I don't know, I think the Left's attitude of making civil institutions socially radioactive has contributed more to the decay than people burning out from within.

You speak as if "the man" is by definition "on the wrong side" (i.e. lacking conscience), but there is no "man", just a body of civil servants trying to do what they think is right, for varying definitions of right. After all, isn't that what folks were out protesting during the DOGE days, when whole departments were eliminated?

Your argument assumes its conclusion, and thus is circular.

I agree with the issue of folks trying their best and burning out--but this is why it's important that the people replacing them be just as hungry to do the right thing, if not more so.

However, it's been a tactic in politics recently to call entire departments corrupt, and insinuate that anyone who wants to work for them are likewise so.

But I don't understand the logic of doing this. If, for example, you think "all cops are bastards"... Wouldn't you want more people who think like you to become cops, instead of fewer? Wouldn't you rather run into your best friend in a cop's uniform, than someone you don't know? Why, then, would you vilify the entire organization, and make it clear you could never stand shoulder to shoulder with anyone who would dare want to be a police officer?

Wouldn't that make it less likely that someone who thinks the same as you would consider joining?

And yet the need for police persists; thus by vilifying them, your end up increasing the concentration of people who don't think like you. This seems, like my statement above, a strictly worse situation, and seems to be exactly what has played out in many jurisdictions!

You can apply the same line of thinking to all parts of the government, with similar results. In fact, I'll go further: I think this dynamic better explains the rotting of our institutions than yours does.

We should be encouraging people who think like us to work in the government, not discouraging them with pointless fatalism.

You're assuming that I subscribe to the left-right paradigm and that I am an American but that is not the case.

The way I see it the modern American left-right paradigm that you identify with is the problem. The little gotchas that you describe with people who complained about DOGE or ACAB are the problem.

Modern America itself is the problem. Modern Americans lack the mental capacity to reason about this.

I don't mean that as an insult, I mean that Americans for generations now are conditioned to not be able to reason about America not being the dominant player in the world, they can't process a scenario where America falls, and due to the past ten+ years of hyper-partisan political discourse and the corrosive effects that it has on their brains they lack the ability to understand these things when people talk about them.

Many Americans still believe that their country can be saved -- that it merely requires a reconfiguration of the existing pieces with some hardworking, dedicated people in the right positions to put things back in order. I'm sure there were people who believed the same in the USSR even in the final days before it fell apart but that didn't turn out to be the case.

You can put as many friendly people as you can find in the police force, and the same with the NSA and CIA, but it would be just as futile as doing the same with the Stasi, the KGB or the GRU.

The time to fix this was twenty years ago. George Bush and Dick Cheney should have spent the last twenty years in prison. Same with the heads of the NSA and CIA and thousands of other bureaucrats, the oligarchs who caused the 2008 financial crisis.

It didn't happen and it won't happen for this bunch of pedophile war criminals.

Authoritarians and theocrats have taken over.

America is falling down and it isn't going to get back up. I don't want that to be the case but it just is.