I have some hope from the fact that when they showed just how absurdly subservient they are, some people showed up at town hall meetings to yell at them. Not all of these representatives are totally insulated in a maga-encrusted bubble, and at some point the fear of being too pro-Trump might start to compete with the fear of not being pro-Trump enough.
I can totally believe that someone who’s never worked in the private sector has such a fanciful view of how layoffs work. My first job out of college was in the government. My views of what constituted “waste” were hilarious, like we got a flashlight (because we occasionally would go outside at night) and it was definitely a pricier flashlight, with some features we didn’t really need. I told my friends at home, “Gosh, the government is so wasteful, look at this overpriced flashlight I got”. Of course they made me turn it in when I left, but still.
Then when I got into the private sector I realized private sector waste is a whole different animal. Obviously there’s the insane CEO pay packages, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Definitely I’ve seen some multi-million-dollar projects that never should have happened and were just the result of our slick salespeople. When I left one job in a layoff I had no way of returning a $3000 laptop because the person I’d return it to was laid off too. It ended up being a nice gift for an amoral friend. Of course layoffs themselves are crazy wasteful, you have tons of hard-earned knowledge walking out the door. They’re almost always random and driven by a desire to temporarily boost the stock price as clueless shareholders are left holding the bag when the company collapses a few years later.
Point is government waste exists, but it’s like a leaky faucet that drips a little. In the private sector, it’s like a faucet that’s constantly running on full blast because everyone is incentivized to maximize the rate of flow.
One could argue it did work, just a little too well. In 1995 forget trans rights, gay marriage was just starting to become a question and about half of white people were still against interracial marriage. As the one atheist kid in that era, I was certainly an outlier and society still regarded it as a default that everyone was religious. Basically only black people were worried about whether police were beating people up too much and for the vast majority the only question was why we weren’t being harsher on criminals. Society’s views on things have changed very rapidly as a result of being able to access information very easily.
I think what we’re seeing today is not a result of the internet, but a reaction to the result of the internet. Things have changed too fast for some and there’s basically a cultural luddite movement.