Welcome to the Dark Enlightenment
Adding to the chaos in Washington is the fact that there is no one reactionary agenda at play in Trump 2.0. Yes, there is Donald Trump’s attempt to “king me” and join the exclusive Autocrats’ Club with all the appertaining riches and corruption. There is the well-documented Project 2025 with its Heritage and Christian nationalist influences. Bit players are the spineless Republicans kowtowing to Trump and minority Democrats’ flailing in House/Senate disunity.
And then there is Elon Musk and his DOGE coders doing their thing almost independent of everything else. But what their project is is not well understood. Efficiency and cutting waste are a smokescreen.
Mike Brock commented Monday (reacting to a February post by Noah Smith) on the ideological project behind Musk’s activities at Notes from the Circus. “[W]e face not chaotic incompetence but deliberate subversion,” he explains.
Short version, Musk’s anti-democratic DOGE project is in reality “a mechanism of state capture.” Behind him and behind J.D. Vance is eccentric billionaire Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley billionaires with their goal of establishing a “post-liberal order” imagined as a “domain of enlightened autocrats making decisions insulated from public interference.”
When you examine what DOGE is doing in the context of those goals, DOGE makes more sense. But the media has yet to take that project seriously because it sounds so much like a conspiracy theory.
I am reminded of this exchange about another crazy-sounding scheme from Captain America: The First Avenger (2011):
Dr. Arnim Zola: Schmidt believes he walks in the footsteps of the gods.
Col. Chester Phillips: Hm!
Dr. Arnim Zola: Only the world itself will satisfy him.
Col. Chester Phillips: You do realize that’s nuts, don’t you?
Dr. Arnim Zola: The insanity of the plan is of no consequence.
Col. Chester Phillips: And why is that?
Dr. Arnim Zola: Because he can do it!
Brock elaborates:
But if you recognize that Musk’s project is not merely about efficiency but about who controls the levers of power, then you see DOGE for what it is: a mechanism of state capture. A vehicle to strip the government of neutral expertise and replace it with an ideological vanguard, loyal not to institutions but to Musk’s broader anti-democratic project.
Similarly, if you see Peter Thiel merely as a wealthy libertarian with eccentric views, you miss the larger picture—that his project is not just about tax cuts and deregulation, but about the construction of a post-liberal order in which governance is no longer constrained by democratic accountability, but instead functions as a domain of enlightened autocrats making decisions insulated from public interference.
[…]
This is the Silicon Valley delusion in its purest form—the belief that technical proficiency is a substitute for political wisdom. But power is not just about competence. It is about ideology, incentives, and institutional control. Musk is not a stabilizer; he is an accelerant. He is not a bulwark against Trump’s excesses; he is a visionary for a different form of autocracy—one optimized for oligarchic rule rather than nationalist demagoguery.
It also explains Trump’s interest in Greenland. He’s been influenced by Dryden Brown’s Praxis project, another of those “network states” imagined by libertarians with too much money and no sense of civic responsibility as a democracy-free techno-dystopia. Run by them, of course, over your plebian objections.
They also imagine setting up AI-driven, deregulated “freedom cities” in this country and they are presenting those ideas to the Trump administration. Josh Marshall calls it “an important window into what’s happening right now with DOGE.” He emphasizes, “Once you get beneath what we might call the cyber-libertarian spray tan, these are really digital lordships which at a fundamental level would be very at home in the Middle Ages or in the early transitional phases of a number of European maritime empires.”
Marshall warns:
… the real idea here is to stand up what amounts to a sovereignty-free-zone where private corporations can step out of democratic self-government, which is of course the point. As I said, there’s nothing particularly “digital” or “networked” about any of this. These are just lordships which oligarchs now want to carve out of a democratic Republic.
As Brock sees it:
If anything, Musk represents an even more insidious danger than Trump’s erratic nationalism. Trump’s movement is destructive and lawless, but ultimately incompetent—prone to self-sabotage, incapable of sustained governance. Musk, on the other hand, represents the rationalization of autocracy. He doesn’t oppose strongman rule; he wants to optimize it—to strip away inefficiencies, to replace its vulgarities with precision, to run a dictatorship like a well-engineered company.
Run by digital Medicis.
As Zola warned, the insanity of the plan is of no consequence if they can do it.
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