links, etc
Trump’s Slow-Burn Authoritarianism
there’s a lot of media attention on the notion of violent authoritarianism, the expected cronyism of a trump term, etc. this is the first time that i’ve seen someone sit down and really discuss the slow-burn authoritarianism.
we saw glimmers of this when the sharpies were busted out to talk about hurricane path projections, etc. but the impacts to scientific research, the impacts to the ability to regulate based on science get hollowed out. the protections are slim here for us as country writ large.
Instead, we’d see strategic firings and efforts to corrupt governing processes bureaucratically and behind the scenes. “It would not take the firing of that many officials to lead to the systematic suppression of scientific information in the rulemaking process,” Donald Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan, told me. “In a second Trump administration, it will be much easier for political appointees to rig the flow of information and threaten career officials if they don’t align with Trump’s preferences, even if it’s at odds with the scientific consensus. It could impact everything from water to air to workplace and food safety.”
then there are the personal/political burns that wreak havoc.
But—unlike in the nightmare scenarios we’ve heard—this never results in real prosecutions. Instead, word of Trump’s rage filters down the chain of command in the Justice Department until it lands in the lap of an FBI agent or U.S. attorney who is eager to stand out to Trump and his top advisers. An investigation ensues. Investigators start calling that person’s associates and dig through his or her records. Nothing more materializes, but it puts the target through months or years of deeply unsettling, and expensive, precarity.
the whole article is well worth the read, regardless of your feelings about the new republic. it provides a useful framework to think about how autocrats and their henchmen can make life miserable.
this was embedded in another article about feeling stupid with math via hacker news. this is the generalized good stuff.
zadie smith on the ezra klein show
this was a banger of an ezra klein episode. there’s a great discussion on the addictive or engineered manipulative nature of social media and our phones. relating to other generations, letting the kids (read generations) have their words, and of course, populism. highly recommended.
tags: #uspolitics, #trump, #scotus, #2024