The golden age of out of control bureaucracy has led to countless, unsavory, outcomes.
And this age is surely the age of the bureaucrat because so much of the public has been brainwashed into having complete, unwavering, cult-like religious faith in what bureaucrats tell them to do, no matter how ridiculous their orders are.
If Fauci told the public that coronavirus can be prevented by standing on their heads at least 40% of the country would immediately obey.
Yet, as ubiquitous as the policy disasters of this age have been, very little useful has been done to truly understand the design of the political machine that is generating them.
Almost everyone on the American Right (or what passes for it) wrongly thinks the Progressive system is Communist.
The problem is that there are good reasons to think it isn’t.
From a systems engineering perspective there is every reason to want to settle on a correct definition on any topic.
Proper classification methodology can only help understand the operations and vulnerabilities of any system, even one as seemingly immune to reality as the Progressive system.
Certainly, calling Progressivism ‘Communism’ for decades hasn’t led to accomplishments for any version of Conservatism.
American Progressivism (as well as the European equivalents of British Fabian Socialism and European Union Supranationalism) is a straightforward architectural match for the Liberal ideology known as Positivism which is simply a dictatorial system ruled by scientists and scientifically trained sociologists.
The Progressives are even announcing this when they tell the public to “trust the science.”
Of course, in a dictatorship ruled by scientists (or liberal arts majors posing as “scientists”) trusting “the science” means “trust the dictators” – and where is the coronavirus-era scientist of today who doesn’t think like a power-crazed dictator?
On this website our recommendation is to save the science by getting scientists out of political decision making (except to serve in strictly advisory roles on technical questions) because the more political powers scientists have the less they act like scientists and the more they act like ordinary politicians.
To the extent Communism resembles Positivism that is because Positivism preceded Communism. Positivism was developed from the 1820s to the 1840s by Comte whereas Marx was not considered to be an important Liberal thinker by as late as the 1850s. Communism itself is simply a straightforward amalgamation of various Liberal ideologies and economics originating in the first half of the 19th century, one of the most popular of which was Positivism.
But back to those of you on the Right.
On the level of political philosophy only there is good reason to question if Progressivism is Communism.
The ideal Marxist society is dominated by an “aristocracy” of the proletariat, by which Marx meant the highest, most politically capable elements of the European working class.
However, Positivism’s ruling class not only consists primarily of the scientifically trained middle and upper middle classes, the working class is explicitly defined as unworthy of political leadership, even bordering on being a class enemy of the ruling, scientific, classes.
This is a significant philosophical problem to overcome for anyone who wants to seriously argue Progressivism is Communism.
If the “aristocracy” of Marx is considered (at best) an underclass in Progressivism, if not an enemy class, then there are solid philosophical grounds for rejecting the classification of Marxism with Progressivism.
It may seem academic to even care if there is a distinction between Progressivism and Communism at all.
But if the definition of terms is not clearly established or the most basic elements of ideology (such as who is at the top of the political hierarchy and who is at the bottom) then one could just as easily claim a political system that categorizes Germans as untermenschen is “Nazism.”‘
And, yes, in theory there is no hierarchy at all in Communism.
But in the true spirit of systems engineering we are interested in Communist theory only to the extent it influenced Communism as practiced.
In practice a Communist hierarchy formed wherever Communist states were founded because humans cannot resist sorting themselves into hierarchies.
Of course, there are similarities, such as the use of propaganda and show trials. But propaganda is only a political tool, and tools of all types in every field are always, in and of themselves, ideologically neutral.
The Nazis used propaganda and show in ways similar to Communists, but that does not mean Nazism was Communism.
On a superficial level there is the strong impression, even if one cannot quite articulate it, that Progressive governance is uniquely, extraordinarily, dysfunctional in ways that Communist governance never came near.
For example, anyone vaguely familiar with life in Soviet Russia would know that their police forces would never permit the public use of hard drugs and rampant shoplifting by the homeless as Progressive cities of today permit.
Indeed, the Nazis and Soviets themselves would say that equating Communism with Progressivism isn’t giving the Progressives enough credit because the Progressives have accomplished what the Nazi and Soviet propaganda ministries would have said was probably impossible to do – which is to turn bureaucracy itself into a religious cult.
From the Nazi and Soviet perspective religious faith in bureaucracy shouldn’t even exist because bureaucracy has, until modern times, been despised for all of recorded history with its associations with high taxes and interfering regulations.
In their view the more plausible propaganda route to take would be the time-tested and time-proven system of the cult of personality.
Propaganda centering around cult-like faith in a single, all charismatic, all knowing, all powerful, all benevolent, demigod of a political figure was the system selected by Fascism and Communism because it was supported by abundant historical precedent.
But what neither the Nazis nor the Communists were prepared for was that the Progressives turned out to be crazier than they were, combined, and by orders of magnitude.
There is no historical precedent for successfully vesting this kind of religious devotion to bureaucratic agencies and multitudes of cold, robotic, government droids like Anthony Fauci, and similar figures, at the EPA, HUD, etc, etc.
If political theory is only worth studying to the extent it manifests into political reality, then the theoretical differences between Progressivism and Communism haven’t even begun to be researched because the wildly different manifestations of Progressive and Communist politics are wrongly assumed to originate from the same system.
Differing results are always suggestive (if not definitive proof) of differing, underlying, mechanical systems.
Another area where Progressive theory and implementation differs from the theory and implementation of Communism is in terms of Darwinian evolution, specifically the evolution of human psychology.
In terms of Darwinian evolution, Progressivism is unsuitable for governance because –
1) Progressive institutions do not attract those with the psychological traits appropriate for leadership positions.
2) The human mind did not evolve to divide its attention to care about even 10% of the enormous number of specific causes Progressives claim to care about.
To the first point, there is the political problem that the institutions that attract Progressive partisans – academia, Government agencies, non-profits, media, government unions, international forums, environmentalist organizations, activist groups – attract a psychological profiles that are unsuitable for leading.
All psychological traits have an underlying genetic origin that was molded by Darwinian evolution.
The genetic makeup of those who are attracted to these kinds of bureaucratic fields were designed by evolution to be suitable for servant roles.
During the Roman Empire (or, for that matter, any era before the 20th century) modern Progressives would have never been allowed to lead because they would be seen as only mentally suitable to be tax collectors, census takers, scribes, translators, librarians, household servants, etc., etc.
The psychological profile of modern Progressive classes originally evolved to be near power, to flatter power, to associate with power, to please power, to be seen standing next to power, to fluff the pillows of power, to lobby power for favors.
But the Progressive classes do not have the genetics to hold power.
Even the process by which they recruit future leaders and train them in universities is wrong.
European royalty gave their children military training, in addition to other forms of schooling, not by sending its future ruling class to do internships at non-profits because this type of “liberal arts” experience teaches students to do nothing except create more Progressive bureaucracy.
The Soviets also did not recruit those with a Progressive psychological profile for its leadership, instead preferring intelligence agents, military officials, and industrial managers.
But with each succeeding generation of liberal arts majors (especially at the Ivy League) who make it into Progressive politics (all of whom, in order to impress college admissions officials, had their energies from preschool onwards directed into meaningless extracurricular activities that have nothing to do with learning how to effectively manage complex organizations, or doing anything remotely productive except create more regulations and bureaucracy) the less and less capable these graduates are to so much as identify the physical differences between men and women.
By contrast, not much has changed with business, science and medicine majors. Business majors mostly go into business; some will go into politics but their effectiveness as a politician can only be to the extent they ignore +90% of what they learned at their grossly overpriced, pronoun-confused, “elite” college. Science and medicine majors still go into science and medicine (though, as we have seen during the coronavirus pandemic, these fields are being corrupted the more political power scientists and doctors are given).
But the Progressive liberal arts majors who (overwhelmingly) end up absorbed somewhere in the vast Progressive bureaucracy steadily become more and more useless, power-mad, toddlers with each graduation ceremony.
This degradation in the quality of the Progressive liberal arts major is easy to see by comparing them to earlier generations of Progressive – Woodrow Wilson, FDR, Harry Hopkins, Robert McNamara, Lyndon Johnson, McGeorge Bundy, nor anyone among their respective generations, would ever hire the average Ivy League liberal arts major of today (e.g., Miles Taylor, Anthony Blinken and Jake Sullivan) as janitors.
Naturally, the original Progressives deserve no sympathy since today’s disastrous recruitment process of choosing an “elite” from the sociology/liberal arts classes, and creating an unaccountable bureaucracy, was their creation. Anyway, they themselves were not the most able of their era because bureaucrats of any era are never the best of their contemporaries.
Worse than the process of selecting and training the least capable college majors for national leadership is the fact that, no matter how complete and all-consuming the religious faith Progressives have in bureaucracy is, it does not change the fact their genetically based psychological makeup cannot lead.
Overwhelmingly, the psychological qualities of leadership are concentrated in business and the military, not those attracted to Progressives institutions.
The second major evolutionary problem with Progressive governance is that it is literally, neurologically, impossible for the human brain (as it actually evolved) to really care about the gigantic number of issues Progressives claim to care about because human cognition does not have the ability to divide its attention across (for example) all of the 741 trillion genders Progressives claim there are.
Even among the highly intelligent the tendency of exceptional mental powers is to concentrate on a particular issue with great intensity at a single time, not divide its attention across multiple subjects at the same time.
And that’s only gender.
We haven’t even begun to list the numerous chemical compounds the Progressives want to ban (with the exception of drugs) because these inanimate collection of atomic particles, somehow, someway, got labeled as political enemies of the state.
The enemy list the Progressives have drawn up from an increasingly besieged periodic table of the elements include despised molecules like carbon, oxygen (which must be heavily restricted and regulated with quadruple masking because of the possibility oxygen might transport viral particles), plastic straws, ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, and nicotine delivered through vaping, to name only a few “enemy” compounds.
Despite what they say it is simply impossible to care about such an enormous number of issues – everything from plastic straws to the temperature of the earth’s atmosphere.
Instead they have confused saying they care about an issue for actually caring about the issue.
But genuine concern is measured by actions, not statements.
If Progressives were really concerned about global warming causing a rise in sea levels then they would not live near the coasts.
If Progressives were really concerned about supposed white privilege then white Progressives would resign all of their positions and let their jobs, salaries, power, and other perks be taken over by minorities because Progressive institutions are populated by elite, wealthy, whites in at least the same proportions (if not more) as Wall Street is.
If Progressives were really convinced there are 741 trillion genders (all of them completely malleable, and liable to switch to a different gender at the drop of a hat) if they were not just saying it, not just posturing, but if they were really, absolutely convinced of its truth then heterosexual and homosexual Progressives would be every bit as willing to have sexual relations with transgender ‘men’ and transgender ‘women’ (depending on each individual Progressive’s sexual orientation) as they are with biological men and women.
That their actions do not match their statements tells you they do not really believe what they say they believe.
Anyway, it wouldn’t be neurologically possible to divide one’s attention across this many topics even if they were sincere.
The age of insincerity is one of the inevitable consequences of the age that claims to care about absolutely everything, and nothing short of everything.
Here is yet another indicator of a distinguishing characteristic that separates Progressivism from Communism, which again indicates a fundamental difference in political design between two different systems.
Soviet Russia, by contrast, only deeply cared about, more or less, 10 major policy issues such as factory production, intelligence operations, nuclear weapons, foreign policy, arms buildups, keeping the gulags frigid, preventing domestic political uprisings, and so on.
Otherwise they didn’t normally harass the public on numerous, completely trivial, issues like mask mandates, pronouns, “road diets”, how much of one’s household energy comes from solar and wind, flavored nicotine vape bans, or plastic straws.
Of course there were other concerns, but usually nuclear weapons, intelligence gathering, and a handful of other major policies were around 80% to 90% of all agenda items at normal Kremlin meetings of senior leadership.
Certainly, Stalin never once even thought of opening a meeting at the Kremlin by asking his fellow comrades which pronouns they identified with.
As long as the average Russian citizen didn’t interfere with these national priorities, and saluted when they were told to salute, the population was usually left alone to its own devices. And nobody was ever ordered to believe there were more than two genders.
To the average Westerner the idea of being left in peace, to not be harassed about which pronoun they are using, the freedom Soviet citizens Soviet pronouns took for granted, is a level of personal liberty that modern Westerners can scarcely begin to imagine.
The reason why Progressive tyranny covers so many, many, more topics like pronouns which Eastern Bloc Communist states never thought were not matters of political concern is because of the mechanics of differing command and control systems.
In Communist nations the command and control structure was centralized in a clear power hierarchy.
The top of this hierarchy exercised system wide authority to prioritize what each of its government agencies were working on.
In the Soviet Union the top of the power pyramid was occupied by Stalin, and then the Politburo, and each were given the power to set system wide priorities.
What does it mean to have the power to set priorities system wide?
It means the power to disappoint others within your organization by telling them that their priority is either being downgraded or ignored completely in order for the resources of the overall system to be diverted to different priorities.
Each component of the Soviet command system was organized around a series of clear, traceable, orders of precedent.
What does order of precedent mean?
Order of precedent means each individual or subunit of an organization is rank ordered from the highest to the lowest in a connected hierarchy listing whose will has precedent over the will of those below them.
In the case of the KGB and Russian military, senior KGB and military officials had higher orders of precedent over midlevel military and intelligence officials. Midlevel KGB and military officials, in turn, had order of precedent over lower ranked KGB and military officials.
Whenever there was a dispute between the KGB and Russian military about which priorities should be emphasized, the dispute about whose priority would be given precedent was resolved by Stalin because Stalin exerted order of precedent over both the KGB and Soviet military, as well as order of precedent over the entire Soviet system.
This is why Soviet Russia’s social engineering looks relatively unambitious compared to the Progressives.
The Soviet system was concerned primarily with major issues of state (such as nuclear weapons and spying, instead of pronouns) because the entire Soviet system of governance was a reflection of the priorities of either a single man (Stalin) or a well-defined oligarchy of Soviet officials.
In a relatively small gathering of people only a few major issues will be on the agenda for no other reason than because the human mind is limited in terms of how many topics it can divide its attention across.
The Progressives are micromanaging to a ridiculous degree because their bureaucracies do not have a centralized, system wide, command structure.
There is no order of precedent among each of their individual institutions because the rank order of which Progressive organization can override the priorities of another is nonexistent.
There are prioritization powers that are only infrequently and haphazardly exercised by the elected officials who are supposed to be running the Governmental bureaucracy.
But elected officials are either not really controlling government workers, or, have great difficult doing so because America’s elected officials (and all elected officials across the Western world) have limited powers to fire heavily job-protected, heavily unionized, government workers .
What Progressives have is a “siloed” bureaucratic structure (or, arguably, an anti-structure) that reports to no one, operating only for the amusement of the bureaucrats within it, because there is no command structure to tell one Progressive bureaucracy to abandon its priorities to focus on something with a clearer, system wide benefit.
There is no clear order of precedent where one Progressive bureaucracy, or subunit within it, outranks another and can command another Progressive institution to do something.
The perfect example of how this defective design of lacking any order of precedent is Anthony Fauci’s gain of function research in China.
Professor Marc Lipsitch of Harvard warned for a decade about the numerous dangers of Fauci’s crazy assistance to gain of function research into the coronavirus.
But nothing was done to cancel it, even though a Conservative might at first assume that Harvard – being far more prestigious and famous than Fauci’s (until recently) relatively obscure National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) – would outrank Fauci’s NIAID and, by extension, a Harvard medical professor would have been able to order Dr. Fauci to stop the research just as the chief of the KGB could have ordered a halt to a bioweapons program it had authority over.
But the research continued because Harvard cannot order a Federal agency like the NIAID to do anything because there is no order of precedent in the Progressive system that says Harvard outranks (and, therefore, is authorized to command) Federal health agencies.
Neither could The New York Times order Harvard to do anything, nor could Harvard give orders which The New York Times would be obligated to obey because the Times and Harvard are siloed away from eachother as individual components of the Progressive system of bureaucracy.
At best, Harvard may be able to politically pressure a Federal agency, or a Federal agency may pressure Harvard with regulations or lawsuits.
But these measures to exert internal control are all improvised, legally time consuming (even if they eventually work in court, which they may not), temporary, and not guaranteed to force the other bureaucracy to comply with the desires of another.
Any clear command and control system like that seen in the USSR does not have this issue – the orders simply flow down from superiors to lower level administrators.
This problem of not being able to actually execute governmental responsibilities because there is no rank order connection between individual Progressive institutions is compounded by the fact that the Progressive system excels at gaining power over more and more facets of day to day life.
The coordination problem that hampers the administration of government after the Progressives gain power over something is absent from the coordination needed for Progressives to initially gain that power.
This is because the priorities of each individual component/subunit of the Progressive system (from their perspective) directly or indirectly benefits whenever any separate component/subunit of Progressivism gains power and money, even if the benefit to unrelated Progressive institutions are not immediately obvious to outsiders.
When the CDC is granted more dictatorial powers and tax money to regulate masks, The New York Times defends its power and money grab to the maximum extent that it can because the Times believes in dictatorial bureaucracy.
And when the The New York Times is fighting to expand its own power and wealth, Federal bureaucracies defend it to the full power that they can because increasing the power of the Times increases the power of a propaganda outfit that will, in turn, always argue for more dictatorial power to be given to Federal bureaucrats.
Whenever a component of the Progressive system advocates for a different component to be given more power and money, no component of the Progressive system has to decide between priorities among different Progressives.
The problem comes in when Progressives then have to administratively use the powers they’ve grabbed hold of.
There are Progressives who would like more emphasis on fourth generation nuclear technology to reduce carbon emissions instead of wind and solar because nuclear power is the only zero-carbon energy source that is a proven technology able to deliver stable, abundant, electricity.
But pro-nuclear Progressives cannot order the pro-wind and pro-solar Progressives to abandon their (lucrative, Government subsidized) green corporate projects because Progressive environmentalists are independent of eachother, and therefore no one can order one side to do anything.
Governing (and all forms of management in every type of organization) by definition is deciding to favor different priorities valued by one group within an organization to the detriment of priorities held by another group within the same organization.
In case of a funding dispute between Soviet factory managers who wanted extra money to build more tractors and the Soviet Navy which wanted to reserve more of the budget to build attack submarines, Stalin, in his infinite wisdom, held the power of system-wide prioritization to decide whether to give the funding request to one side, divide it between both, or decline to fund either side’s priority.
When the Progressives are in the process of gaining power and tax money there is no coordination problem because each individual institution of Progressivism thinks the extra power and money will eventually advance their own priorities directly or indirectly.
It is when they have to use the power that their administration falls to pieces because they have no way of prioritizing the objectives of the overall Progressive system, because there is no hierarchy linking each individual Progressive institution – all their institutions are just siloed/on autopilot.
The disconnected command structure of Progressivism also delays the time it takes to complete simple governmental tasks after each power grab because the expansion of power to individual institutions and activist organizations (without knowing which institution is actually in charge of executing a project) excessively increases the number of stakeholders that need to approve of a project.
Hence the New Deal bureaucracy (when there were fewer Progressive institutions and activist groups needed to approve New Deal initiatives) was able to create all sorts of public works that moved at lightning speed compared to today’s glacial Progressive system.
Today the successors of the New Deal cannot keep the homeless of San Francisco from shoplifting at will.
The true irony in the age of out of control bureaucracy is that the more power the bureaucrats gain the less able they are to use the power and money they just grabbed to carry out the simplest tasks of government, such as keeping California’s energy grid safe from “rolling blackouts.”
Obviously, Progressives would prefer their policies work (at least moderately) if for no other reason except that even marginally ssuccessfuloutcomes make it easier to justify their next power grab.
Propaganda can cover up a lot, but as a rule it is always easier and preferable to create propaganda if it is justifying somewhat ssuccessfulpolicies.
Yet, they cannot get the most basic policies to work because their own governing components are siloed, that is to say they have no cross-component command structure; there is no command to rank every institutions priorities in importance to the overall system.
As if this weren’t disastrous enough, this unworkable Progressive administration of government is also more resistant to Conservative attacks and proposals for reform because their siloed institutions are (by definition) protected by system redundancies.
A system redundancy means that if one component of a system is disabled other components are activated to take on the role formerly played by the disabled component, with limited disruption or no disruption to the operation of the entire system.
What this means in the context of Progressive machinery is, for example, if President Trump in early 2017 had launched a military strike on Harvard in the middle of the school year with tactical nuclear weapons, Yale would take over all of Harvard’s functions without any noticeable change in policy, or without disabling academic processes generally, within the overall Progressive system.
If Trump had launched a tactical nuclear strike against both Harvard and Yale, Princeton (or maybe Stanford) would take over as the new Harvard, again, with only temporary disruptions to the system wide operations of Progressive academia.
Let’s analyze the Progressive system further from the subunit/component level down to the level of the individual Progressive.
This bizarre, siloed command and control (or, really, non-command and non-control) system creates strange psychological malfunctions at the level of the individual Democratic partisan working at any of these ‘governing’ institutions.
Again, we use Dr. Anthony Fauci and his now infamous gain of function research assistance to the Wuhan Institute of Virology as the perfect example.
The mentality Fauci had towards gain of function research is typical of every Progressive institution, and would not have been possible in a prioritized system like Stalin’s USSR.
In this respect the problem was that Fauci (like all Progressive bureaucrats) enjoyed an excessive level of independence from the overall system of American Government.
Fauci felt completely independent to run crazy policy experiments because NIAID had millions from a Federal budget which he could use to divert to gain of function research in China.
His experiments and excessive budget were independent of elected officials because his agency (like the rest of the Federal bureaucracy) is protected from being fired from the elected politicians who are supposed to run all of these out of control bureaucracies, but who cannot because the spoils system was eliminated over a century ago.
His operations were also independent of other Progressive institutions and bureaucrats (such as Marc Lipsitch of Harvard) who warned him of the dangers of gain of function research for over a decade, but none of whom had order of precedent powers over his actions nor control of his budget at the NIAID.
In theory, President Obama could have ordered Fauci to cease the research before the funds were released to China. But that would require Obama having the technical knowledge to decide which scientist (Fauci or Lipsitch) in a scientific disagreement was correct, which would require a level of detailed medical knowledge no President is expected to have.
Independent of elected officials (who usually aren’t scientifically trained to know if his plan was a good idea or not), funded with billions of tax dollars to do as he pleased without supervision, independent of dissenting subject matter experts, Fauci was and remains saturated with the attitude of all Federal agencies which is that they are free to run crazy political experiments at will, without consequence, and are answerable to no one.
Why did Fauci feel that he answers to no one?
Because under the Progressive system of out of control bureaucracy Fauci, in reality, does not answer to anyone.
This is exactly the same mentality as every individual Progressive bureaucrat and activist who (like Fauci) also answers to no one except diverting American tax dollars to whatever crazy social engineering experiment pops into their mind at any given moment.
Notice that Fauci would not be allowed to operate with this kind of attitude in a prioritized system like Stalin’s Soviet Union.
Under Stalin’s prioritized system, every Soviet Government worker would know that one of the major priorities of the Soviet State was national security.
Because of the system-wide emphasis on national security, Fauci would have automatically refrained from his biological weapons research.
And the reason wouldn’t have been because the Soviets did not engage in bioweapons experiments, or that Stalin was trained in virology.
The reason would have been that the Soviets never outsourced bioweapon research to hostile states as Fauci outsourced coronavirus gain of function research to a hostile power.
Fauci’s work would have had to be conducted entirely within heavily guarded Soviet laboratory facilities.
The demarcation here, between Communist and Progressive, is not that their states are “deep.”
Both the Soviets and Progressives had massive, sprawling bureaucracies.
The difference rests in the fact the Soviet “deep state” was subordinated to the priorities of a central command structure.
Whereas the Progressive “deep state” is independent not only of elected officials but also independent/siloed from answering to other Progressive institutions, even the most individually powerful Progressive bureaucracies like Harvard University.
The significantly greater dysfunctionality of Progressivism relative to Eastern Bloc Communism is ultimately explainable by independence, not “deepness.”
There are other psychological problems caused by this malfunctional New Deal design.
From the perspective of just about ever non-Progressive it is baffling why individual Progressives do not seem satisfied with the level of power they already have.
Progressivism covers trivial issues like pronouns and plastic straws that Stalin never once thought needed governmental intervention – and Stalin wasn’t exactly a Libertarian.
Why do Progressives never meet some threshold of diminishing returns for every power grab, at which point the desire for more domestic controls reaches some sort of stable (if still uncomfortable) equilibrium as it did in Soviet Russia.
The reason, again, is the different mechanics of Progressivism and Communism.
Although Progressivism lays claim to more jurisdiction over more areas of life (far and away beyond anything Stalin ever dreamed of) at the level of the individual Progressive the power of the total system is not something they can gain system-wide control over because of the siloed relationship between all of their different institutions.
Because no individual Progressive can command, from a central point, the entire Progressive political machinery at the individual level each individual Progressive is left unsatisfied with the individual level of power they have over the entire system.
For example, the anti-plastic straw bureaucrat (and any bureaucrat, academic, or activist) would otherwise very much enjoy having system wide control of the entire Progressive bureaucracy because with system wide power comes the ability to boss around other Progressives and divert their resources to some other project which the straw regulator would prefer be prioritized.
If any of them somehow got system level administrative access over everything in Progressivism, just as Stalin had system level access in the USSR, they would quickly lose interest in plastic straws, just as Stalin eventually would have if he had begun his early career in the Communist movement as a militant, anti-plastic straw terrorist.
But because of a siloed non-command structure (an anti-structure structure???) they can only exercise influence over plastic straw regulations.
Additionally, because of how Western academic specializations work, plastic straw regulators cannot easily switch fields and go into a different bureaucracy that deals with topics other than plastic straws.
And if they do manage to switch fields from plastic straw regulation to pronoun regulation they can then only focus their energy on regulating pronouns, not command the entire New Deal system.
Regardless of which particular niche specialty each Progressive bureaucrat is immediately focused on, regardless of whether it is macro-policy like global warming or a micro-policy like pronouns, the dissatisfaction with only having jurisdiction over a niche subject is ubiquitous.
This desire for system level power, while only having niche assignments at the individual level and over $200,000 in student debt for studying that niche subject, keeps each individual Progressive in a disgruntled state that encourages them to use their niche as a revolutionary weapon to use to gain more system wide/Stalin-like powers over the entire political system.
This is why revolutionary tactics, that are employed only before power is seized are constantly being employed by every component of the Progressive system despite the Progressives seemingly running everything.
Before and during the Russian Revolution it was an acceptable tactic to fight with Tsarist police forces.
But when the Communists won the Revolution, attacking Soviet police forces was completely forbidden because those police officers were Stalin’s police officers.
And very few things could be more hazardous to one’s health in Stalin’s Russia than trying to takeover one of Stalin’s police stations.
But under Progressivism, law enforcement is attacked (either literally or rhetorically) in Progressive electoral strongholds (like San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, and Los Angeles) even when the Progressives are in power, because no individual Progressive feels like they are in power because none of them have the system wide control that they crave.
From a systems engineering perspective this feeling of having limited power individually is literally true – despite the fact that the Progressive system, in totality, is more omnipresent in every minor detail of life than Communism ever was in Stalin’s Russia.
So each Progressive feels powerless (because at an individual level this is mostly true) even though the totality of the Progressive system claims dictatorial jurisdiction over more areas of life – everything from gender, to plastic straws, to the temperature of every last atomic particle of the earth’s atmosphere – than either the Nazis or Communists, combined, ever did.
And this system that claims power over everything cannot handle the simplest governmental jobs because each siloed Progressive activist is running their own, niche, social engineering experiment disconnected from any plan; except to give more dictatorial power and money to Progressive bureaucrats who can do nothing useful with the power and money they already have.
This does make the average Progressive look towards electoral politics as a way to seize the Stalin-like control over the entire FedGov system that they long for.
But elected politics is a mirage.
Because 100 years of Federal Government worker job protections have severed the control elected politicians once exercised over American bureaucrats under the spoils system, winning election as a Democrat requires support from Progressive Government workers.
This means that to win an election as a Democrat is to win as a servant of the bureaucracy, not its master as Stalin was master of the Soviet bureaucracy.
Winning as a Democrat does not grant the winner Stalin-like prioritization powers that Progressive partisans all want over other Progressives, it simply means they are elected to be Santa Claus for the Progressive bureaucrats whom they owe their victory to.
This abomination of a ‘governing’ system, this golden age of out of control bureaucracy, could only lead to disingenuous terminology.
One of these numerous definitional disasters, the age of insincerity, is only too logical a result of this beyond-Orwellian confusion.
To provide a sensible viewpoint to this chaos, here, in no particular order, is a quick reminder of what ‘irony’ is and ‘irony’ is not –
‘Irony’ is almost never irony.
‘Irony’ is not interesting.
‘Irony’ is not talent.
‘Irony’ is not convincing.
‘Irony is not class.
‘Irony is not wit.
‘Irony’ is not substantive.
‘Irony’ is not tasteful.
‘Irony’ is not serious
‘Irony’ is not an answer.
‘Irony’ is not information.
‘Irony’ is not helpful.
‘Irony’ is not productive.
‘Irony’ is not genuine.
‘Irony’ is not clever.
‘Irony’ is not cute.
‘Irony’ is not stylish.
‘Irony’ is not art.
‘Irony’ is not skill.
‘Irony’ is not an argument.
‘Irony’ is not quality.
‘Irony’ is smarmy.
Pragmatically Distributed 
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