I've been thinking about reasons it's hard to convey the importance of the Musk/Treasury thing and maybe one factor is that people don't realize how *much* of the world is government?
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Charles Tilly is helpful here too. I just taught his "Trouble with Stories" essay, on Americans' cultural preference for narratives with agentic, individual protagonists. Stories about infrastructure, systems, structures, emergent properties are a harder sell.
It's available as Ch. 4 of Stories, Identity, and Political Change as well as in a couple edited volumes. I can email a PDF if you can't track it down. It's not earth-shattering, but it is (characteristically) a very clear and accessible statement of the argument.
There's also, I think, this narrative that government serves as the ceiling rather than the floor of our expectations/endeavors. You see that in the anti-regulation push and the anti-DoE push. Both pointing to gov't as the road block rather than the baseline expectation.
: drags out the "infrastructure is invisible until breakdown at which point it becomes very visible" drum kit and plays a solo that is measurable on the richter scale :
nonprofits, agencies, etc. play such a huge role in organizing and orchestrating the daily heartbeat of the United States that it would not be crazy to stockpile enough food calories to supplement your diet for a year, just in case. Just in case.
Also, watching the congressional rally yesterday and how many of them focused on “musk has your data”, and how that became the talking point— because while true, that doesn’t even get the half of what is most dangerous about the situation.
There’s a story about capitalism that is of mythical proportions that Americans have been force fed. If people really knew how much stuff is government they’d realize that socialism is not the bogeyman they’ve been told
having read about failed states and traveled through some on the verge, its terrifying to think what a world without "government" is like for the citizens
There are those who would think it would be great. However, I don’t think they know any better. Governments have been demonized as the problem for years when in actuality, it’s the only tool we have protecting us from the oligarchs and dictators.
there is a strong, pervasive idea inculcated by generations of propaganda that almost all money spent by the government basically instantly bursts into flames and doesn't affect anything that matters.
List the specific harms that come from destructing these departments: drug price increases, no Medicaid, Medicare, no more veteran health care, babies dying, no more college pell grants, no ss checks for you even though you paid for them, no airline safety, no banking security, no allies …
As a Canadian, one difference I see between our respective countries is how visible government action and effort tends to be. This wasn't clear to me until I read about how obfuscated American governance often is (e.g., due to working with local groups, not advertising involvement, etc.).
In my GC there are a bunch of trump supporters who know that the government is huge and are excited at the idea of cutting out ~all of it. These people are excited for the devastation because they believe it won't affect them, only other people far away
I hope that some of them, somewhere, are remembering the units we spent on what the 'bureaucracy' is/does and are accordingly alarmed and enraged by what is happening
A lot of it is just that the bastards are moving faster than most people can absorb mentally and emotionally. A lot of folks have “it couldn’t possibly be that bad” running subconsciously. It’s a very effective tactic that some of the protagonists have been developing for decades.
Yes! Sort of like the "keep your government away from my medicare!" stuff. And massive privatization & public-private partnerships obfuscate the role of government. My kids used to complain that some of their public high school teachers disparaged government, as if they were not part of it!
Yeah, it's not like roads build themselves, airplanes automatically fly safely, banks behave more or less safely just because, and children learn to read from elves.
This is what @mayrl.bsky.social and I have been working on. How people even make sense of what the state is, and it's role in their lives, is actually a tricky problem. And it goes far beyond policy design.
Even on the technical side it's super fuzzy! Like the way that the "state action" doctrine plays out in the context of (heavily regulated) insurance pricing and discrimination law alone is a mess. How everyday folks are supposed to grok what's state or not...
And even direct parts of the state have what @joshpacewicz.bsky.social calls a "backstage."
I don't think govt officials even know what's happening in the next office, nevertheless the next department. It's too big and complex for us to expect most people to grok it without a lot of help.
I thought of you today when I chatted with a man at an Indivisible thing who was *extremely* aware of all the ways that he's come into contact with Federal government. He had a looong list, and it included a ton of things that most people wouldn't think of, e.g. training for fire departments.
Liberals over analyze everything to paralysis. "This guy, Musk, gained access to all US government money, your money. He's deciding on his own how to spend your money."
I work in the Medicaid/uninsured/mental health/substance use/IDD world. Most people have no idea the infrastructure & sheer amount of labor that goes into administering programs & supporting people. Nitty gritty, on the ground, skilled & yes underpaid work that happens way more than 40 hrs/week
I think you're on to something, there. Good government is actually fairly unobtrusive, and fades into the background. It becomes part of "how things are" that people rely on and take for granted. Part of the invisibility prob, actually, when ppl claim govt doesn't do anything good. (!)
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Rather than our government printing the dollars we use to pay our banks back & pay tax
I think folks have an image of a balloon in their head.
When our government prints up some dollars it just goes into the balloon, blowing it up
Versus every dollar spent goes directly into someone’s bank account
I don't think govt officials even know what's happening in the next office, nevertheless the next department. It's too big and complex for us to expect most people to grok it without a lot of help.
That’s sure to resonate, trust me.
Plus Republicans have convinced their voters for years now that shrinking the government only affects workers who weren’t actually working anyway.
tax money is the collective money of the American people,
the Treasury controls the tax money,
money is managed digitally by computers in the modern age, and those Treasury computers directly control the money.
Let’s say it gives you paper dollar 💵
Now you have a 💵
Now you can pay your taxes with a 💵
That’s one reason why dictators like power. So they can seize the 💵 printing machine
Of course, all the people I worked with/assisted were, similar to you, reality-based sociologists. :)