DOGE Is Waging a Class War on America’s New Clerisy
Elon Musk’s department represents a significant challenge to the entitled, well-paid and self-serving bureaucracy.
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.
Politics
.webp)
Liberal Democracy Reexamined: Leo Strauss on Alexis de Tocqueville
This article explores Leo Strauss’s thoughts on Alexis de Tocqueville in his 1954 “Natural Right” course transcript.
%20(1).avif)
Long Distance Migration as a Two-Step Sorting Process: The Resettlement of Californians in Texas
Here we press the question of whether the well-documented stream of migrants relocating from California to Texas has been sufficient to alter the political complexion of the destination state.
%20(3).avif)
Who's That Knocking? A Study of the Strategic Choices Facing Large-Scale Grassroots Canvassing Efforts
Although there is a consensus that personalized forms of campaign outreach are more likely to be effective at either mobilizing or even persuading voters, there remains uncertainty about how campaigns should implement get-out-the-vote (GOTV) programs, especially at a truly expansive scale.
International Law Is Holding Democracies Back
The United States should use this moment to argue for a different approach to the rules of war.
Trump purged America’s Leftist toxins. Now hubris will be his downfall
From ending DEI madness and net zero to securing the border, he’ll leave the US stronger. But his excesses are inciting a Left-wing backlash
California’s wealth tax tests the limits of progressive politics
Until the country finds a way to convince the average American that extreme wealth does not come at their expense, both the oligarchs and the heavily Democratic professional classes risk experiencing serious tax raids unseen for decades.
How FDR’s Bold Experimentation Blinkered the American Economy
Overall, False Dawn is a disciplined, evidence-heavy challenge to the New Deal’s most self-flattering myth: that bold experimentation rescued the American economy.
