During the run up to the 2024 election, I kept POASTING on Bluesky things like “Most people aren’t even aware of the things that could be broken and will be broken.” We saw that with FEMA, where DHS Secretary and dog murdering sociopath Kristi Noem, didn’t approve funding for search and rescue teams for 72 hours after the Texas floods. Noem also didn’t renew a contract for FEMA call centers, leaving 15,000 people unable to contact FEMA.

Which leads us to a very good question (boldface mine):

This can’t go on. This isn’t a normative claim. It’s just an observation about the structure of things. For six months, day after day, the Trump administration has been breaking various parts of the federal government out of both ideological malice and equally ideological ignorance, until nobody can even keep track of what’s still supposed to be operational. The government is essentially a collection of phantom limbs: people think things are there—it feels as if they’re still there—and when they need them they’re just gone. Dozens of little children were swept away in a flood, and in principle the government still had elite search-and-rescue teams but in fact when people called the government (if the government even answered the phone) the mechanism to send out those teams was broken…

How is this supposed to keep on happening? Again, this is not about the emotional sense that it must not be possible for the kind of wickedness that has been loosed to continue. It’s appalling to think that brutality and abuse are going to keep spreading, but there’s no moral thermostat that resets a society when the wickedness exceeds a certain level. Generations lived and died in this country with the institution of chattel slavery securely in place in their daily existence.

A society whose basic functions are shut down, though, doesn’t seem likely to endure in its current form for very long. Is it even going to hold on for 18 months, until there can be some sort of new solution put in place with the presumed support of the voters?

I think the real question is where will people cast blame? In fact, the larger issue is if people will cast blame, or if they will resign themselves to accepting this level of failure.

Much of this will depend both on professional Democrats making it clear who is responsible–and making clear the (ir)responsible people are bad people who are doing bad things. At the same time, we hoi polloi must keep reminding ourselves and others that it doesn’t have to be like this–and until Trump, it was not like this.

Meanwhile, buckle up everybody.