Thinking about authoritarianism
It looks like MAGA news is gonna be mostly bad to awful for as long as MAGA has significant power. Let’s just say that the MAGA mindset, like all forms of authoritarianism, kleptocracy and wealth and power lust are always present in society to some highly variable extent. MAGA and its equivalents will probably never be completely defeated. The war of mostly dishonest speech (polarizing demagoguery) harnessed to concentrate wealth and power among elites vs honest speech harnessed to somewhat spread wealth and power run throughout human history.
Yeah, sometimes authoritarians in power are defeated in war, e.g., the German Nazis, Italian fascists and Japanese imperialists in WW2. Sometimes authoritarianism collapses under the weight of its incompetence, corruption, cruelty and arrogance, e.g., fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the 1991 disintegration of the Soviet Union. But even those defeats and setbacks never completely eliminated authoritarianism from any society. Authoritarianism sometimes gets pushed to the fringes of society and has little or no political power, but it never completely goes away.
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CNN reports that some people who voted for djt and then lost their job due to djt's wrecking ball, still support him and stand by their vote:
Michael Graugnard said he voted for President Donald Trump in the 2024 election because he felt Trump was the best candidate to improve the economy.
But three months into his new role as an attorney advisor for the US Department of Agriculture, Graugnard was laid off along with thousands of other federal employees. The termination, Graugnard said, came as a surprise given his managers had assured him his job was safe.
“I was devastated,” Graugnard told CNN, adding this was his dream job and he had just moved to Little Rock, Arkansas, with his pregnant wife and toddler for the position. “I was expecting to spend the rest of my life doing it.”
Graugnard said while he supports government efficiency, he “didn’t vote for it to be implemented the way it’s being implemented.”
“I voted confidently with the intent that it was going to be done in a way that was technocratic and efficient and a bit more rational, and that’s not what happened,” Graugnard said.
Still, Graugnard said he does not regret voting for Trump.
“I still support all of the goals of the administration, and I think that I can respectfully disagree with the way those things are carried out,” he said.
He was confident that djt would be technocratic and efficient and a bit more rational? One can only wonder what a “bit more rational” means in the face of djt’s irrationality and bad faith.
The important point here is that this is evidence of how much pain and disruption some djt voters are willing to accept. They need to rationalize what happened to them protect their self-esteem and identity. They have to either keep supporting djt and rationalize the irrational, or painfully come to see how deceived and wrong they were. That kind of evidence tells me that many or most djt voters are willing to take a lot of pain to mentally protect themselves. It is hard to envision much or any backlash from people with that kind of tribal (cult?) loyalty.
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US senator Chris Murphy (D-CN) seems to be vexed about MAGAland corruption:
U.S. Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) on Thursday spoke on the U.S. Senate floor to expose the unprecedented corruption of the Trump administration’s first six weeks in office. Murphy condemned Trump’s normalization of pay-to-play politics, where billionaire donors dictate policy and taxpayer money is funneled into the pockets of the president, Elon Musk, and the corporate elite.
“In the first six weeks of the Trump presidency, Trump and Elon Musk and their billionaire friends have engaged in a stunning rampage of open public corruption,” Murphy said. “It’s not fundamentally different than what happened in Russia. These are efforts to steal from the American people to enrich themselves. And their strategy is to do it all out in the open, to do it at such a dizzying pace that the country just gets overwhelmed or anesthetized or dulled into a sense that we just all have to accept the corruption – or, maybe more charitably, that this is just how government works, that government is just corrupt, and so the fact that it’s happening out in the open instead of happening secretly, well, it’s really nothing new.”
“This is how democracies die,” Murphy continued. “Democracies die when the very powerful people steal from us so regularly, so openly, so unapologetically, that we come to believe that it’s normal. And listen, I understand that many Americans may think that all of this stuff just used to happen quietly, and the only difference is that Trump and Musk are just putting it all out in the open.
Murphy asserted some real good examples of blatant MAGA corruption and corruption enablement. One is the launch of Trump’s meme coin, enabling anyone seeking to influence the administration to privately funnel money directly to the president. So far djt has hauled in almost $100 million in "fees" for meme coin transactions. Also mentioned is the gutting and manipulation of corruption watchdog agencies like the NLRB, CFPB, EPA and OSHA to benefit Elon Musk, the billionaires in Trump’s cabinet, and other MAGA elites at the expense of consumers, workers and the environment.
Q (Pro-search mode): In a democracy, is it better for democracy and the public interest for corruption to be done in secret or better done in the open?[1]A: .... short analysis ....ConclusionWhile some argue that transparency can sometimes facilitate corrupt transactions by lowering transaction costs, the overall benefit of open corruption is that it allows for public scrutiny and potential legal action. In contrast, secret corruption undermines democracy by creating a culture of impunity and eroding public trust. Therefore, it is better for democracy and the public interest if corruption is done in the open, as this increases the chances of detection and accountability.
There you have it. Maybe corruption MAGA style is better for democracy and the public interest than old fashioned, bipartisan pay-to-play corruption. What a fracking mess.
Q: How compelling is Murphy’s evidence-based and apparently correct analysis about the overall level and impact of MAGA corruption?
Murphy’s corruption chart
Footnote:
1.
Q (Deep research mode -- same Q): In a democracy, is it better for democracy and the public interest for corruption to be done in secret or better done in the open?A: .... Open governance frameworks like those advocated by the Open Government Partnership enable real-time public scrutiny of procurement processes, with evidence showing that nations implementing open contracting systems reduce procurement costs by 11-17% while increasing competition among vendors 1 6. The publication of lobbying registries and official meeting calendars in countries like Lithuania and Georgia has demonstrably reduced opportunities for undisclosed influence peddling, creating what political scientists term “accountability through visibility” 14..... gigantic analysis ....Conclusion: Toward Optimized Transparency Regimes
The evidence decisively favors transparent corruption over secret malfeasance, though with crucial caveats. While secrecy enables corruption's metastasization, poorly designed transparency measures risk normalizing unethical conduct. The solution lies in “smart transparency”—systems that expose corrupt networks while raising coordination costs through:
Dynamic Disclosure: Real-time rather than retrospective reporting
Contextual Anonymization: Protecting whistleblowers while exposing principals
Civic Empowerment: Training publics to effectively utilize open data
Democracies combining these elements see 54% faster corruption case resolutions and 38% higher public trust levels compared to partial reforms 3 7. As global corruption evolves, so must transparency frameworks—not as simple panaceas but as continually refined tools in democracy’s essential toolkit.
