- cross-posted to:
- world@quokk.au
- cross-posted to:
- world@quokk.au
With Zohran Mamdani’s ascent to Gracie Mansion, a democratic socialist is now chief executive for the largest municipal bureaucracy in the United States, meaning that he oversees the daily activities of roughly 300,000 employees. Most of these employees are what the political scientist Michael Lipsky called “street-level bureaucrats”: the teachers, firefighters, cops, bus drivers, and others whose jobs put them into direct and regular contact with civilians. But they also include the urban planners, economists, analysts, and administrators who operate behind the scenes and at the higher echelons of city government: the people who help write the city’s budget, study traffic patterns, and run grant and incentive programs.
It is this latter category of civil servants that will be tasked with turning the cumbersome machinery of city government in the direction indicated by Mamdani and his political appointees. Implementing a sewer socialist agenda in New York City will be, to a great extent, an enormously complicated technical exercise, carried out by a small army of trained technicians.
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I’ve been thinking lately about indestructible machines and the cogs they depend on to run them, and it made me remember this article I read a while back.
The people who control the machine, didn’t build it, they just hijacked it and intentionally corrupted the majority of cogs the machine depends on to run.
It seems to leave us believing there are only two options: we either help tear down the machine that took nearly 300 years to build, (which inadvertently accomplishes the long term goal of the men who have hijacked it hoping to replace it with their own), or we take out our frustrations on the individual cogs who have been corrupted, who will then simply be replaced to keep the machine running while we’re distracted. Neither is a great option.
What if a 3rd (less exciting, more time consuming and frustrating, but still important) option is to corrupt the machine they’ve created by inserting our own cogs? What if we just take back our machine piece by piece using their strategy?
the teachers, firefighters, cops, bus drivers, and others whose jobs put them into direct and regular contact with civilians. But they also include the urban planners, economists, analysts, and administrators who operate behind the scenes and at the higher echelons of city government: the people who help write the city’s budget, study traffic patterns, and run grant and incentive programs.
There really should be no divide between white collar and blue collar street level bureaucrats. If we ever hope to successfully gain control of the machine and make it better than what we lost, we have to move forward with the expectation that each one of these beuracrats is an important piece of the machinery. When you lump them into their trade rather than including them all as important parts of the same community system, you create distance and leave their trades (as well as the bureaucrats within each trade) more vulnerable to corruption.
For example, it’s much easier to corrupt a police force than an entire community, right? But, police are supposed to be members of a larger group with accountability and loyalty to their local community before allegiance to a trade. (To be clear, I don’t mean this in any way to be taken as a knock on unions, even though that’s an important and not unrelated aspect of accountability to local communities for all civil servant trade unions, that ties into rights and protections under a competent federal government. For simplicity of this argument, just pretend that this future federal government is competent enough to protect those rights for all workers).
There are a million and one examples of a lack of police accountability that certainly justify the hesitation to view them as neighbors and members of a local community, but that separation from the community, also enables the lack of accountability. It becomes a cycle where less accountability an agency is expected to provide to the public, the further away it drifts from its place within the community and public oversight.
Eventually, the removal from oversight and accountability for corruption becomes the norm within the department or agency, and even the people who may have joined for admiral reasons, often find themselves in a position where they eventually rationalize their own corruption, because if they didn’t do it somebody else would.
It doesn’t excuse or justify their corruption, but it also isn’t an irrational decision. That same scenario goes for every bureaucrat in every department and agency at every level of government.
Over time, a lack of accountability creates distance from the public, and that distance makes it possible to justify and rationalize new standards of conduct. Over time that conduct becomes the norm. If you don’t make corruption the irrational choice to make, then you’re always going to be left with corruption as the norm and individuals rationalizing their own corruption.
But police are supposed to be members of the larger community with accountability to the community.
This is easily disprovable.
Do police enforce the laws against wage theft? How about workplace safety? How about landlord malfeasance? How about any of the most broadly damaging crimes to a community?
No. Police enforce the law when you break the landlords window, but not when he refuses to fix it. Police enforce the law when your employer demands you leave public property, but are not responsible for wage theft.
Police solve very few crimes, 40% or less of felonies. They have never been accountable to the broader community.
Except when they were used to keep black slaves on the straight and narrow when they ran errands in town for their masters, or when they “cleaned up” all the recently freed black people who were homeless and moneyless. The black people were in the minority so it could be said then that the police served the broader community.
But other than that, no. The police have always been a necessary function of private property, because the rich acquire too much property and they need an entire paramilitary group to patrol their holdings against the masses.
You can see this in the strike breaking that local police did. And then you can see it again in the state police system which was created because local police started to refuse to beat their neighbors. The state police was modeled after the US occupation of The Phillipines. Not designed for public accountability but for military occupation.
Prisons too. US prisons have never been rehabilitive. They have always been a human grinder. When the slaves were freed, US prison populations went from 90% white to 90% black. The prisons leased the prisoners back to the plantation owners for profit. Today, prisons generate around $11B in profit for private companies. Meanwhile, the US has the world’s largest parole system, absolutely abysmal recidivism rates, and only recently lost its place as number 1 incarceration rate, being overtaken by El Salvador, where we are shipping prisoners, and Cuba, where prisons are rehabilitive and incredibly psychologically more welcoming, far less violent, and where the US has been literally paying people to fight against the government. China’s carceral system is way better than the USA’s and has been for many years.
No. There is no going back to the way things were and taking back the bureaucracy. It was designed by slavers, rapists, mass murderers, genocidaires, and robber barons. It’s designed to be completely unaccountable to the masses and always has been. James Madison, 5th president, wrote in the Federalist Papers that the purpose of government is to protect the opulent minority from the will of the majority and that the Senate should be the body that enforces this.
You’re not going to make any progress while the Senate remains. No amount of ideologically motivated bureaucrats is going to fix that. There’s no prior time to go back to where the entire system wasn’t fully aligned on mass murder, genocide, universal exploitation, military adventurism, psychotic wealth accumulation, starving children, etc.
Hell, US sanctions alone have killed 40 million people around the world in the last 50 years. That’s a bipartisan consensus. As is funding the police and selling them military surplus, as is the prison industrial complex, as is funding the military, as is spying on US citizens, as is maintaining good relationships with brutal dictators, as is undermining democracy anywhere it threatens profits.
It’s time to face the reality. There’s nothing behind us that worked, there’s no going back, and if there was a way to go back, it would be back to brutal, proto-fascistic system that would produce the same results we have today.
This is the point. Public employees are supposed to be held to the same standards of conduct, but they’re not.
It’s true of police and members of Congress and other government agencies. Corruption becomes normalized, and once it’s normalized, it’s easy to rationalize as “I’m a cog in a corrupt machine. If I don’t do it somebody else will.”
The goal of rebuilding a better government should be to make corruption the less rational option.
You’re missing the point. You can’t there from here. You can just slowly take over parts of the government and “corrupt” them in the direction you want. What we have emerged from what we had. The foundations of the system are the problem. The symptoms are just the current manifestation.
It is the unfortunate reality that the path forward goes through “rupture” or “revolutionary change”. This doesn’t have to mean violence, but it means a fundamental break from the past and the creation of a fresh foundation.
The foundations were a problem. The response to the problem was reconstruction (not demolition) and the civil rights movement, and both faced opposition and subterfuge while they were being built.
To me, if I needed a home, and somebody gave me an old house with a fucked up foundation that had already been repaired a few times, and had a lot of bad memories attached, it’s more rational to repair the foundation again, and know that I’ll need to reinforce it in the future because it’s just a fact of reality that houses always settle and shift over time. Then I would remodel the house to make it my own instead of just burning it all down and starting from scratch.
Especially when burning the house down is also the goal of my enemy who wants to steal the land and rebuild a house that I won’t be welcome to live in.
The response to the problem was reconstruction (not demolition) and the civil rights movement, and both faced opposition and subterfuge while they were being built.
And both failed to address the foundation, which is why we are where we are. Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Movement are evidence supporting my position.
Especially when burning the house down is also the goal of my enemy who wants to steal the land and rebuild a house that I won’t be welcome to live in.
This is confused logic. As it turns out, your enemy has far more income with the foundation builders than either do with you. You may see DJT as a totally evil human being, what with the human trafficking and rape and corrupt use of power for self-enrichment and what not. But he’s nothing compared to Thomas Jefferson who literally built and managed breeding plantations, where trafficked humans were raped and their children taken from them and sold as slaves. Thomas Jefferson kept a slave girl in a small room attached to his bedroom with no windows and only one door. And then, when he tried to use his power to end the transatlantic slave trade. Why? Because he wanted to charge a higher price for his “domestically bred slaves”.
OK? Do you get it now? The foundation was built by your enemies too. Your enemies don’t want to burn the whole thing down. They want to remove those reforms you talked about. They want to get rid of your remodel, revert it back the way it was, and then continue living on that foundation.
You are confused because you think somehow your current enemies are abberations trying to destroy everything when they’re actually the norm and they’re trying to destroy everything YOU care about and keep everything they care about.
You seem to be confusing my opinion differing from yours with me being “confused.” I’ll assume this is just a simple misunderstanding, because as a member of the reality based community, I really don’t like when people try to gaslight and create other people’s reality for them. It’s kind of a shitty and manipulative thing to do.
This is still America, at least until THEY destroy it, and it’s important to me that we’re still allowed to disagree even if you don’t see things that way.
In his recent book Why Nothing Works, Marc Dunkelman refers to this tendency as “Jeffersonian progressivism,” or a preference for “pushing power down and out” over the more “Hamiltonian” strategy of building strong, centralized institutions to serve progressive goals. The Jeffersonian-versus-Hamiltonian dichotomy is a little too schematic, but it does gesture toward a real tension within the American left. On the one hand, the left needs a muscular state—capable of overseeing large-scale infrastructure projects and redistributive programs—to realize its vision. On the other hand, there exists a strain of leftist thought that is inclined to reject anything that smacks of hierarchy, centralization, formal rules, and decisions made through any process other than consensus. Some leftists find themselves negotiating an uneasy compromise between these twin imperatives; others embrace one or the other.
Mamdani and some other high-profile figures of the socialist left, most notably Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have shown a pronounced interest in the uses of state power and public administration. But the left’s anti-bureaucratic wing, influenced by C. Wright Mills, Students for a Democratic Society, and other pillars of the New Left, remains alive and well.
Instead of retreating into facile cynicism about the safety net and regulatory state, people on the left should be trying to occupy the bureaucracy at the state, local, and, after the MAGA putschists are finally expelled from power, federal level—not simply because we need good people in those jobs, but because enough good people in any given department can change its internal culture for the better.
You seem to be confusing my opinion differing from yours with me being “confused"
Apologies. What I meant was that you are confused about what your enemies are doing. That’s a reality. They are not destroying the foundations. They are returning to the foundations.
This is still America
Yes, the land built on indigenous genocide by European settlers. You need to remember what happened in the 1970s AIM trials - the US judges ultimately based their arguments on the Doctrine of Discovery, literally they word of the pope saying that the savages in the world could be enslaved, assimilated, and killed if they resisted. I know 50 years feels like a long time ago, and that it probably your enemies that made that argument, but Ruth Bader Ginsberg wrote a majority opinion for SCOTUS and literally said the same thing - US territorial claims are founded on the Doctrine of Discovery.
So yes, it’s still America. A euro-centric white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. That’s reality.
at least until THEY destroy it
Your enemies, the Trumpers and ICE and whatever, are not trying to destroy America. They are trying to reform it and bend it back to the foundations of genocide, enslavement, mass murder, environmental extraction, etc. Reconstruction and Civil Rights were REFORMS on top of that foundation. And it didn’t get very far - the cops still killed black people without any consequences, black people were still disproportionately in prison doing slave labor, the US was killing millions around the world and both parties supported it as did the news papers and technology companies.
These are not differences of opinion. These are historical facts, from before the founding to the actions of Democrat presidents and politicians literally up to the present day.
The left needs to remove Trumps dick out of their ass and stop letting the Democratic party be an opposition party.
