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The Absolute Best Kind of State
by noteworthy at 7:41 am EDT, Aug 28, 2013

Michael Lopp:

When it comes to state, finite is the absolute best kind of state out there.
When I'm either in the discomfort of a new job or mired in the boredom that permeates an old one, I remind myself of returning from vacation. I remember how much my brain likes it when I've shut down the state machine and see a familiar world as new. I remember there is always more to learn because the state is infinite.

Mark Leibovich:

Kurt Bardella's BlackBerry trance was broken by Karin Tanabe, a reporter then working for Politico who came over to introduce herself. Bardella's swoon was rather egregious. I listened as he told Tanabe that he "worked in oversight," which sounded like a surefire Washington pickup line to me ("Is that a subpoena in your pocket?") until Tanabe killed the mood by saying, "Oh, my boyfriend works in oversight," and the discussion ended soon after.

Jennifer Boatright on civil forfeiture in Texas:

Where are we? Is this some kind of foreign country, where they're selling people's kids off?
Have you looked it up? It'll blow your mind.

From the archive:

If you think "Russia" when you hear "oligarchy", think again.

Cory Booker's father:

Don't walk around here thinking you hit a triple when you were born on third base. You drink from a well you did not dig. There is still work to be done. Don't sit back and think democracy is a spectator sport.

Decius:

It's important to understand that it isn't Congress that must change -- it is us.

RE: The Absolute Best Kind of State
by Decius at 1:17 pm EDT, Aug 28, 2013

Cory Booker's father:

Don't walk around here thinking you hit a triple when you were born on third base. You drink from a well you did not dig. There is still work to be done. Don't sit back and think democracy is a spectator sport.

I've been real dejected about this lately. Its not just petty things like civil forfeiture, which people were complaining about in the 80's. Its the warrantless spying on Salt Lake City, the nonchalant sidestepping of a constitutional principal. And people are like, meh - we had a national discussion about warrantless wiretapping during the Bush admin, didn't we? So, there will be no consequences for that. Its not really about right and wrong or legal and illegal - its about managing perceptions. People perceive that the issue has been resolved, even though it hasn't. Therefore, there is no need to resolve it.

Things only need to be democratic because people perceive that its something they want, and things only have to be democratic enough that most people perceive that things are adequately democratic.

The problem is that various authoritarian states demonstrate that people are perfectly comfortable with totalitarianism as long as most of them perceive that the state is not a threat to them. So democracy isn't needed to manage perceptions and neither are civil liberties. These things are not necessary for modern nation states to maintain internal peace, order, and economic prosperity, and therefore they are ultimately going to be shed.

All these lofty ideas that we have about a constitutional order through which liberty is ensured - they've already dispatched with all of that in spirit. Thats not how things work anymore. Today, things work through perception management. People perceive that they need civil liberties, but that perception can and will change over time, because it isn't a necessary ingredient to the leadership.

Slowly, our constitutional republicanism will be as China's communism - something we insist that we are although everyone knows we are not. China's non-commuism is much more obvious to us than to the Chinese. Likewise, I think, foreigners will snicker about our constitutional rights long before we accept that they are gone.

The first step is to blatantly ignore one of those rights, and see if anyone cares. It turns out no one really cares. The only reason they care is because its useful for partisan politics, and this is how we can walk it out. Republicans get in power, eliminate civil liberties, democrats scowl, they get in power, they eliminate civil liberties, republicans scowl, they get in power...

Follow this through to its natural conclusion.