...every time you hear the phrase white people,
white supremacy,
whiteanything but paint, you're listening to a Democrat. Ask him/her/it to reimagine something for you; they do that a lot, though not well. They can hear a dog whistle a mile or two away. They invented the spoils system and Tammany Hall, and inspired the addition of the word
(Thomas) Nastyto the English language. They want to stop continental drift and repeal the law of unintended side effects...
.
The Federal Government employs almost three million people. Of those, between 5,000 and 7,000 change when the White House changes occupants.
Tenured, at times life-long, jobs help perpetuate a Mandarinate that sees its task as keeping the ship of state on a course it has set.
That Mandarinate is especially well-entrenched in the State Department, the Pentagon, the Treasury and, more importantly, the judiciary.
It also has well-established, at times incestuous, relations with lobbyists, single-issue activist groups, universities with their tenured academics, and think tanks with rotating doors to government departments and the media.
The Mandarinate maintains close ties with those unmovable, effectively tenured members of the Senate and House of Representatives.
Conspiracy theorists refer to this Mandarinate as "the deep state".
However,
a lie repeated often enough remains a lie...
what we are dealing with isn't the product of a conspiracy by a cabal in a black chamber. It is the organic product of a system in which democracy is reduced to elections, and elections reduced to a beauty contest, just as a set of rituals is often marketed as a religion.
Winning an election is an art; governing is quite a different one.
Another key issue is the redistribution of power at the federal and state levels. In several states, especially in the South, confederal anxieties abide. This is often unjustly seen as "redneck" prejudice or even rank racism. But the fact is that the closer the decision-making process is to those affected, the stronger a democracy is.
Trump has tried to express that view in his bull-in-the-china-shop style, while advocating the opposite by calling for an increase in presidential power.
Elitist Democrats on the other hand preach the old federalist gospel of states close to water -- especially the two oceans and the Great Lakes.
This is why Democrats portray the recent decision by the Supreme Court on allowing some states to set their own rules on
Rebalancing power between Washington and the states has been an issue since the end of the Civil War.
The states of the defeated Confederacy suffered 12 years of military occupation by the Union army, not to mention plundering by "carpetbaggers," at the end of which they signed a treaty that, while ruling out fissiparous dreams, promised a rebalancing process that never happened.
While the two candidates fire abuse at one another, the voter isn't told what they actually mean to do about cracks in the structures of world order, the war in Ukraine, China as a threat or a rival, the exponential rise of anti-Semitic activities and the deepening of incivility in public life.
On November 5 the Mandarinate or the third party won't be on any ticket.