alt Hacker News> But at a moment's notice their allegiance can switch.
Is that true, though? I don't expect that the individual biases of officers or judges, or the institutional biases of the police or immigration departments, can switch at a moment's notice.
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It's less true every day, now that Trump is busy filling the ranks of the bureaucracy with people who respond to the loyalty-test question "Who won the 2020 election?" with "Donald Trump."
Well, no, but you could have the very rude awakening that the in-group that you thought you were part of is suddenly now more narrowly defined than you had deluded yourself into believing. “I’m one of the good ones” quickly receives the response “there are no good ones” once the dominoes start to fall. The curse of reactionary politics is that it always crumbles under its own weight of an ever-narrowing definition of the in-group.
Entities like the courts and law enforcement optimize for the retention of people who do what they're told and the turnover of those who have their own principals. And this is before you account for the fact that most people will do what they're told before they threaten their paycheck.
Rational people act according to the incentives they’re provided. If that incentive is “follow these new instructions/directives or you’ll lose your job” (or worse?) it takes an especially principled person to object.