I noted the other day that Scott Bessent was basically promoting a sort of MAGA Cultural Revolution by forcing white collar workers into manual labor and apparently, this is a common theme among our MAGA overlords. Paul Waldman looked at this in his newsletter today, pointing out that even their promise of good paying factory jobs is a bait and switch:
They have been quite explicit in their hope that the hundreds of thousands of workers being purged from the federal government can be sent to do more “productive” work in factories and mines, as Musk recently tweeted:
“We are shedding excess labor in the federal government,” said Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and “that will give us the labor we need for the new manufacturing.” The idea that a weather forecaster at NOAA or a cancer researcher at NIH or a clerk at the Social Security Administration or a therapist at the VA will only be “productive” if they’re mining copper or making pan-head screws is preposterous. That’s not because we don’t need copper and pan-head screws; we do. But the big mistake would be to assume that what our current rulers want is to create a manufacturing economy in order to produce widely-shared prosperity of the kind we were creating in the 50s and 60s. In fact, they would see that kind of economy as not a triumph but an abomination, one that would have to be crushed.
So what do they actually want? For that you have to keep your eye on the contempt with which they talk about (and treat) federal workers, their commitment to destroying labor unions, their hatred for universities, and their fantastical vision of the possibilities of artificial intelligence. The labor market they want to create is one with a tiny class of tech ubermenschen at the top, a gutted middle class whose jobs will largely be done by AI, a disempowered class of service workers whose wages are kept low, and a similarly disempowered class of manual laborers who can be told that because they are working with their hands they have recovered their lost masculinity.
No unions, no safety regulations, no workers rights. Basically a nightmare.
Do these people truly believe this is what Americans want? Or is it that they just don’t give a damn?
