this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2024
1573 points (98.9% liked)

News

23397 readers
4067 users here now

Welcome to the News community!

Rules:

1. Be civil


Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.


2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.


Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.


3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.


Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.


4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.


Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.


5. Only recent news is allowed.


Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.


6. All posts must be news articles.


No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.


7. No duplicate posts.


If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.


8. Misinformation is prohibited.


Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.


9. No link shorteners.


The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.


10. Don't copy entire article in your post body


For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Maggoty@lemmy.world 10 points 4 months ago

The American founders didn't have good understanding of civil service type stuff back then. Coming from Britain there was a bureaucracy but if I'm remembering my history right it was mostly staffed by nobles who needed jobs and the overriding concern was that money should keep coming into the government. Especially from the colonies. This was actually part of the reason we ended up in a war for our independence. It may not have gone differently with a direct line, but we had to go through the undersecretary to the undersecretary to communicate with the British government. Which effectively made sure our concerns were never heard by the King until we petitioned him directly. Then he consulted his top advisor who also had not heard any concerns previously and they concluded the petition was worthless. To which we decided property destruction was the answer and cue the escalations.

So what our founders wanted was an independent civil service, but they had no idea how to make one. They only knew about patronage systems. And the one lethal blow to any patronage system is to say you can hold this position for as long as you want, as long as you're not corrupt. They knew it wasn't perfect. And they openly said we should be holding Constitutional Conventions on the regular to improve on things like this. For the record the two competing models are to lean into partisanship and hold elections, or run the judiciary as a technocracy with limited sovereignty. So the judges would actually figure out the supreme court and lower courts themselves in that system. Much like our military does now.

Both of those systems have their pros and cons but importantly, none of them stop determined ideological assaults on the institution. By the time you are hiring people it is too late to stop that. They've already been indoctrinated and they aren't going to tell the truth about it publicly. (For example all the judges that overturned Roe v Wade, said it was settled law or something similar in their confirmation hearings. Then they flipped the literal second they had the majority on an abortion case.) You have to stop indoctrination at the source, in education. Which is why there's such a huge push by conservative Christians to destroy public schools.

Anyways that's probably more than you wanted. TL;DR is it was the best system they had at the time, and they could not have foreseen fuckery like capping congress which obliterated the idea of actually representing the local views in a national body.