Democracy Dies in Sunlight
What the outrage over Elon Musk and DOGE is really about.
The blitzkrieg-style “online maneuver warfare” that Trump and Musk have employed over the past few weeks, in which the former overwhelms the news cycle with executive orders, interviews, impromptu pressers, and late-night social media posts that shape the national discourse while the latter runs loose within the corridors of power with a crack team of young engineering prodigies,1 pruning the edifice of federal government and its deep entanglement in progressive causes and funding, is causing extreme psychological discomfort on the Left.
A researcher at UC Irvine’s “Coping Lab” tells Axios that a “shock and awe” reorientation of federal priorities is aggravating the “broader collective stress” shared among the mentally fragile. The Daily Beast also notes that psychologists have seen “an increase in patients, largely Democrats, citing burnout and despair in part due to the mounting uncertainty generated by Trump’s rapid-fire policies and the energy required to keep up.”
The desperation that’s taken hold among Democrats confronted with “powerlessness” was perhaps best encapsulated last week, when protestors outside the Treasury Department, having listened “as one after another member of Congress outlined the horrors perpetrated by Musk and his team of tech lackeys,” began plaintively chanting “Tell us what to do!”
Lacking a post-election agenda, and with Trump enjoying an excellent net positive approval rating, Democratic Methuselahs have apparently decided that ginning up opposition to Musk is their best hope for unifying the party. Cringe pageants are being used to incite hysteria among the resistance crowd, with various gerontological specimens doing their utmost to create a political reality through repetitious sermonizing, employing a new catchphrase (“constitutional crisis”) and crafting yet another storyline in which Team Blue is the only thing standing between Our Democracy™ and fascism. The past few weeks have featured various Congress critters like Maxine Waters, Hank Johnson, and Chuck Schumer posturing behind podiums as they make spurious imputations that cutting waste and shrinking a wildly unaccountable bureaucracy is somehow indicative of “an illegal power grab,” describing Musk as a “Taliban terrorist,” “serial constitutional violator,” and “gangster” who’s “dismantling the federal government” and “going after all of your freedoms, all of your rights, all of your money.”
The “Nobody elected Elon Musk” refrain needs to be addressed.
For starters, I don’t recall anyone voting for Biden’s gender gremlin jihadists and longhouse harridans to funnel taxpayer money to super-duper important causes like “Central American gender assessment consultant services” and “Mozambique voluntary medical male circumcisions.” Nor do I recall anyone voting to put Alejandro Mayorkas in charge of the border, Antony Blinken in charge of foreign policy, Jake Sullivan in charge of national security, or Janet Yellen in charge of the economy.
And I would argue that, in a way, people did vote for Elon Musk. It’s not as though his presence in the administration is some sort of long-hidden trap sprung on the American people. Trump gave plenty of advance notice that he intended to put the eccentric billionaire in a role looking for ways to eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse. To say that this is “unlawful” and indicative of an “undemocratic takeover” is nonsense. Precedents from the Obama and Biden administrations support Musk’s role as a special government employee2 of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE),3 which is just a renamed version of the previously extant United States Digital Service created under Obama for the purpose of hiring outside talent to help improve digital services following the infamously glitchy rollout of Obamacare.
Musk’s standing as a political advisor has nothing to do with being the richest man in the world and everything to do with his proven track record as both a master of efficiency and an audacious disruptor. No entrepreneur has ever yielded so many significant achievements in such a short period of time.4 As John McGinnis rightly points out, Musk and his DOGE boys are “analogous to corporate consultants like those at McKinsey, who go over an institution’s operations exhaustively. Such consultants frequently begin with a data analysis of where corporate payments are going.” The access they’ve been granted merely allows for them to make recommendations.
To be fair, Musk said some wildly controversial things over the past few weeks, like:
Goodness gracious! You know who he sounds like? Barack Obama and Joe Biden:
But in the least surprising development ever, the usual house organs are churning out Musk-themed erotic fiction for resistance shitlibs, and much of it has been beyond parody.
Washington Post termagant Ruth Marcus is rending her garments over the “irreparable harm” and “incalculable damage” the country has endured since Trump’s re-election due to his focus on “curtailing government’s power and reach.” “The world’s richest man running amok” while using a “roving strike force to terrorize the bureaucracy” has led to “years of expertise down the drain.”
The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser, dwelling always at the edge of some vast continent of self-induced hysteria, describes Musk’s line-by-line auditing of government spending as a kind of “revolutionary terror” and informs readers that his “sneaky takeover of the apparatus of the vast U.S. executive branch was something entirely new in the annals of global coups.”
And The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum, “All-star Russiagater” and “High Matriarch of All Banality,” penned yet another febrile phantasmagoric fantasy in which she equates Elon Musk cleaning out the Augean stables of the administrative state to literal “regime change.”5
The hyperventilating from Democratic politicians and their wordcel allies is strongly reminiscent of how, when you try to delete a piece of malware, it starts screeching that you’re on the verge of destabilizing and crashing your entire operating system.
None of these people actually believes that Elon Musk is going to “break” the country, or that we’re experiencing an “administrative coup.” It couldn’t be more obvious what all the high dudgeon is about: power and the end of the progressive gravy train.
Far from being a constitutional republic, for some time now the United States has effectively been run by a malignant fourth branch of government overwhelmingly comprised of unelected, unevictable Democratic apparatchiks who exist to facilitate “progressive” governance and impede conservative administrations. Often referred to as the “deep state,” this permanent bureaucracy operates in increasingly flagrant contradiction to the interests of the American people and democratic government, and it has become a massive power center insulated from accountability, immune from the results of elections, and eager to impose its will on the public while making a mockery of constitutional checks and balances.
What I’m describing is not some conspiracy theory. It’s a long-running development that stretches back all the way to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s progressive overhaul of the federal government. It accelerated in the 1970s after the Watergate scandal resulted in huge majorities for Democrats in both houses and the election of Jimmy Carter, who proved more than happy to sign off on congressional Democrats’ raids on the president’s constitutional powers.
The Founding Fathers and the framers of our Constitution believed that liberty should be America’s ne plus ultra, with government a necessary evil that could preserve liberty only if limited by a separation of powers.
For progressives, however, the central goal has always been to “improve” society as a whole (which of course requires empowering progressives). They see government as a “necessary good” that must be used to push people in the direction of Progress™—even at the expense of individual liberty. Hence, like liberty itself, separation of powers is seen as a nuisance that impedes government’s capacity to marshal its resources in pursuit of the collective good.
Progressives eschew discrete branches checking each other while exercising their separate powers, as well as a system of laws made and executed, respectively, by political branches accountable to the people affected. They prefer governance by bureaucracies of theoretically non-partisan experts who should be insulated from political accountability and be allowed to operate like tenured college professors because they’re altruistically devoted to [insert utopian pursuit].
The post–World War II international order introduced the popular progressive “wisdom” that the Constitution is past its sell-by date because it was originally conceived for a more isolated nation in a less complicated world. For decades now, the prevailing thesis on the Left has been that the future belongs to non-partisan professionals who, having been schooled at elite institutions, are equipped with a dry clerical mindset and select credentials entitling them to run our government’s deeper machinery while simultaneously wielding legislative, executive, and judicial powers.6 The Democrat-dominated post-Watergate Congress put this vision into high gear, enacting various bills aimed at extending congressional control over executive agencies and reducing the president’s authority (like the ability to fire insubordinate executive officers) to disturb these arrangements.
Fast forward to present day, and what you essentially have is the facade of a constitutional republic controlled by a sprawling leviathan of agencies staffed by faceless functionaries, a permanent bureaucracy that Andrew McCarthy correctly emphasizes was “founded on the premise that Congress may ignore separation of powers and create a maze of government entities and actors that either are (a) independent of the chief executive even though they execute laws and regulations (e.g., the Environmental Protection Agency and the Federal Communications Commission), or (b) nominally within the executive branch but at least partially insulated from presidential control (e.g., IGs and Justice Department special counsels).”
This progressive vision of governance, in combination with technological and economic changes, coincided with the rise of managerialism — oligarchic technocratic governance rooted in the idea that everything should be deliberately engineered and controlled from the top down by professional managers — and an entire class of effete, college-educated elites who specialize in the manipulation and control of people, information, ideas, and money. As N.S. Lyons points out, because these technocratic “experts” pass through progressive madrassas (read: elite universities), they’re largely “enculturated with the same language, cultural sensibilities, and ideological prejudices as the rest of their peers.” Success within the professional managerial class is heavily dependent on social maneuvering, which requires recitation of and commitment to a “correct” set of beliefs and opinions—a “managerial consensus” that both elevates you to a position of moral superiority and legitimizes your right to rule. This unifying system of moral and philosophical beliefs is basically progressivism 101 and includes a number of core tenets like technocratic scientism and homogenizing cosmopolitan universalism.
In effect, what passes for “democracy” in America is really just managed democracy. And, far from being the “nonpartisan civil servants” they’re made out to be, the vast majority of those doing the managing are Team Blue Janissaries whose beliefs and schemes grate harshly against the interests of ordinary people, and who’re more than willing to subordinate the elementary functions of government to virtuous abstractions and facilitate fraud and corruption under the guise of “pursuing a more just social compact.”
Which brings us back to Democratic outrage over Elon Musk undertaking the Herculean labor of delving into the vertiginous realm of the administrative state to decode the byzantine Rube Goldberg device that’s been siphoning power away from the people and the states. It’s taken the DOGE team less than three weeks to expose not just the pyramid of waste, fraud, and abuse that the Left’s entire professional-activist apparatus is dependent on, but the Beltway-centered governing machinery enabling the nonconsensual rule of America’s managerial class.
“If there’s not a good feedback loop from people to government, and bureaucracy is in charge, then what meaning does democracy actually have?” Musk asked the media the other day.
Imagine arguing against this, against greater transparency. Imagine arguing, as virtually every mainstream media outlet has, that the federal bureaucracy shouldn’t be supervised and directed by political leadership ultimately accountable to the President, and that certain operations of an executive agency must be performed wholly by civil servants outside the ambit of accountability. Imagine defending unelected bureaucrats and special interest groups regularly bypassing the will of the people by undermining or overriding decisions made by elected officials.
And imagine sticking to such a script even as stuff like this comes to light:
Jeffrey Tucker put it thusly: “The crucial point of these days is that the narrative surrounding government has changed. It used to be regarded as the institutional bulwark defending the poor and marginalized. Now it is more correctly seen as the conduit for ruling-class rackets at public expense. Huge shift.”
One party is at least trying to fix this; the other party is defending it.
As DOGE continues its financial proctological examination of the deep state’s books and payment systems, and as the public becomes increasingly aware of the extent to which the federal government has been funneling taxpayer dollars to fringe left-wing causes and abusing its power, the American people will inevitably adopt an increasingly sour view of Democrats, who’ve become “the party of bureaucrats” and are illegally attempting to thwart reductions in federal fraud, waste, and abuse.
The fury over extremely intelligent young people working to improve the federal government is amusing. “They’re too young” is a preposterous objection to data work. Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook at 19; Larry Page and Sergey Brin launched Google at the age of 24; Steve Jobs started Apple when he was 21. History is teeming with examples of individuals who accomplished incredible things at a young age. James Monroe, Alexander Hamilton, John Marshall, and James Madison were all under the age of 25 on July 4, 1776. And the average age of scientists and engineers on the Manhattan Project was 25. Democrats just made David Hogg (24) their new Vice Chair, have long worshiped a teenage climate activist from Sweden, and believe toddlers should be able to make irreversible medical decisions about their bodies. But young adults working for DOGE is a bridge too far?
An individual hired to assist an administration for no more than 130 days.
I don’t recall anyone making a fuss about Democratic heavyweight Anita Dunn serving as a special government employee in the Biden administration.
If you haven’t already, please consider reading a Musk biography. The guy is incredible. In less than 30 years, he has revolutionized online payments, consumer vehicles, satellite internet, and space travel. He’s even managed to connect the human brain to computers. And I do not give a flying fuck that he’s a socially awkward weirdo with Asperger’s Syndrome who’s prone to infidelity, loves juvenile memes, and sometimes indulges in conspiracy theories. Howard Hughes, Henry Ford, Nikola Tesla, Pythagoras, John Napier—history is chock-full of geniuses who were also weirdos. And for the record, I was a huge Musk fan long before he got involved with politics. There are many things I don’t like about him and he’s certainly worthy of criticism. But the people who take such exception to his politics and flaws that they pretend he’s an “evil,” “deeply stupid and incompetent person” who “is simply not very good at anything” are morons.
Applebaum also couldn’t resist throwing a dig at the “so-called Twitter Files scandal” that was used “to discredit researchers and mischaracterize their work.”
After covid, I frankly don't value anyone screeching about 'democracy' or 'fascism'. I saw their actions then and no amount of words can cover up their actions.
I heard a great comment describing the Democrat party
Ideological excess turned to madness