Decoded

Last week, addressing CPAC, Steve Bannon said one of the goals of this administration was "the deconstruction of the administrative state". In the Washington Post, E.J. Dionne deconstructed what that phrase actually means:

Bannon's dangerous deconstruction

Here's some of the elements of the deconstruction from E.J.'s op-ed:

"And Bannon actually made sense of Trump’s seemingly bizarre habit of naming people to head up agencies whose missions they openly oppose.

...

"... the “deconstruction of the administrative state.” Bannon explained that officials who seem to hate what their agencies do — one thinks especially of Scott Pruitt, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, who has sued it repeatedly to the benefit of oil and gas companies — were “selected for a reason, and that is deconstruction.”

Thus did Bannon invoke the trendy lefty term “deconstruct” as a synonym for “destroy.”

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In practice, this is a war on a century’s worth of work to keep our air and water clean; our food, drugs and workplaces safe; the rights of employees protected; and the marketplace fair and unrigged. It’s one thing to make regulations more efficient and no more intrusive than necessary. It’s another to say that all the structures of democratic government designed to protect our citizens from the abuses of concentrated private power should be swept away."

So, simply, deconstruction means getting rid of the regulations that hold back business interests (another term for the wealthy, or the 1%) from exploiting natural resources, the environment, our money, and the less-privileged members of our population. It means getting rid of safety and safeguards, all in the name of business and "growing the economy".

The Republicans have returned to their roots: pollute, exploit, and profit. That's how they are. That's how they've always been, since Reagan.