition and proclaimed, with a but-of-course look on my face, "it's me!" My mother chuckled and shook her blonde head in amusement, "no, honey, that's not you, that's Harold." My little brow immediately furrowed. Completely perplexed, I continued to star...
Read more