You’ve been boarded
Suddenly, and not accidentally, people who work for the American federal government are having the same experience as people who find themselves living under foreign occupation. — Anne Applebaum
More than a few of us not in federal employ feel the same. People I know have, like the refugees in Casablanca, fled the occupation. Except today it is the U.S. they are fleeing, not fleeing to.
Applebaum suggests that whether Musk-Trump’s Project 2025 saboteurs call their goal “Liberation Day,” or replacing all mid-level bureaucrats with MAGA loyalists (RAGE, in Curtis Yarvin’s coinage), or Steve Bannon’s “deconstruction of the administrative state,” regime change from within is the goal although their motivations may differ.
Hugo Chávez used a similar approach in Venezuela, as did Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Applebaum explains:
Trump, Musk, and Russell Vought, the newly appointed director of the Office of Management and Budget and architect of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025—the original regime-change blueprint—are now using IT operations, captured payments systems, secretive engineers, a blizzard of executive orders, and viral propaganda to achieve the same thing.
This appears to be DOGE’s true purpose. Although Trump and Musk insist they are fighting fraud, they have not yet provided evidence for their sweeping claims. Although they demand transparency, Musk conceals his own conflicts of interest. Although they do say they want efficiency, Musk has made no attempt to professionally audit or even understand many of the programs being cut. Although they say they want to cut costs, the programs they are attacking represent a tiny fraction of the U.S. budget. The only thing these policies will certainly do, and are clearly designed to do, is alter the behavior and values of the civil service. Suddenly, and not accidentally, people who work for the American federal government are having the same experience as people who find themselves living under foreign occupation.
Ask the people of Ukraine what that’s like.
What Musk-Trump means to achieve — Musk by Bond-villain design and Trump by feral instinct — is to replace the long-established culture of public service with something other. Applebaum is not sure what, but it’s not American.
Christian nationalists want a religious state to replace our secular one. Tech authoritarians want a dictatorship of engineers, led by a monarchical CEO. Musk and Trump might prefer an oligarchy that serves their business interests.
You can bet it will reflect the corruption at Trump’s core. Per Vought’s designs (himself a Christian nationalist), civil servants “who had previously viewed themselves as patriots, working for less money than they could make in the private sector,” Applebaum explains, “must be forced to understand that they are evil, enemies of the state.”
From where federal workers now sit (state workers and university employees soon enough, then you), they can either resist the Nazis or join the Vichy government. That’s how Applebaum frames the choice in her link: “Putting them all together, the actions of Musk and DOGE have created moral dilemmas of a kind no American government employee has faced in recent history. Protest or collaborate? Speak up against lawbreaking or remain silent?”
Drink the Vichy water or waste-bin it?
The Ink this morning proposes another analogy for regime change: alien invasion.
In Cixin Liu’s massively popular sci-fi epic The Three-Body Problem, an advanced society abandons their collapsing planet and sets out to take over the Earth. But to pave the way and make sure they don’t meet effective resistance, they monkey wrench human progress by distributing viral propaganda, recruiting allies in the gaming community, cutting sweetheart deals with oligarchs, and interfering with scientific research.
Thus, Physics World reports:
Scientists across the US have been left reeling after a spate of executive orders from US President Donald Trump has led to research funding being slashed, staff being told to quit and key programmes being withdrawn. In response to the orders, government departments and external organizations have axed diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programmes, scrubbed mentions of climate change from websites, and paused research grants pending tests for compliance with the new administration’s goals.
James Gates, a theoretical physicist at the University of Maryland, warned an audience this month at the Royal College of Art in London, “My country is in for a 50-year period of a new dark ages.”
The Ink continues, “It’s as if the tech oligarchs who’ve journeyed from South Africa to remake America — the guys who, as therapist Daniel Shaw remarked, ‘read Orwell’s 1984 and decided the hero was Big Brother’ — read Liu’s trilogy and decided the San-Ti (the alien invaders) were the heroes.”
We cautioned yesterday, that in plain view and through sheer doggedness, the United Daughters of the Confederacy succeeded in fixing “The Lost Cause” myth in minds across the South and farther for generations. Christian nationalists want a Jesus-über-alles theocracy and damn your religious freedom. Tech billionaires want their Red Caesar. The international autocrats’ club wants a capitalism even more rapacious, NATO castrated, and popular sovereignty replaced with neo-feudalism. They are all so focused on powers they hope to accrue that they’ve blinded themselves to what they likely will lose in making a devil’s bargain. None of this is secret, but their plans are obscured by the sideshow antics of men like Elon Musk and Donald Trump.
Americans busy working and paying bills will be slow to catch on to what they are losing. Perhaps until it’s too late. But our history also holds solitary heroes like Rosa Parks whose actions inspire transformational movements. Pray we have a few left.
A commentator the other day said that there are only two guardrails left against Musk-Trump’s predations, meaning Congress and the courts. He was wrong. There is a third: Americans in the streets.