"Ensuring Accountability for All Agencies" – Executive Order

He seems more like Pinochet than anything (maybe without the murdering). Neoliberal deregulation, privatizing state owned assets, etc. while consolidating power to himself. Which ended up in extreme economic inequality and fear of opposing the ruler.

Re the Apportionment Act of 1929 -- care to elaborate? Are there figures for "the worst representation in the free world"?

My impression is that there are many reasons for the dysfunction of congress; the media feedback control system (in a literal and metaphorical sense) plays an important role, as does the filibuster, lobbyists, and other corruption.

(Aside: in aging, an organisms feedback and homeostatic systems tend to degrade / become simpler with time, which leads to decreased function / cancer etc. While some degree of refactoring & dead-code cruft-removal is necessary - and hopefully is happening now, as I think most Americans desire - the explicit decline in operational structure is bad. (Not that you'd want a systems biologist to run the country.))

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It is telling that you have that interpretation of executive power but not the same of regulatory power.

As proof, this isn't an American problem, it is nothing to do with the US constitution or "gridlock". In most English-speaking countries you have seen: massive increase in power by unelected officials, the vast majority of these officials have identical political views and operate with a political agenda (to be clear, at no point did anyone ask whether this was legal, whether these were "strongmen"), and this effect has paralysed government function in every country.

Even worse, this appears irrespective of clear limits. For example, the US system of political appointments of judges is clearly a bad idea, the incentives are awful, the results are predictable. But the same issue with judges overriding elected officials is occurring in countries where selection is (in theory) non-political.

The reason why is simple: there has never been a greater difference between the lives of the rulers and the ruled. The reason we have democracy is to resolve this problem.

But the US is a particularly extreme case of this: if you look at how government operates in the US, what is the actual connection with people's lives? The filth and decay in US cities is incredible given the amount of government spending...the answer why is simple: the spending is for government, the people don't matter.

Also, US-specific: it is extremely strange to characterise the US as a system of checks and balances if you look at actual real world political history rather than some theoretical imaginings of someone in the late 18th century. Checks and balances have always been dynamic. The reason why the outrage is so vitriolic (and the comparisons to Hitler so frequent...imagine if Hitler fired civil servants or changed regulatory policy, definitely the worst thing he did) is because the people being hit are the people who believed they would always be safe from oversight.

I mean, yes, technically it's "not new" for the President and Judiciary to disagree at this level. But doing so results in events like the Trail of Tears, which is pretty bad.

People are alarmed and concerned because they know it's not new. It's not difficult to find horrors in American history. Decorum and norms exist for the purpose of attempting to smooth over these stress points and make a safer power structure that hopefully prevents tragedies like this. The relative peace and safety we've enjoyed for the half century or so has been largely based on a modern era of good feelings and respectful norms.

When those norms go away and the authoritarian president dares the court to enforce the laws he breaks, people, rightly, get scared. The courts don't control the army, he does. I hope the generals remeber their oath, but oh yeah, he's been replacing them with loyalists too.

We know it isn't new. We've seen the horrors of history. That's why it's scary.

Yeah yeah, America lived on and stuff after all of that. But a lot of oppressed minorities didn’t. And if you're any minority group that the ruling party doesn't like right now, you are totally justified in being deathly afraid.

(For the record, I was against centralization of executive power under Obama and Bush too. But open and blatant disrespect like this is as especially alarming and should be treated as such, not normalized or justified)