🧵I think it's very important for people to comprehend that substantial numbers of Democrats and nearly the entirety of the Left and, sadly, far too many supposedly on the Right, don't consider what we are seeing with, say, USAID as being fraud. They see it as being morally just.
This is not due to getting kickbacks or working for an NGO or getting government grant money to run studies or pick your favorite here. It is because that group believes that what is being done is, in fact, what the US government is supposed to do.
To set out my bias here directly: I grew up in the Evangelical Christian world. Not just in that world, my parents, particularly my father, were involved in the administrative side of it. I know what it takes to keep the doors of those ministries open.
I grew up surrounded by people who became Christian school teachers, pastors, missionaries, worship leaders, worked as secretaries for churches and missions groups, people who truly walked away from the secular world and secular pay levels.
Because of that background, I consider that idea that working for a US government agency or, even more so, working for an NGO, is any kind of service and sacrifice to be spitting (and I am being polite using spitting) in the mouths of those I know who actually sacrificed.
That throat cleared, it is important that those of us who see, and who have seen for decades, all of these government expenditures as insane and as vehicles for corruption comprehend that the other side sees them as absolutely vital actions for what the US government should do.
What Trump is doing is, indeed, an existential attack on the foundation of what a huge number of people consider to be what democracy means and what democracy is to meant to do. Wilsonian progressive technocracy is a century old. Multiple generations believe in it as doctrine.
For those who believe that the point of the US government is to nudge the populace of the world into what is best for the populace, as determined by experts who truly do know best and who truly should be in charge, what Trump is doing is absolutely treason.
People are responding as if Trump is attacking them on a personal level because he is. Trump is denying that the concept upon which they have built sense of self, that politics are per se political and political beliefs are thus an indication of moral worth, is true. He mocks it.
The ego will defend itself and will defend itself with absolute vigor. Once a person accepts and internalizes the concept that the personal is per se political, any political dispute is an attack on that person's worth as a person.
Are there those in the political class and the upper level managerial class who are part of the revolving door academia to NGO to agency to NGO to academia process who view all of this as get paid, son. Absolutely. I am not speaking about those people.
I am speaking about those who are mid level agency employees or the non C suite level managers at NGOs and those who are workers bees in the various and sundry massive web of government funding reliant organizations.
Many, if not most, of those people really think that what they are doing is exactly what the US government should be doing. They really do. This is an attack not only on their jobs but on their entire world view. People respond poorly to that. And that must be remembered. /fin
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