Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

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> destruction of government institutions in 6 months that were built over decades by hundreds of laws passed by thousands of elected representatives

Republicans made the case to their voters that these institutions were permanently controlled by Democrats, and expressly promised to dismantle them. And Republicans won the Presidency and both houses of Congress. There's no principle of "democracy" that says changes to longstanding institutions must proceed slowly.

In fact, the only thing that's preventing Trump from living up to even more of his campaign promises is the anti-democratic check of the filibuster.

> billionaire coup

Every objective analysis shows that the majority of billionaires supported Kamala Harris. She raised $1.65 billion against Trump's $1.05 billion: https://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2024-11-15/trump-har.... She went into the home stretch with a huge cash advantage over Trump: https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/21/politics/campaign-fundraising.... This was the second time Trump won despite being outspent and swimming against the opposition of Wall Street.

> that these institutions were permanently controlled by Democrats

the lies is what got us here

Not only is it true, it's not even debatable. 84% of federal employee campaign contributions went to Kamala Harris: https://www.govexec.com/workforce/2024/11/federal-employees-.... If you exclude DOD, it's like 90%. In State and Commerce, it was like 95%.

To put that into context, replacing the federal workforce with random voters from AOC's district in New York City would double the percentage of Republicans! (https://nypost.com/2024/11/09/us-news/aocs-district-saw-mass...)

From your first link:

> Those donation totals may be explained, at least in part, by the former president’s policies related to those agencies. Trump has repeatedly vowed to eliminate Education if he is elected. He maintained an adversarial relationship with EPA, proposing in each of his annual budgets to decimate the agency’s spending and meddling in its scientific work. Trump instituted a longstanding hiring freeze at State and referred to it as “the Deep State” Department. Trump has also vowed to do away with a merit-based civil service for much of the federal workforce.

"Employees at institutions being threatened to be dismantled by a presidential candidate do not support that candidate" does not prove what you think it proves. In fact, the same link says Trump got 40% of federal employee donations in 2020, which is much more balanced.

Also donation amounts don't map to votes. From another link on the same site, https://www.govexec.com/pay-benefits/2016/10/federal-employe... --

> The lopsided donations do not necessarily reflect how the federal workforce is voting. The former State Department secretary led the businessman by 5 percentage points among federal employees in a July poll by the Government Business Council, the research arm of Government Executive Media Group, with 42 percent of respondents saying they would vote for Clinton, compared to 37 percent who said the same for Trump.

We'll need more substantial evidence to believe that these institutions are "permanently controlled by Democrats."

This is perhaps confounded somewhat by the fact that Trump's platform included mass layoffs of federal workers. Trump, contrary to past Republicans even, represented an existential threat to the livelihood of every federal worker.

So what?

Really? Wow. It does not matter one iota who employees vote for. That is a dark and ugly slope. Maybe we should extend such dystopian views to the periphery, too, such as lobbyists.

It is not a surprise to anyone that people who see themselves as Republican, "the party for smaller government" are less likely to work for said government.

But the insult (and I am not even a public servant) that because people are democrats, they are somehow beholden to that over doing their job professionally, is a strong one. You've basically accused them of having a loyalty to party over their jobs.

Education has a left leaning bias, in spite of some prime examples to the contrary in this thread (it's statistics, after all, and not about particular individuals). So given that to become a federal employee (rather than, say, an elected official) you need to have some education and some skills it should be no surprise that they would skew left leaning as well. If there is an argument to be made that the 'deep state' exists and is democratic leaning that would be the one. But it isn't a bad thing and has - until recently - kept the USA from devolving even faster. But now the brakes are off and the train is gaining momentum. Whether it is too late to stop it or not I do not know.

There is an interesting concept in chemistry: activation energy. If there is a fuel/oxidizer mixture it takes a certain amount of energy to get the chain reaction started. Too little and the proto-fire will burn out by itself. But pass the threshold and it will continue to blaze until there is nothing left to burn. There is a good chance that we have passed the threshold as a society even though the fire has really only properly begun to burn a few months ago. Maybe it is not too late. But I wouldn't bet on that, too many people are spoiling for a fight, they'd harm their own interests happily if they believed it harms the other guy more.

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