[rayiner]

The military is uniquely disciplined and socialized to follow orders in a way the ordinary civil service isn’t.

And in comparison to previous republicans, the difference is two-fold. First, the government has been affected by the same politicization of the workplace that’s happened in corporate America over the last decade.

Second, previous republicans are aligned with neoliberal democrats on certain key cultural issues. Reagan publicly opposed affirmative action, but his government kept implementing and expanding it. Reagan and Bush supported immigration and Reagan granted amnesty. Highly educated democrats were willing to play along with certain issues, but see Trump’s issues as fundamentally moral ones. E.g. Even today, there is almost no partisan politics within the FCC. The career folks will happily go back and forth on net neutrality all day long. Nobody sees it as a moral imperative the way they see immigration.

[ckemere]

Both of my parents worked at times for the Federal, state, and local governments. From that small sample size (also including corworkers, neighbors, etc) I would suggest that it IS the case that government workers will be strongly biased towards process-oriented changes. So “ignore the rules” will not go over well for most of them.

I think the most charitable interpretation of your argument might be that people would be more inclined to ignore the rules for ideas they believe in, but my data suggests that government employees in general (and not just the military!!) tend to be rule followers. I would argue that most people’s complaints about the government historically could be summed up by this???