This episode explores the American bureaucracy, its history, and organizational structure from 1789 to 1930 divided into three eras: The Founding Era (1789 – 1828), The Spoils System Era (1828 – 1883, and the Civil Service Reform Era (1883 – 1930). The problems experienced by our bureaucracy during the Founding Era were minor compared to those encountered during the Andrew Jackson presidency beginning in 1829 with his introduction of the infamous “Spoils System” and his flagrant abuses of presidential powers and the rule of law. Jackson’s presidency, perhaps more than any other, is accurately compared to the Trump presidency but on a smaller scale.

This episode of Fixing America with J Mel explores the damaging effect that minority control, poisonous partisan politics, and mis- and disinformation’s has had on civic participation. That, coupled with Trump’s war on the press, independent agencies, and legislative and bureaucratic oversight has prompted Americans to doubt our democracy and distort its potential. There is a better way: Subordinate politics to governance.

This episode of Fixing America with J Mel highlights how Trump has attacked and damaged individual and societal freedoms, when freedom is most vulnerable, and the lessons we learned, or should have learned, about freedom and its preservation from our own history. And last, we explore how the scientific revolution made positive improvements to our philosophy of individual and societal freedom.

The 2025 Presidential Transition Plan gives the roadmap this regime is using to turn our democracy into an autocracy or oligarchy. This episode reveals that roadmap with specific examples and historic references in support, as follows: create an enemy; fund an army; create chaos & fear; unlawfully seize authority; create an insurrection to quash; invoke martial law; imprison dissidents; centralize all control; use government to steal from vulnerable nations for personal gain; and institutionalize corruption.

American sovereignty belongs to the people. It is being stolen because the Rule of Law and Constitutional Limits are not being respected. This episode reviews the history of discrimination against black people, women, and immigrants to reveal that hard-fought progress made is being systemically taken away – a theft of our sovereignty.

Episode 11 explores how to make our democracy less reliant upon politics and more amenable to problem-solving by strengthening essential tenets of our democracy, beginning with Popular Sovereignty, the ‘We the People’ tenet, and its foundation of free and fair elections and leader accountability.

Many people have been told a conservative democracy will make America great again. The reality is a conservative democracy excludes or minimizes secularism and separation of church and state. We explain why that historically increases the potential for war, suppresses compromise, and denigrates the Rule of Law.

In this episode of Fixing America with J Mel, we explore the current regime’s ultimate goal and strategies. We compare those goal to how our citizens think about the legitimacy of our government and their preference to keep a democracy or reject it. And we explain how “wokeness” is a tool used to manipulate our citizens.