Thread by @Tinkzorg

Let's take a break from foodposting for just a bit and consider this stuff seriously and what it tells you about the situation the US is in.

https://twitter.com/NYCPBA/status/1453781640912719872

I occasionally get painted as some sort of "doomer" when it comes to the future of the US, and a word people love to use here is "apocalypse". That tells you something about how human psychology works in the face of normalcy bias.

In their mind, there are only two settings: business as usual, and people engaging in cannibalism out in the street. There's no continuum, just a binary. Given that I say the US is heading for some rough territory, that means I must therefore be a proponent of imminent collapse.

In reality, these things are just a continuum, and the stuff around the covid mandates illustrate very well how these things actually work out in practice.

The US is a very large federal republic that today looks quite different from it was originally envisioned.

The founders neither imagined nor wanted a globe-spanning empire administering hundreds of bases on foreign soil, nor a federal bureaucracy that has de facto and de jure usurped most of the power that was originally given to the states.

But the creation of this state of affairs wasn't some overnight thing. And just as it took a very long time to wind this spring up, unwinding it is not done over a weekend. That said, indications are that the US is hitting diminishing returns on centralization.

Beyond the immediate problem of covid mandates, what they really do show is that the federal government's ability to enforce writ is slowly being undermined, not due to rebellion and insurrection, but just by a lack of moral authority and legitimacy on the part of the rulers.

The police in a modern society exist and work the way they do because the vast majority of people don't need cops around to not commit crimes. In a similar manner, government writ generally works on a honors system: once the provinces start ignoring you, you have real issues.

It's not just resistance from the people (cops, firemen, pilots, nurses and so on in the case of covid mandates) that are a danger here. It is states beginning to see writ from Washington as a mere suggestion rather than some sort of ironclad imperative.

So DeSantis can just tell these cops "come to Florida, we'll even pay you to move here and give you a job without the hassle." How many people take him up on his offer is in some sense kinda beside the point. Once this sort of thing starts happening, you're in trouble.

Outright coercion of subjects and provinces is not only very unpopular but it expends a lot of bureaucratic energy and effort. Coercion has huge transactional costs; a very large state formation can only really work if it doesn't have to pay those costs for very long.

For a state the size of the United States to work, most people have to go along with the program willingly. That is what is clearly being lost in the US at present, and one can't just go "oh well we'll send the FBI and the army in to force compliance" nilly willy.

After the fall of the Qing dynasty in the early 20th century, China sort of hovered uneasily trying to get some form of republican government to work. There was never really a clear break between that time and the warlord era that was to follow: power simply *leaked*.

And power is clearly leaking in the same way in the US today. The reason China has this history of constant fission and fusion is partly due to its dependence on irrigation (which would require a thread on its own), partly because the "cost" of enforcing writ rises over time.

So what does this mean for the short- and mid-term forecast for the US of A? Well, two things. As 2021 showed, *events* can drive radicalization and polarization very quickly. Covid, J6, Afghanistan, etc. But behind the drama there's a much slower process playing out.

Over the next decade or two, the federal government is going to find itself mired in higher and higher transaction costs for enforcing writs, and higher overhead on its bureaucracy. States will become more powerful by virtue of the center becoming weaker in practice.

Many attempts will likely be made to shore up Washington's *de jure* power, but these attempts will quickly be bogged down by legal challenges, outright noncompliance, and a lack of political legitimacy in the eyes of large segments of the population.

Stuff like what DeSantis is doing now with cops (openly ignoring clear indications from Washington that this is where they want policy to go) will sometimes be tolerated and sometimes challenged, but the challenges to local power will be at a large risk of stalling.

Moreover, the more you challenge the states, the more likely you are to see informal regional modes of cooperation. In a way these things already exist in a very ad hoc way (for dealing with natural disasters and even covid), but every crisis will make them LESS ad hoc.

Dealing with the state of Florida because DeSantis Did A Thing will likely be possible. But what if Louisiana and Texas and Mississippi and Alabama suddenly join in, putting their own resources and political capital on the table? This also increases transaction costs massively.

So in short, stuff like Florida outright trying to poach cops from blue states in open defiance of central writ is going to be your baseline scenario: a slow leakage of power from the system, like hydraulic fluid leaking out of a cracked airplane wing.

This slow leakage will then be periodically worsened by one of the engines on the plane catching fire; a new political staredown, an economic crisis or contested election. Events drive a lot of politics, but the leakage of the hydraulic fluid of government is the big story today.

This is kind of why I stress that "logistics" is the real field of study for anyone serious about politics, just as it is for anyone serious about commanding a military. In politics, amateurs discuss ideas, while professionals discuss "logistics".

By this dreaded L-word, I mean the actual transactional costs of enforcing a writ or using your power. Just as it is much more costly to transport grain over a mountain range, making grain-shipments by way of Mount Everest so impractical nobody does, it...

...states also have costs they have to pay in order to ensure compliance. If these costs rise too high over too long a period of time, the state will lose cohesion and slowly revert to something less complex, or quickly degrade into a civil war, depending on conditions.

States don't run on "ideas", they run on people, and those people run on a lot of things - money, ideology, bureaucratic "techne" retained inside institutions, and so on.

The #1 logistics guy account on this platform, @man_integrated , has a term he uses to describe most normal people's idea of logistics. In their mind, the system works on the principle of "PFM", or "pure fucking magic", where cornflakes just show up on the shelves on their own.

PFM is a great term, because most political radicals - especially those with a middle class background, for a whole host of reasons - have the same idea about politics. To them, a bureaucracy runs on PFM, and a state runs on PFM.

A tyrannical state is just a state where the "magic" at work is black magic. The task is to replace the bad and evil magic with good and benevolent magic. Willpower and ideology count, while boring stuff like diminishing returns in the capability of human bureaucracies do not.

As such, I also get called some sort of believer in "material determinism" in politics, that you can look at a system and know where it will go just from crunching the numbers. And that is kinda correct in a limited sense, but it bends the stick too far.

If you want to fire a gun, you need stuff like ammo that works, a firing pin, a trigger to pull, and so on. Remove those things, and the gun will not fire just because you want it to. That goes for politics as well. But within those constraints, individual action matters.