“Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” – Ronald Reagan
Under Joe Biden, it truly is mourning in America. While it may sound counterintuitive, conservatives who lament that America's modern federal government is badly broken might consider that it is "working" exactly as planned (just not for the benefit of society).
Polls showing a loss of faith in government institutions are always framed as if the public's well-warranted cynicism and lack of trust is the problem rather than the institutions themselves.
Any institution is only as good or bad, moral or immoral, as the people running or ruining it. Totalitarian hellholes like the DPRK (Democratic People's Republic of North Korea) and the PRC (People's Republic of China) claim to be republics or democracies but that doesn't make it so.
Similarly, America refers to itself as a Democracy or a Republic but functions as neither. A more apt descriptor of America's graft-ridden police state, particularly during the fifteen year (and counting) continuum of the Obama-Biden junta, would be to call it a Fascistic Kleptocracy.
For all its spectacular and expensive failures, America's government does function as a well-oiled shakedown machine when it comes to serving its own monetary interests, buttressed by total institutional and cultural capture along with an infantilized voter base on the Democrat plantation deluded by an utterly false consciousness.
In America, work is the curse of the government class. Idle bureaucrats and overcompensated civil self-servants routinely fail up and pursue amoral, libertine lives sucking at the teat of the US taxpayer, and their gluttony has effectively bankrupted the nation.
Most government programs (the New Deal, Great Society, Obamacare, ad nauseum) devolve into mission creep and are designed to perpetuate social problems, which, in circular fashion, justifies a proclaimed need for yet more government, more useless programs, more taxation, and evermore spending.
In aggregate, America's hundreds of millions of private sector taxpayers cough up roughly half of their income to government. Thus, in a typical 40 year working career, twenty of those years are spent working exclusively for the enrichment of government. What are taxpayers getting out of their indentured servitude (other than the finger)?
Everybody knows the GOP is the uxorious spouse of the D.C. uniparty. Therefore, when a presidential candidate like Ron DeSantis or Vivek Ramaswamy speaks in aspirational terms about dismantling the administrative state, he is (to quote the 1976 movie Network) meddling with the primal forces of nature.
How so? Millions of government employees love their no-show "jobs" with guaranteed employment security, sky-high remuneration, perks, and rewards that dwarf those found in the private sector. Anybody who dares touch that third rail, as Donald Trump learned, will provoke a frenzied "whole of government" response.
With so many outsized benefits redounding to them, most federal employees have a patrician sense of entitlement and perceive any policy suggestions of smaller government as a direct threat to their pampered, coddled, leisured lifestyles.
Government employees know which political party butters their bread. With Democrats being the party of government, state and federal employees naturally recoil from any Republican candidate as Nosferatu would from a crucifix.
As things currently stand, bovine bureaucrats essentially cannot be fired, and can easily wait out any obsequious, bureaucrat-friendly Republican presidency (the George W. Bush administration with its armies of compassion, for example) by simply stonewalling the implementation of any policies they don't like.
But if a DeSantis or Ramaswamy or Trump cannonballs into the swamp and federal bureaucrats feel their cushy sinecures are directly threatened, they immediately go to DEFCON 1 and engage in overwhelming retaliatory measures (the Russia and related lawfare hoaxes successfully waged against Trump, for example, or any of innumerable iterations and spin-offs).
Paternalistic government "experts," most of whom are charlatans with official-sounding titles employed by authoritative-sounding acronym agencies, have at best a highly politicized Wikipedia-level "understanding" of the world, not to mention their picayune job assignments.
These mediocrities are not interested in solutions to problems or even objective reality. Politics and self-enrichment inform every aspect of their thinking; for the Left, it is always ideology and profit uber alles.
Conditions for social upheaval are deliberately sown and provide a pretext for the further empowerment of government. More crime, more debt, and more chaos equals more need for government, more control, and the need for more taxpayer money.
After government creates and exacerbates problems, it then presents itself as the only possible solution to the problems. It makes a good protest sign or bumper sticker:
What does the Left and the government want? Nihilism! When do they want it? Now!
The government-media complex’s deafening dog whistles, and earsplitting hyperfocus on race, gender, and climate simplifies a complex world, stokes hatred, hysteria, and violence by design, and relieves both government officials and an anaesthetized society of the burden of critical thinking. And as always, the profit motive is interwoven throughout government's imperious behaviors, policies, and actions.
The squeaky wheel gets the oil. Government doesn't dole out billions in grant monies to reasonable, rational climatologists who say climate change is well within normal variations or that modestly rising temperatures are primarily due to the sun.
No, the billions in government grants and glowing media coverage are for the squawking toucans and grifters who shriek incessantly that the earth is about to incinerate. It's the "friends with benefits" government/corporate partnership mobilized in toto, for both have skin in the financial spoils of the shakedown game.
How do government officials, other leftists, and their media bullhorns allow politics to warp their every judgment, including on seemingly apolitical things like medicine, science, and economics? Examples are legion.
Politics absolutely informs government's and Big Pharma's insistence on the safety and efficacy of the Covid vaccines, irrespective of compelling evidence to the contrary. Science is very secondary to politics and profit.
The government and (D) voter base which loved the carbon-friendly Tesla car years ago when Elon Musk was perceived to be an eccentric left-wing billionaire, did a 180 on Tesla the moment Musk spoke up in defense of freedom of speech, instantly becoming the Left's latest bete noire. Indeed, the Department of Justice (DOJ) is now waging its trademark lawfare against Tesla in order to bring Musk to heel.
In a related case of irrational psychological transference, the federal government also used to love X (formerly Twitter) when it broadly censored conservative opinions along with countless empirical facts; now the very same Club Fed and its progressive voter base despises X because, thanks to Musk, it has largely eschewed censorship and mostly embraces free speech.
Economics, anyone? Paul Krugman, a farcical, gerbil-faced Keynesian economist beloved by government who blogs for the NY Times (comprehensively debunked as a legitimate news source decades ago), offers endless contradictory economic prescriptions and assessments based exclusively on politics.
For Krugman, interest rates, entitlement reform, the national debt, tax cuts, inflation, runaway government spending, foreign wars and more are all either salutary or rancid depending on which party holds the White House or congress.
Far more consequentially, consider the root causes of the Iranian-sponsored mass murder of Israeli Jews and scores of others at the hands of Palestinian terrorists on October 7th.
Barack Obama, the principal architect of the so-called 2015/2016 Iran nuclear deal, unfroze upwards of $100 billion in impounded assets and handed the money to the terrorist regime whose entire raison d’etre is death to the Little Satan (Israel) and death to the Great Satan (America).
Obama knew these monies would be used to fund terrorism. Yet, crude antisemitism and anti-white racism are central to Obama’s identity and progressive ideology, and define the Manichean (D) political movement he still leads today from behind the scenes, with a loathsome Joe Biden as his corrupt, bribe-taking marionette and front man.
The task of dramatically shrinking the American leviathan is daunting given the government swamp has proven itself eager to seize citizens' assets, imprison peaceful dissidents, manipulate election results, and shed the blood of innocents in order to further expand its permanent entrenchment.
Yet, America's long-term survival ultimately depends on such a contraction, and not just a curated pruning at the edges. Why, for example, is it necessary to have both a Department of Labor and a Department of Commerce? Perhaps it is as the character Red (Morgan Freeman) said at his parole hearing in The Shawshank Redemption: “A politician’s word…so that young fellas can wear a suit and a tie and have a job.”
The federal government’s incompetence is matched only by its greed and malevolence, as evidenced by its longstanding pro forma abuse of conservative citizens. Entire cabinets (the so-called Departments of Education, Homeland Security, et al.) and agencies (the IRS, FBI, etc.) are unreformable and should be excised, root and branch.
If abolishing entire cabinets proves to be politically impossible (as the saying goes, every temporary government agency or program quickly becomes permanent), then all cabinets and federal agencies need to be downsized by half or more.
While great in theory, is it even possible to take the eternal debate over leaner government out of the conservative salons and inject it into the bloodstream of the wider electorate? Whether they are spitting into a hurricane or not, a few of the braver GOP presidential contenders are at least considering the possibilities.
The government-media-big tech axis has all the megaphones, microphones, cameras, publishing platforms, and algorithms. The result is an increasingly addled center-left nation that has given the popular vote to the Democrat candidate in seven of the last eight presidential elections.
GOP presidential aspirants vowing to enlighten the public and cull an implacably hostile and avaricious federal workforce must also contend with a maniacally progressive media that would never voice support for a moonshot such as downsizing government.
For now, on terra firma, only a plurality of American voters seems troubled by (or are even aware of) the fact that half of their working life is for the enrichment and further engorgement of a government class which provides so very little in return, other than negative outcomes engineered for its own replicative and pecuniary ends.