DOGE Is Waging a Class War on America’s New Clerisy

The ever-mounting hysteria over Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) seems to largely be coming from that large sector of Americans who work for, or in other ways feed from, Washington’s seemingly bottomless trough. As government employment and spending have cascaded in recent years, this has created not so much a ‘deep state’, as the right-wing paranoids suspect, but a huge and expanding protected class of people who are anxious to defend their livelihoods.

Most anti-DOGE jeremiads avoid questions of class or self-interest. Predictable Democratic allies, like the Atlantic, accuse Musk of presiding over a ‘reign of ineptitude’ and waging war on defenseless civil servants. Some suggest that this reflects a deep-seated desire by GOP neanderthals to remove objective ‘empiricists’ from Washington – presumably the same ‘experts’ who led the nation into mounting debt, high inflation, increasing class divisions and a chronic inability to get things built at reasonable cost.

Many have resorted to the tired, old ‘fascist’ meme. Anne Applebaum sees Musk’s disruption of the federal bureaucracy as nothing less than the arrival of authoritarian ‘regime change’. As if auditing the bureaucracy is now the first step towards totalitarianism. Even some populist conservatives have warned that the fallout from DOGE’s cuts will ultimately harm vulnerable working-class people the most.

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