Posts Tagged ‘political rhetoric’

“Fabricated Authority”

January 21, 2026
Ricardo F. Morín
Irrationality, Propaganda, and Tribalism
CGI
2026

Ricardo  F.  Morín

January21, 2026

Oakland Park, Fl. 

1. A political claim ordinarily enters public life through institutions.  A law is debated, enacted, interpreted, contested.  A speech is delivered from a known office, before a defined audience, subject to reply and record.  Authority, in these cases, arises from responsibility and constraint.  

 

2. The text examined here satisfies none of these conditions.  

 

3. The text attributes to an unnamed broadcast the power to alter legal status.  The text presents a speaker not as a citizen who speaks, but as a conscience that pronounces.  The text declares effects that no statute, no executive order, and no court possesses the authority to produce.  The text announces national assent in the absence of any forum capable of granting assent.  

 

4. No enactment appears.  No interpretation occurs.  No review is possible.  

 

5. Nothing in this sequence is argued.  Nothing in this sequence is demonstrated.  Nothing in this sequence is capable of verification.  

 

6. Authority is not derived from office, law, or responsibility.  Authority is assigned by narrative arrangement.  

 

7. The speaker is granted moral standing by recognition alone.  The law is displaced by spectacle.  The audience is positioned as witness to a verdict that precedes deliberation.  Silence is treated as confirmation.  Stillness is treated as consent.  

 

8. What appears as denunciation functions as substitution.  

 

9. The place of institutions is occupied by a voice.  The place of argument is occupied by proclamation.  The place of judgment is occupied by reaction.  

 

10. The result is not persuasion.  The result is conversion.  

 

11. Citizens are not addressed as agents capable of contesting claims.  Citizens are addressed as spectators invited to receive a moral scene whose meaning has been fixed in advance.  

 

12. When invented testimony is received as political record, the boundary between event and wish disappears.  When spectacle is treated as verdict, correction loses authority.  When conscience is produced as performance, no institution remains capable of constraining conscience.  

 

13. This is not misinformation in the ordinary sense.  

 

14. This phenomenon is the replacement of judgment by fabricated authority.  

 

15. Authority ordinarily attaches to an office before authority attaches to a voice, because office supplies the limits under which speech can claim consequence.  A court exists, so a judge speaks.  A chamber exists, so a legislator speaks.  An administration exists, so an executive speaks.  In each case standing precedes utterance, and the public can locate responsibility by locating the forum in which the claim is made.  

 

16. The text examined here reverses that order.  The text presents a voice whose standing is not grounded in any office that can be named, any jurisdiction that can be defined, or any forum that can be recognized.  No delegation is stated.  No mandate is visible.  No responsibility is assumed.  Yet the voice speaks as if entitled to pronounce on matters whose force depends, in ordinary civic life, on enactment, interpretation, and review.  

 

17. This reversal matters because office establishes the scope under which a claim may operate, jurisdiction fixes the reach of effects, and procedure subjects both scope and reach to contest and record.  A claim that arises through these constraints can be challenged because standing can be challenged.  The claim here does not arise through constraint;  the claim arises through reception.  Standing depends on recognition rather than jurisdiction, and recognition is not a civic category that admits examination.  

 

18. One can dispute a mandate.  One can deny a court’s jurisdiction.  One can invoke procedure and require reply.  Recognition offers no equivalent instrument.  Recognition confers authority without specifying scope, and recognition allows a voice to present itself as conscience without accepting the obligations that make conscience accountable in public life.  

 

19. The effect is not merely that a voice speaks outside office.  The effect is that the role of office is replaced.  In a system where standing precedes speech, speech can be limited because the forum can be limited.  In a system where standing follows speech, speech expands until something external imposes a boundary.  

 

20. The text relies on no such boundary.  The text presents moral standing as complete at the moment of utterance, and the text treats reception as confirmation.  The audience is positioned less as a public capable of contest than as a witness to a pronouncement whose authority is presumed rather than earned.  

 

21. In that arrangement the claim to speak carries consequence without jurisdiction, and authority appears where no institution can be identified as a source of authority.  

 

22. Authority that does not arise from office cannot rely on procedure.  Procedure requires forum.  Forum requires jurisdiction.  Jurisdiction requires mandate.  None is present here.  

 

23. The claim therefore does not proceed by sequence.  The claim proceeds without premises, without grounds, and without anticipation of reply.  The statement does not argue.  The statement announces.  

 

24. What would ordinarily require enactment is declared complete.  What would ordinarily require interpretation is pronounced settled.  What would ordinarily require review is presented as final.  Verdict precedes forum.  

 

25. This reversal alters the function of speech itself.  Speech no longer seeks assent through reasoning.  Speech produces assent by declaration.  Judgment no longer follows deliberation.  Judgment is installed before deliberation can occur.  

 

26. Once proclamation is received as verdict, proof becomes irrelevant.  

 

27. Once argument is removed from the sequence, assent no longer arises from judgment.  Assent arises from recognition.  The claim does not ask to be examined.  The claim asks to be received.  The force of the claim depends less on what the claim establishes than on whom the claim addresses.  

 

28. The audience is not invited to consider whether the verdict follows from law, or whether the authority invoked possesses standing to pronounce.  The audience is invited to recognize the audience in the verdict.  

 

29. This shift alters the function of agreement.  In deliberative settings, assent follows contest.  One accepts a conclusion because one has weighed a claim against alternatives.  Here, assent precedes any such weighing.  The verdict arrives already formed, and reception supplies confirmation.  

 

30. Agreement no longer signals conviction, but affiliation, a posture defined less by conviction than by position.  

 

31. Recognition, in this arrangement, performs the work that argument once performed.  To accept the claim is to affirm membership in a moral position already defined.  The verdict does not bind because the verdict is correct.  The verdict binds because the verdict identifies.  

 

32. Those who receive the verdict do not do so as judges of coherence, but as participants in the posture the verdict confers.  The claim succeeds not by persuading opponents, but by consolidating those already disposed to accept the claim.  

 

33. This function explains the absence of procedure.  Deliberation would introduce fracture.  Contest would introduce differentiation.  Review would expose divergence.  None serves the purpose at hand.  

 

34. The claim therefore bypasses every stage at which disagreement could appear.  The claim offers instead a completed judgment whose primary effect is to sort recognition from refusal.  

 

35. The result is not belief in the ordinary sense, but affiliation, a posture defined less by conviction than by position.  To assent is to take position within a moral alignment whose boundaries are drawn by reception itself.  Those who accept are confirmed.  Those who hesitate are marked.  

 

36. Authority, in this form, does not govern through law.  Authority governs through identification.  

 

37. Once standing is conferred by reception, the remaining limits cannot hold.  

 

38. Once authority is produced in this manner, substitution becomes unavoidable.  In this arrangement office yields to presence, jurisdiction yields to recognition, procedure yields to proclamation, and judgment yields to reaction, until no limit remains capable of arresting the expansion that follows.  

 

39. Each replacement removes a limit.  Each replacement widens scope.  Each replacement dissolves responsibility.  

 

40. What remains is a form of authority that cannot be contested because no forum remains in which contest can occur.  

 

41. The consequence for citizenship follows directly.  A citizen ordinarily participates in judgment by weighing claims, contesting standing, and invoking procedure.  Here, that role disappears.  The citizen is no longer positioned as a participant in deliberation.  The citizen is positioned as a recipient of verdict.  

 

42. Agency yields to reception, judgment yields to alignment, and responsibility yields to loyalty, until disagreement itself can no longer appear as a civic act.  

 

43. In this posture disagreement ceases to be a civic act.  Disagreement becomes a breach of affiliation.  Hesitation becomes disloyalty.  Correction becomes defection.  

 

44. Once judgment is displaced in this way, repair becomes impossible.  Correction presupposes a forum.  Review presupposes jurisdiction.  Reply presupposes standing.  None remains available.  

 

45. A verdict that arrives without forum cannot be recalled to contest.  An authority that arises without office cannot be subjected to review.  A claim that governs through recognition alone cannot be corrected without threatening membership itself.  

 

46. The persistence of fabrication follows not from confusion, but from function.  Fabrication endures because fabrication stabilizes alignment.  Fabrication circulates because fabrication confirms position.  Fabrication resists correction because correction would dissolve the posture fabrication sustains.  

 

47. Authority, once detached from office and constraint, does not disappear.  Authority reappears in altered form.  Verdict is separated from forum.  Conscience is separated from responsibility.  Assent is separated from deliberation.  

 

48. What remains is a claim to govern without jurisdiction.  

 

49. This is not the corruption of judgment.  This is displacement.  

 

50. Judgment is no longer exercised.  Judgment is produced.


“The Masquerade of Small Government”

November 27, 2025

*

Ricardo Morín
Silent Quadtych: The Masquerade of Small Government
Each Panel: 22’ x 30”
Watercolor, graphite, gesso, acrylic on paper
2010

Ricardo F. Morín

November, 2025

Oakland Park, Florida

The idea of shrinking government in the United States has recurred across administrations, yet the national deficit persists and the central obligations of public life (Social Security, Medicare, rising healthcare costs, and the long-term fiscal imbalance) remain structurally unresolved.   Initiatives framed as efficiency programs often divert attention from these enduring commitments.   This essay examines the distance between the performance of reform and the realities that persist beneath that performance, and asks what remains concealed when a portrayal of reform is presented as transformation—particularly the corporate interests that benefit when regulatory and oversight functions are reduced.


1

The recent closure of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) reveals more than an administrative shortfall.   The initiative began with the extravagant promise of saving several trillion dollars, yet concluded with an unverifiable claim equivalent to roughly three percent of the federal budget.  The disparity is not a technical miscalculation but a symbolic one.  The disparity exposes a political pattern in which sweeping reform is announced, performance is staged, and the result is a gesture that bears little relation to the scale of the aspiration.   What had appeared to be a disciplined restructuring of government became instead an example of how ambition can detach from feasibility.

2

The language of efficiency has long exerted a nearly irresistible appeal.   That language suggests a vision of governance freed from excess, guided by prudence, and aligned with fiscal virtue.   Yet efficiency functions as a metaphor rather than a principle.   The metaphor conceals assumptions about what government should do, what citizens require, and what modern complexity demands.   One assumption is that public obligations can be met with fewer instruments; another is that smaller institutions inherently serve the public better.   Both assumptions overlook the fact that intricate societies require robust capacity, and that such capacity necessarily entails cost.

3

When such programs collide with the operational realities of administration, their limits become evident.   Federal agencies exist because the responsibilities they discharge cannot be managed by private initiative alone.   These agencies coordinate infrastructure, regulate markets, monitor systemic risks, and mediate conflicts among large and often competing interests.   Attempts to severely curtail these functions rarely yield the projected savings, because the underlying needs do not disappear.   Reformers confront a simple truth:   indispensable functions cannot be eliminated without consequence.

4

What emerges instead is appearance without substance.   The promise of cutting government satisfies a cultural demand for acts that signal restraint, even if the result satisfies little else.   That promise affirms a narrative in which bureaucracy is imagined as the obstacle to national well-being and institutional reduction as the remedy.   Yet an appearance of reform often substitutes for substantive reform.   Procedural actions are elevated to the status of outcomes, and the declaration of change is treated as proof that change has occurred.

5

Behind this representation stands a deeper strategy.   When government is weakened, the scope of public oversight contracts.   Such contraction reallocates authority rather than removing it.   In the absence of robust public institutions, nongovernmental power centers (corporations, high-wealth individuals, and other privately controlled entities operating without electoral accountability) assume a wider sphere of influence, operating with fewer obligations and almost no transparency.   The rhetoric of shrinking the State therefore conceals a different movement entirely:   the expansion of discretion outside the channels of democratic accountability.

6

This expansion is most visible in the consolidation of wealth.   When regulatory and investigative capacities narrow, the constraints on large fortunes diminish.  Concentrated capital extends its reach across industries, infrastructure, data, and information systems.  Efforts to limit the scope of government therefore operate as a shield under which private power accumulates with minimal resistance.   What is framed as the removal of constraints becomes, in practice, the removal of limits on private authority from public scrutiny.

7

Such conditions foster the autocratic temptation.   When wealth operates beyond institutional counterweights, the boundary between influence and authority begins to fade.   Private actors acquire the ability to shape policy, steer public discourse, and redefine norms without democratic mandate.   The critique of ‘big government’ becomes a means of creating conditions in which private actors function as informal sovereigns—powerful, unelected, and increasingly indispensable to the ordinary functioning of civic life.

8

It is no coincidence that this rhetoric often appears in the language of populism.   Appeals to public frustrations convert structural imbalances into cultural grievances.   Bureaucracy is framed as the adversary, even when the real impediment to civic dignity lies in the widening distance between concentrated power and the public interest.   What presents itself as a defense of the people frequently advances interests far removed from those it claims to champion.

9

These dynamics reflect a recurring pattern:   the appeal of concentrated wealth, the weakening of public constraints, and the claim that progress can be invoked without being shared.   The call to shrink government fits within this broader pattern.   That call functions as a contemporary iteration of a familiar strategy in which reformist rhetoric obscures the concentration of advantage.   The pattern endures because its surface language is persuasive while its underlying mechanisms remain concealed.

10

If an effective path forward exists, it does not lie in diminishing institutions but in strengthening the mechanisms through which they remain accountable to a diverse society.   The measure of the State is not its size but its integrity—its ability to respond to complexity without ceding its responsibilities to private authority.  What weakens when institutions are diminished is not efficiency but democracy itself.  Defending the public sphere requires clarifying what is lost when reform devolves into appearance alone, when efficiency becomes a language intended to conceal power rather than distribute it.