What this means in practice is a return to the very corrupt system we had before there was a professional civil service, in which the winning party uses federal jobs as a means of rewarding supporters.

  • @ReallyActuallyFrankenstein
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    English
    373 days ago

    Oligarchy, kakistocracy, autocracy, kleptocracy, fascism, totalitarianism…It’s actually kind of impressive how they’ve found a way to be (or it appears soon will be) all of the worst systems of government all at once.

        • @[email protected]
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          fedilink
          42 days ago

          Same as most autocracies. The system of incentives lines up such that the innermost circle gets absurdly over-rewarded in order to not turn on the leader. In other words, it’s corruption by design in almost all autocratic systems, and even when the autocrat manages to avoid that, regression towards the mean means it ends up that way within a couple generations at best.

    • @[email protected]
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      fedilink
      52 days ago

      In Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, a character in the 1930s says “the dictatorship of the proletariat begins to seem to me, a German burgher, an ideal situation compared with the now possible one of the dictatorship of the scum of the earth.”