Democracy is Impossible Under the Managerial State

[Iconoclast]

The real problem with governments in the West is not elected officials. It is the armies of unelected “third way” liberal bureaucrats who grease the wheels of the new soft tyranny. The existence of their jobs depends upon the ignorance of the public. If the Average Joe knew even a fraction of what most so-called “civil servants” were actually doing for a living, they would not tolerate it.

The Right are sick of them:

After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State | Joseph R. Stromberg, Paul Edward Gottfried

fee.org

By the 1940s liberals defined their outlook as a “fighting faith” opposed to fascism (communism having somewhat escaped their attention). “Value relativity” had been a useful cudgel against existing bourgeois, Christian values—“social acids” as one Deweyite put it—but liberalism itself was exempt from inquisition. Ongoing experiment gave ever-shifting “content” to an ever-new liberalism. The welfare state was means and end, since planning and economic redistribution were keys to a rational society. Freedom, Gottfried observes, was reduced to “what judges, public administrators, and journalists see fit to impose on other people.” Bored with handing out pottage, welfare states “also tried to shape or reshape social relations to fit particular worldviews.”

This social engineering and therapy is known, oddly, as “pluralism,” although it is “plural” only in terms of organized factions, accredited victims (lately), and the administrators themselves. Gottfried quarrels with paleoconservatives who see modern liberalism as a “front” for New Class public meddlers. The truth, he says, is much worse: the administrators actually believe in their ideology and wish to impose it everywhere.

Fearing, after 1945, that “fascism” might come back, liberals turned education into an engine of social reconstruction. Egged on by that emigré Marxist charlatan Theodor Adorno, they fretted over the backward Americans’ “mental health” and psychoanalyzed the “Radical Right” long distance. (This remains fashionable.) In the hands of journalists incapable of making distinctions, this attitude became a weapon of mass demonization.

The Left are sick of them:

We no longer like to think about bureaucracy, yet it informs every aspect of our existence. It’s as if, as a planetary civilization, we have decided to clap our hands over our ears and start humming whenever the topic comes up. Insofar as we are even willing to discuss it, it’s still in the terms popular in the sixties and early seventies. The social movements of the sixties were, on the whole, left-wing in inspiration, but they were also rebellions against bureaucracy, or, to put it more accurately, rebellions against the bureaucratic mindset, against the soul-destroying conformity of the postwar welfare states. In the face of the gray functionaries of both state-capitalist and state-socialist regimes, sixties rebels stood for individual expression and spontaneous conviviality, and against (“rules and regulations, who needs them?”) every form of social control.
With the collapse of the old welfare states, all this has come to seem decidedly quaint. As the language of antibureaucratic individualism has been adopted, with increasing ferocity, by the Right, which insists on “market solutions” to every social problem, the mainstream Left has increasingly reduced itself to fighting a kind of pathetic rearguard action, trying to salvage remnants of the old welfare state: it has acquiesced with—often even spearheaded —attempts to make government efforts more “efficient” through the partial privatization of services and the incorporation of ever-more “market principles,” “market incentives,” and market-based “accountability processes” into the structure of the bureaucracy itself.

The result is a political catastrophe. There’s really no other way to put it. What is presented as the “moderate” Left solution to any social problems—and radical left solutions are, almost everywhere now, ruled out tout court—has invariably come to be some nightmare fusion of the worst elements of bureaucracy and the worst elements of capitalism. It’s as if someone had consciously tried to create the least appealing possible political position. It is a testimony to the genuine lingering power of leftist ideals that anyone would even consider voting for a party that promoted this sort of thing—because surely, if they do, it’s not because they actually think these are good policies, but because these are the only policies anyone who identifies themselves as left-of-center is allowed to set forth. Is there any wonder, then, that every time there is a social crisis, it is the Right, rather than the Left, which becomes the venue for the expression of popular anger? The Right, at least, has a critique of bureaucracy. It’s not a very good one. But at least it exists. The Left has none. As a result, when those who identify with the Left do have anything negative to say about bureaucracy, they are usually forced to adopt a watered- down version of the right-wing critique. -David Graeber

The so-called “Deep State” are nothing more than an international mafia of bureaucrats, ones who think that we are stupid cattle and unfit to govern ourselves.



They take their marching orders from billionaire elites, through their apparatuses; the NGOs and nonprofits that populate our institutions and make up the petitioning bodies of the rich and powerful.



Thousands of think tanks, charities, and other non-profit, tax-free organizations, pushing what are allegedly American ideas and American values on foreign countries, when they are actually the values of the flavorless centrist amoeboid liberal bureaucrats who hope to reshape the world in their image, with or without our consent. Who stands to gain from all of this? Big finance. The bankers. The World Bank and the IMF. Wall Street. The City of London. Bern. Amsterdam. Shanghai. A tiny aristocratic caste is profiting off of our misery.

Democracy requires that those who vote have accurate information on what they’re voting for. Millions are now voting with not even the slightest inkling of what their government consists of. How can that be called democracy?

 

[Cherico]

things are changing as we speak the people your talking about their not very good at adapting to said changes its likely by trying to hang onto power at all costs they will lose it all.

 

[Duke Nukem]

The real problem with governments in the West is not elected officials. It is the armies of unelected “third way” liberal bureaucrats who grease the wheels of the new soft tyranny. The existence of their jobs depends upon the ignorance of the public. If the Average Joe knew even a fraction of what most so-called “civil servants” were actually doing for a living, they would not tolerate it.

The Right are sick of them:

After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State | Joseph R. Stromberg, Paul Edward Gottfried

fee.org

The Left are sick of them:



The so-called “Deep State” are nothing more than an international mafia of bureaucrats, ones who think that we are stupid cattle and unfit to govern ourselves.



They take their marching orders from billionaire elites, through their apparatuses; the NGOs and nonprofits that populate our institutions and make up the petitioning bodies of the rich and powerful.



Thousands of think tanks, charities, and other non-profit, tax-free organizations, pushing what are allegedly American ideas and American values on foreign countries, when they are actually the values of the flavorless centrist amoeboid liberal bureaucrats who hope to reshape the world in their image, with or without our consent. Who stands to gain from all of this? Big finance. The bankers. The World Bank and the IMF. Wall Street. The City of London. Bern. Amsterdam. Shanghai. A tiny aristocratic caste is profiting off of our misery.

Democracy requires that those who vote have accurate information on what they’re voting for. Millions are now voting with not even the slightest inkling of what their government consists of. How can that be called democracy?

Hopefully Trump will deal massive damage to these people in his 2nd term

 

[Iconoclast]

Hopefully Trump will deal massive damage to these people in his 2nd term

A simple analysis of Trump’s presidency shows that his most widely publicized actions have actually been quite unremarkable so far, as far as presidents go. He used executive power a great deal, but so did Obama. His border wall plan resulted in no border wall. His healthcare reform bill was a tiny, almost meaningless adjustment to Obamacare. He is often lambasted for caging people in ICE detention centers, but Obama did that before him; all Trump did was draw attention to it. He reduced our presence in the Middle East significantly; when Obama withdrew the military, he was praised for reversing Bush-era policies. When Trump does it, he’s accused of gifting precious clay to Putin.

Why does he piss off the establishment so much? The bad PR drummed up against him is completely out of proportion with the things he has done. What is he doing, exactly, that they dislike so much?

 

[Cherico]

A simple analysis of Trump’s presidency shows that his most widely publicized actions have actually been quite unremarkable so far, as far as presidents go. He used executive power a great deal, but so did Obama. His border wall plan resulted in no border wall. His healthcare reform bill was a tiny, almost meaningless adjustment to Obamacare. He is often lambasted for caging people in ICE detention centers, but Obama did that before him; all Trump did was draw attention to it. He reduced our presence in the Middle East significantly; when Obama withdrew the military, he was praised for reversing Bush-era policies. When Trump does it, he’s accused of gifting precious clay to Putin.

Why does he piss off the establishment so much? The bad PR drummed up against him is completely out of proportion with the things he has done. What is he doing, exactly, that they dislike so much?

if your enemy is of chloric temperament provoke them- Tzun Zu


Trump when he got into office accepted that the media and the left was his enemy, so what he's done is simple, he poked them lightly and then let them over react. Then poked them again, and again and again. Over reactions give you power in the short term but the longer you over react the more resources you burn the more capital you burn the more mistakes you make.

We all thought it was stupid at the time but we didn't see a very basic long game strategy, because 4 years of overreactions burn people out, and after 4 years the dems dispite their insitutinal strength are tired, they cant keep this pace up for another 4 years the party will collapse if they try and that's the goal.

 

[Iconoclast]

if your enemy is of chloric temperament provoke them- Tzun Zu


Trump when he got into office accepted that the media and the left was his enemy, so what he's done is simple, he poked them lightly and then let them over react. Then poked them again, and again and again. Over reactions give you power in the short term but the longer you over react the more resources you burn the more capital you burn the more mistakes you make.

We all thought it was stupid at the time but we didn't see a very basic long game strategy, because 4 years of overreactions burn people out, and after 4 years the dems dispite their insitutinal strength are tired, they cant keep this pace up for another 4 years the party will collapse if they try and that's the goal.

All he has to do is tweet something mildly outrageous, and they trip over themselves in a froth as they try to condemn whatever it was he said. Whatever he endorses, they reflexively denigrate it. If Trump endorsed drinking water, his opponents would soon be bombarding us with dire warnings about the dangers of imbibing vile, corrosive dihydrogen monoxide, which can cause your brain to swell and kill you.

 

[Typhonis]

All he has to do is tweet something mildly outrageous, and they trip over themselves in a froth as they try to condemn whatever it was he said. Whatever he endorses, they reflexively denigrate it. If Trump endorsed drinking water, his opponents would soon be bombarding us with dire warnings about the dangers of imbibing vile, corrosive dihydrogen monoxide, which can cause your brain to swell and kill you.

You forget the other dangers of that insidious liquid! If inhaled it is lethal. If frozen it can form shards hard enough to kill. It is so corrosive it will degrade iron, dissolve salt, and is used as a cleaning agent by many groups. Pray tp high heaven you do not heat it, then place it under pressure and then add more oxygen. It will eat any organic material leaving ash in it's wake.

 

[Iconoclast]

You forget the other dangers of that insidious liquid! If inhaled it is lethal. If frozen it can form shards hard enough to kill. It is so corrosive it will degrade iron, dissolve salt, and is used as a cleaning agent by many groups. Pray tp high heaven you do not heat it, then place it under pressure and then add more oxygen. It will eat any organic material leaving ash in it's wake.

If heated sufficiently in an enclosed vessel, it can even explode!



It’s used in nuclear reactors to generate power! Extremely dangerous stuff!

 

[Arch Dornan]

if your enemy is of chloric temperament provoke them- Tzun Zu


Trump when he got into office accepted that the media and the left was his enemy, so what he's done is simple, he poked them lightly and then let them over react. Then poked them again, and again and again. Over reactions give you power in the short term but the longer you over react the more resources you burn the more capital you burn the more mistakes you make.

We all thought it was stupid at the time but we didn't see a very basic long game strategy, because 4 years of overreactions burn people out, and after 4 years the dems dispite their insitutinal strength are tired, they cant keep this pace up for another 4 years the party will collapse if they try and that's the goal.

It's certainly working to convince the sane to stick with Trump even if his presidency's said to be not as knocked up as it be. Can anyone say the same for his predecessors? It's a cavalcade of president after president doing something that fucks up the American people later on.

 

[Morphic Tide]

The flip side of it, of course, is that the state is impossible under democracy. Simply put, there's too much busywork in executive function for modern society to operate without some form of managerial class, because the necessary skillsets require a continuity between elected administrations. We saw the horrific cesspit the Spoils System made of the managerial class, but so to have we been living with the Deep State's unaccountability creeping into the state gradually becoming an agent unto itself.

It's a hard problem to solve, because it's a matter of figuring out a stable middle ground between the two extremes to stay where the high-level decision making organs are accountable, but the operations of those decisions are a stable body able to maintain effectiveness. In the Spoils System, we lost the stability of the executive body, with the Deep State we've been losing accountability of decision-making.

Trump's attack on job security for the managerial class is a big help in this, but so too is it a harsh slide back to the Spoils System, simply because just as he use it to drain the swamp, so too will Kamala be able to use it to shred the ranks of opposition and follow with rewarding supporters and establishing her own base.

 

[bullethead]

I wonder if there need to be laws or even a constitutional amendment putting in some kind of oversight over the managerial class in the government. The problem is that I'm having a hard time coming up with anything more than something like Trump cutting the protections for federal employees to make it easier to hold them accountable.

Long term, it feels like the best solution is just to let AI handle a lot of this crap, but then you have to worry about who's programming them and what potential biases creep in (not just from the creators, but from the way the algorithms work).

 

[f1onagher]

The sad thing is that some things just don't have a perfect solution and must be constantly maintained/pruned and that requires a lot of effort. Unfortunately, humanity is like water and prefers the easiest path so things tend to get way out of sorts before people start noticing.

 

[Sir 1000]

A simple analysis of Trump’s presidency shows that his most widely publicized actions have actually been quite unremarkable so far, as far as presidents go. He used executive power a great deal, but so did Obama. His border wall plan resulted in no border wall. His healthcare reform bill was a tiny, almost meaningless adjustment to Obamacare. He is often lambasted for caging people in ICE detention centers, but Obama did that before him; all Trump did was draw attention to it. He reduced our presence in the Middle East significantly; when Obama withdrew the military, he was praised for reversing Bush-era policies. When Trump does it, he’s accused of gifting precious clay to Putin.

Why does he piss off the establishment so much? The bad PR drummed up against him is completely out of proportion with the things he has done. What is he doing, exactly, that they dislike so much?

No border wall? What do you mean here?

 

[Terthna]

Why does he piss off the establishment so much? The bad PR drummed up against him is completely out of proportion with the things he has done. What is he doing, exactly, that they dislike so much?

He's not a career politician like them; it's as simple as that. Trump is an outsider who, in their minds, came out of nowhere and stole what rightfully belonged to one of their colleagues; he wasn't supposed to win, especially not against Hillary Clinton. It was her turn, after all. These are people who treat ruling this country like a game played only by members of their own tribe; and it is their tribalism that is ultimately to blame for how they've reacted to someone joining in uninvited and winning.

 

[Iconoclast]

The flip side of it, of course, is that the state is impossible under democracy. Simply put, there's too much busywork in executive function for modern society to operate without some form of managerial class, because the necessary skillsets require a continuity between elected administrations. We saw the horrific cesspit the Spoils System made of the managerial class, but so to have we been living with the Deep State's unaccountability creeping into the state gradually becoming an agent unto itself.

It's a hard problem to solve, because it's a matter of figuring out a stable middle ground between the two extremes to stay where the high-level decision making organs are accountable, but the operations of those decisions are a stable body able to maintain effectiveness. In the Spoils System, we lost the stability of the executive body, with the Deep State we've been losing accountability of decision-making.

Trump's attack on job security for the managerial class is a big help in this, but so too is it a harsh slide back to the Spoils System, simply because just as he use it to drain the swamp, so too will Kamala be able to use it to shred the ranks of opposition and follow with rewarding supporters and establishing her own base.

Agreed. The upper echelons of administration have fostered an Ivory-Tower sentiment among their members. The managerial class, for their part, believe that we don't have a right to know what it is that they actually do, and furthermore, that most of us wouldn't even begin to understand it. Accountability can't exist when people can't even explain the processes of governance without tying the average voter's brain into knots, and this is all due to the complexity of the logistics of the modern state. Each individual actor in the system only contributes a tiny bit to the whole, based on their own specialty. Hell, they can’t even explain what they do on an individual basis because they don’t even have the whole jigsaw puzzle, just one or two pieces. It’s modern-day Byzantinism.

This needs to end. There needs to be transparency and accountability, and the public needs to know what all these bureaucrats and NGOs are actually doing. NGO is a misnomer, really; they are so integral to the current power structure, they are basically a part of the government.

 

[LifeisTiresome]

The Globalists or the Managers if you will are already pushing for something called the Great Reset.

https://www.the-sietch.com/index.php?threads/the-great-reset-and-the-man-behind-the-curtain.3818/

Check it out

 

[LordsFire]

The flip side of it, of course, is that the state is impossible under democracy. Simply put, there's too much busywork in executive function for modern society to operate without some form of managerial class, because the necessary skillsets require a continuity between elected administrations. We saw the horrific cesspit the Spoils System made of the managerial class, but so to have we been living with the Deep State's unaccountability creeping into the state gradually becoming an agent unto itself.

It's a hard problem to solve, because it's a matter of figuring out a stable middle ground between the two extremes to stay where the high-level decision making organs are accountable, but the operations of those decisions are a stable body able to maintain effectiveness. In the Spoils System, we lost the stability of the executive body, with the Deep State we've been losing accountability of decision-making.

Trump's attack on job security for the managerial class is a big help in this, but so too is it a harsh slide back to the Spoils System, simply because just as he use it to drain the swamp, so too will Kamala be able to use it to shred the ranks of opposition and follow with rewarding supporters and establishing her own base.

This is a big part of why state and local government authority is so important. The less any one branch is doing, and the more local any given function of government is, the easier it is to hold them accountable for what they are doing.

The Fed steadily exceeding its constitutional limits has substantially damaged this.

 

[PsihoKekec]

A good example of managerial state leting no crisis go to waste

 

[LordsFire]

Yeah, that one is not going to get enforced. Maybe in Lansing, but outside of there? All Whitmer accomplished is guaranteeing she gets removed from office. The only question is if she lasts until the next time she's actually up for election.

 

[Iconoclast]

David Rolfe Graeber, who passed away recently, was one of the architects behind Occupy Wall Street. He pointed out, rather accurately, that there are not two main factions in all this (Left and Right), but three. The Left, the Center, and the Right.



The “extreme center”, represented by the Clintons, Obama, the Bidens, and so forth, are basically the core political arm of the bureaucratic neoliberal elitists. They are opposed by both the Left and the Right, but for different reasons.

The Lib-left and anarcho-socialists who’ve been rioting in America’s streets hate the neoliberal centrists because they represent unrestrained capitalism, bureaucracy, military interventionism, and authoritarianism. The Right despise the Center because they see them as the wishy-washy pacifiers of the Left, responsible for doles, unrestrained immigration, offshoring of jobs, excess taxation, and moral decay.

In America, the Center and the Left are often conflated, best illustrated by how American right-wingers often call leftists by the blanket term “Liberals”, despite the fact that liberal centrist beliefs are antithetical to the values of the Left, and the Center can only exist as long as the Left and Right permit it to.

Both Left-wing and Right-wing criticisms of the Center are valid. The elitist Center have done all of the above. They’ve kissed the asses of the corporations, they’ve buried the human spirit under the burdensome yoke of administrative law, they’ve started pointless realpolitik wars and never apologized for them, they’ve taken more of our freedoms away than ever, they’ve given away our treasure like a bunch of spendthrifts, they’ve let immigrants and refugees fleeing their abusive wars flood into our countries without bothering to assimilate them, they’ve given away all our jobs to Southeast Asia, they’ve taxed the Middle Class half to death, and they’ve replaced decency with mindless consumerism and hedonism in the hopes that bread and circuses will keep people entertained long enough that they won’t notice how badly they’re being robbed. While the Left and Right argue, the Center gets away with murder. Who can tolerate these toffee-nosed freaks? They are unbearable. They think they’re above criticism. They will destroy our countries and feel smug about it and say it’s our fault. It’s high time we brought them to account for their sins.