A good article that explains why this threat is as dire as it is and why this country is basically screwed:
Conservatives defend efforts to dismantle the federal bureaucracy as tactics against tyranny, but Americans exercise their sovereignty through these civil services.
theconversation.com
The long and the short of it appears to be poor voter turnout. The sociopathic narcissist didn't get any more votes than they did before. Those who didn't care enough to prevent this country's full descent into an oligarchic authoritarian state simply didn't show up to vote.
Excellent article. Mentioning Heather Cox Richardson is always a good sign, too.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
From your link:
Around 1900, America was not really democratic. The federal government did not rule by the consent of the governed. As historian
Heather Cox Richardson recently argued, the American government was an oligarchy.
These people were America’s “
other half,” as the social reformer Jacob Riis called them in 1890. And they were effectively excluded from the social contract.
When their employees tried to organize or protest, industrialists got sheriffs and police to suppress them. Or they hired private armies of “detectives,”
like the Pinkertons, as Carnegie did when steelworkers struck in Homestead, Pennsylvania.
Governors called in the
National Guard, as Ephraim Morgan did in 1921 to suppress a labor dispute in West Virginia. Sometimes, it was the
regular Army, as in 1919, when soldiers from Camp Pike propped up the
peonage system of tenant farming by indiscriminately machine-gunning Black farmers hiding in the woods outside Elaine, Arkansas.
‘We stand at Armageddon’
Forced by popular clamor, Congress decided to act.
It created the
Interstate Commerce Commission in 1887 and told its commissioners to compel railroads, which were gouging some customers and favoring others, to charge fair rates to everyone.
This was the start of federal regulation.
In 1895, the New York Legislature passed the
Bakeshop Act, making it illegal to force an employee to work more than 10 hours a day or 60 hours a week.
The Supreme Court, however, was still friendly to business. In its 1905 decision in
Lochner v. New York, the court ruled against the Bakeshop Act. No one could regulate the workday or work week. The decision stripped Congress and state legislatures of their nascent regulatory powers. That enraged President Teddy Roosevelt.
Well, Musk wants to implode the civil service (it'll hurt him more than it'll hurt us, of course).
RFK Jr. wants to implode the FDA - after all, Trump promised to let him "go wild" on health care.
And so it will go. They'll give the people what they voted them in for. Good luck with that.