A George Soros of their own
When Elon Musk’s unelected Agents of DOGE kids march in and physically take over government agencies and their computer systems, it’s not exactly a pyrotechnics-fueled professional wrestling extravaganza. But that doesn’t mean it’s not right-wing spectacle. The spectacle simply isn’t for traditional media or a general audience.
Mehdi Hasan and British columnist Owen Jones this morning discuss the rolling authoritarian coup happening in Washington, D.C.
The disconnect between American reality and our peception of a democracy dying is that the latter comes from Latin America, Jones offers. “It’s tanks on the street, the presidential palace getting bombed a bit,” etc. It’s visual in a way that taking over the U.S. Treasury’s payment system is not.
Hasan notes that the real spectacle is happening on Musk’s social media platform.
“He’s just sitting on Twitter, just unilaterally chatting to his right-wing fans, going, ‘What should I cancel next?’ “
That suggests there is a Roman Coliseum quality to DOGE that doesn’t translate to cable TV but plays well on social media. Throwing Christians to the lions. That sort of thing. The emperor surveying the crowd and asking, thumbs up or thumbs down on who dies and who lives.
For a mob conditioned for decades to view the “gummint” as the enemy, the tool of some rich, unreal-American like George Soros, it’s spectacle like Kid Rock machine-gunning cases of Bud Light or Marjorie Taylor Greene blowing up a Prius.
AWESOME! What shall we blow up next?
Call it yee-haw-ism or hell-yeah-ism, that thrill people get in seeing things get violently destroyed (like Trump’s Atlantic City casino). If Musk really wanted to put on a WWE-worthy show, he’d arrange a “rapid unscheduled disassembly” of the headquarters building of whatever agency is tops on the right’s shit list this week. But given how much one of Musk’s rocket failures costs him, it’s probably not an image he wants reinforced when his program depends on government outlays. He’s enjoying playing emperor nonetheless.
It turns out, tweets Jane Coaston of the Times, “that many of the people who claimed to hate Imaginary George Soros Who Runs Everything simply wanted their own.”