Nihilists on a mission
Yes, their plans are a bizarre geek wet dream. And yes, these gullible “geniuses” are high on their own supply. That doesn’t mean there isn’t an overarching plan flying below the chaos. Or perhaps competing plans.
That jerk-off dance Donald Trump does regularly is actually a fair representation of the forces behind the scenes yanking his strings. Amidst the chaos he’s created in just his first month back in office, it’s now clear just which faction of reactionaries has the figurative upper hand.
FDR’s populism built the middle class that competed with the rich for class and economic domination. Yes, the New Deal helped make the U.S. the predominant world power in the 20th century, and yes, the rich got richer. (Much richer after the Reagan revolution.) But God, man, those uppity poors in the 1960s actually wanted to share power!
Remnants of the conservative old guard, the Koch-style plutocrats behind the Powell memo and the think tanks they built in the 1970s, have longed for decades to tear down New Deal programs. (Even better, privatize them.) Movement conservatism meant to put an end to government that served people besides America’s Most Wealthy. But without killing the golden goose, naturally.
What they didn’t see coming were the techno-state monarchists who wanted to burn down all of it and opt out of society.
Liza Featherstone writes at The New Republic that the burn-it-down boys are not wreaking chaos among popular government programs simply out of hubris:
Most likely, their popularity is precisely what the Trump-Musk administration dislikes about them. For anti-government ideologues, it’s important that people not have good experiences with the government. Every clean energy investment in your community, every Social Security check, every child enrolled in Head Start, every improvement in air and water quality, is a threat to right-wing ideological dominance. They know it, and they want to stop Americans from having those positive associations.
Even Republicans who voted against the Inflation Reduction Act rushed to take credit for its investments in red-state communities. Shutting it down and laying off government employees who form the base of economies in many places over alleged “performance” is not only illegal but guaranteed to be highly unpopular. Which for the DOGEes is just the point.
The ruling class of the 1930s and ’40s would have loved to be in Elon Musk’s position. Although he and his young minions may seem merely like nihilistic psychos, they’re also conservatives doing something that makes rational sense for their political movement. By going after the most popular government programs, they are thinking long-term, planning for a world where no one defends government agencies because these agencies don’t do anything that we value. Elon Musk isn’t just trying to bypass all checks and balances, ignore popular will, plunder our public goods, and wreck the world, though he is doing all that. As we protest this vandalism, we need to remember that he aims to build a future in which we have nothing left to defend.
That is perhaps a tad more disruption than classic conservatives can tolerate. The autocrats also jerking Trump’s strings may wish to see democracy crushed. But paired with capitalism, democracy produces consumers, and consumers produce demand, and demand generates wealth for the plutocrats. And plutocrats pay off autocrats and dictators.
In the tug-of-war among the tech barons, conservative fat cats, American-style fascists, and global autocrats vying for control of the Oval Office, Elon Musk and his delusional DOGEes seem to have the upper hand just now.
As Dave Karpf summarizes in the piece Digby cited yesterday:
The tech barons think they should be allowed to opt out society. They do not know what the administrative state does. They do not care to find out. And they figure we could save a whole lot of money if we just turn the whole thing off.
“Efficiency” is a DOGE smokescreen that plays well in focus groups not told it means they’ll lose their incomes and safety net. By the time they figure it out, the damage is done.
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D) of Maryland lays out the game in a recent interview with Brian Tyler Cohen that Gil Duran transcribes:
We’re dealing with a band of incorrigible, lawless plutocrats who think that they can just control the whole US government. And I keep thinking about what Steve Bannon said about Elon Musk. He said he’s a truly evil individual … But, you know, in the Silicon Valley that network of right-wing billionaire libertarian-turned-authoritarians, they are very open about the fact that they think that democracy is obsolete and we’re living in a post-Constitutional America, the Constitution no longer fits, and they are trying to get everybody ready for a techno-state monarchy.
And in their writings about it they suggest that seizure of the control of technology and computers and financial payments is the essence to moving from one form of government to another. So we’re really talking about people who would like to abolish American constitutional institutions and representative democracy, and the rights and freedoms of the people. Their guy Yarvin, who’s, you know, their big intellectual hero, has said people have got to overcome their fear of the word dictator. He says a dictator is basically just like a corporate CEO. They’re all “dictators” in their businesses and so we need a dictator [for] the corporation that’s the United States of America and obviously they have Elon Musk in mind…
Here’s news on just one of the plans Musk-as-dictator has in mind:
Food and Drug Administration employees reviewing Elon Musk’s brain implant company Neuralink were fired over the weekend as part of a broader purge of the federal workforce, according to two sources with knowledge of the matter.
The cuts included about 20 people in the FDA’s office of neurological and physical medicine devices, several of whom worked on Neuralink, according to the two sources, who asked not to be identified because of fear of professional repercussions. That division includes reviewers overseeing clinical-trial applications by Neuralink and other companies making so-called brain-computer interface devices, the sources said.
Both sources said they did not believe the employees were specifically targeted because of their work on Neuralink’s applications.
Neuralink had its application for human trials denied several years ago after his company “founded in 2016, didn’t seek permission from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) until early 2022 – and the agency rejected the application, seven current and former employees told Reuters.”
The Guardian addressed Neuralink in a story last week, headlined, Elon Musk put a chip in this paralysed man’s brain. Now he can move things with his mind. Should we be amazed – or terrified?
The looney thing is that Musk’s efforts are foreshadowed in a 1960s satire, The President’s Analyst (1967). Dr. Sidney Schaefer (James Coburn) is pursued across the country by alphabet-agency spies from across the planet eager to know what he knows of the president’s mind. Schaefer eventually is captured by the shadowy TPC. They want his help in legislating that everyone have microchips implanted in their brains prenatally. The joke in 1967 was that TPC is The Phone Company. Their goal is efficiency too, to save billions by scrapping all their costly hardware, maintenance, and workforce.
“Can you imagine the ease, the fun, with which you can place a call?” asks Arlington Hewes (Pat Harrington Jr.), the genial president of TPC.
“You’re a megalomaniac,” Schaefer tells Hewes.
We find out later that Hewes is also a Disneyesque animatron. Musk is just the former for now.
Americans are alarmed at the idea of Musk being inside their private data. He wants to be inside their heads as well.
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Have you fought the coup today?