Anyone that has read chunks of Marx’s Capital will know that he often explicitly and not trivially implicitly draws on data and evidence gathered and published in reports by select committees of the British Parliament. Most of these reports he draws on were written before the great expansions of the franchise, and so are effectively produced by the propertied representatives of the propertied classes in what can be fairly called an oligarchic government. Despite the (let’s stipulate) non-trivial class biases built into this reporting structure, the ‘blue books’ or ‘parliamentary papers’ (as they were known) were sufficiently objective and informative to be useful to the great enemy of oligarchy and property.
These nineteenth century oligarchs knew what they were doing. They needed objective information to help structure their internal debates about empire and national governance, and also to shape policy. (Elite bargaining is, of course, still an important function for the publication of public statistics and forecasting.) These reports also shaped the development of the administrative state. For example, the predecessor to the UK’s national statistics office, General Register Office for England and Wales, itself was born from such a select committee report in the first half of the nineteenth century.
Now, Foucault and James C. Scott and their followers have done immensely important work to show that the state’s ability to make populations legible is an instrument of control not just for (let’s stipulate) the oligarchs and political elites in whose favor things are run, but also for the technicians and technocrats who control the instruments of data gathering and classification (and so on), and who can implement and guide policy that presupposes authoritative data and knowledge. And so, more subtly, as many historians of science have noted, the statistical revolution — accompanied by the development of ‘social’ sciences — helped cement an alliance, or a mutually supportive relationship, between State and (big) Science. If you want you can trace that back to that great mercantilist, Colbert, in the seventeenth century who also helped organize the French Academy of Science. (But if you want to focus on Bacon or Petty, or some earlier thinker elsewhere that’s fine.)
But, as many theorists throughout the millennia have recognized, the state’s possession and distribution of (ahh) information played three other, often mutually supporting, non-trivial roles. (What follows is not a contradiction to the projects of Foucault and Scott.)
First, it is a symbol of sovereignty. (I return to this below.) This is most evidence in the monopoly control over the Mint and coinage. This symbol also had direct financial benefits (through seigniorage, taxation, etc.) to the Crown, of course, but also indirect ones because it made long distance trade possible (which may well be a monopoly or interest of that Crown).
Second, as is well recognized (especially by economists), the provision of and standardizing information is itself a public good, and may reduce coordination costs (think of measures and weights) and uncertainty immensely and itself allows the development of all kinds of private and other public goods. This is, in part, the flipside of a legible population. As my co-author Nick Cowen and I emphasize, what we call the “machinery of government” creates an “articulate state.” This sounds fancy, but it really involves all kinds of basic record-keeping of (deeds, births, deaths, property, geography, climate, etc.) that is the quiet background condition for much of our individual and associative agency.
Third, and this is already tugged into features of the first and second roles: the state witnesses truth, and thereby makes a shared lifeworld possible. (Recall the stamp of sovereignty above.) Now, I have adopted this terminology from the work of the philosopher Tom Pink (who uses it to describe the mission of the Church). Pink, who is an integralist, has some non-trivially different theoretical views than I. But his terminology is quite useful.
Now, as a descriptive fact the modern State is constantly witnessing truth. This is because it has the power and authority to help create and (sometimes) constitute social facts, and sometimes because it is the only instrument that can disseminate any facts or categories that we use to organize our lives on a massive scale at all. Of course, some of this witnessing is highly contested [think about formal sex assignation or citizenship], and in most societies the state doesn’t have a monopoly on witnessing and has rivals or competitors in the Church/churches, the Academy, non-profit Encyclopedias, activist groups (think of patient-activists), and even private industry (Google, Bloomberg, etc.).
The previous paragraph hints at the fact that from a normative perspective witnessing truth is a non-trivial matter in a number of complex (and sometimes) interacting ways. Because of the major fault-lines in twentieth century political philosophy, the witnessing truth element in the building blocks of the articulate state have been under-theorized.
In addition, in the processes that I have called witnessing truth and the machinery of government there may never be a fixed line of what should be a government monopoly and what can be organized in the non-profit or even profit private sphere. Many contemporary societies have non-trivially different practices (and non-trivially different privacy protections). A digression cannot wish to pontificate on all the normative and practical principles at once.
The last two weeks have seen a number of highly irregular practices develop Stateside since the creation of The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) as controlled by Elon Musk, apparently the world’s richest person. DOGE’s own status within the government is highly unorthodox, and its practices thus far, too. There seems to be little regard for conflicts of interests (and a whole range of other concerns one might have).
But DOGE’s actions have immediately impacted the second and third of the functions I have mentioned above. When it comes to the three roles established above, a non-trivial number of websites have gone dark, government agencies appear to be closed down, and research halted, and even ended. In addition, some of the public provision of goods and witnessing of truth is being privatized for profit.
So, the second Trump administration is embarking on some dramatic actions that will destabilize existing conventions in and the known workings of the machinery of government and the state’s witnessing of truth. Quite a few of DOGE’s immediate targets are central to both functions (CDC, NSF, NOAA, etc.). To the best of my knowledge no group with such evident oligarchic tendencies has ever embarked on this road with such reckless abandon before. And whatever their motives, I am pretty confident that they have no idea what kind of intermediate effects they will generate.
I allow one exception for the blanket claim I just made. It’s predictable their actions in the disrupting of the machinery of record and state’s witnessing of truth will reduce social trust and so increase social conflict and coordination costs (and reduce long term growth rate). I suspect that the more politically savvy among them expect to be make a profit of that, too, (as they have done already in the last few decades). Yet, we’re soon entering territory where the cascade effects will be quite unforeseen and uncontrollable and, if copied elsewhere, where the state’s role in shaping our life-worlds and social practices will inevitably be quite different than the pattern of (say) the last hundred years.
{ 34 comments }
Peter Dorman 02.07.25 at 6:13 pm
I’m in nearly complete unsympathy with the perspective of this post, but there’s no point in going there in this context. The only thing I’ll point out is that the development of technology in all its forms (production, communication, transportation) has engendered massive social and economic dislocations and problems along with obvious countervailing benefits. Much of the politics of the last 150 or so years centers on disputes over how much and how to regulate these systems. The steady growth (until last week) of state capacity is both a reflection of and a contributor to these contestations. If you try to reduce this world into a simple binary (labor-capital, subjects and objects of knowledge-power) you lose almost everything.
As for Musk, the rational explanation is his belief, which he shares with other tech libertarian-authoritarians, that the regulatory state is almost entirely an obstruction to the progress of humanity and ought to be dismantled. He’s said this several times, so we can take him at his word. I do not expect the wrecking ball to hit the FBI, the State Department or the intelligence agencies, but rather preservation, even enhancement of their capacities, placed under personalist control. We shall see. But there are nonrationalist explanations too, along the lines of having drunk too much of his own koolaid. We shouldn’t forget that Musk is not very smart.
Lee A. Arnold 02.07.25 at 7:12 pm
Democratic Party should say loud and clear that any government employee who becomes a whistleblower, or breaks a confidentiality agreement by going public with information, will be given a pardon by the next Democratic president, and reinstated with full back pay.
Alex SL 02.07.25 at 11:35 pm
We are really living in an exceptional moment. Apart from Musk being stopped in the next few weeks, there are two possible outcomes here:
Either my entire worldview is completely wrong, and it turns out that getting rid of the vast majority of state functions and regulations is compatible with having the kind of complex economy that can provide weather satellites, life-saving organ transplants, cell phones, and aircraft carriers, and also, creating a system of 18th century social mores for the masses but libertarian freedom for a handful of billionaires will lead to unprecedented prosperity and progress.
Or the USA are currently unprompted, unnecessarily, and under the horrified gaze of all of their allies shooting their own legs off in the hope of being able to run faster.
The cult-like nature of what is happening is not entirely unprecedented – Lysenko comes to mind for his absolute dedication to prioritising ideology over evidence, and the Khmer Rouge in that they had the same respect for expertise and administrative capability as Musk has. What makes this moment so unique is not that arrogance but how unprompted and unnecessary it all is. The USA aren’t experiencing economic collapse, nor did they recently free themselves from colonialism, and nor did they just get defeated in WW1 at great loss of working-age men. The USA are prosperous and powerful; even the Trump voters who complain about inflation are living in a bubble of safety and prosperity unparalleled by what their ancestors had over millennia, and much of their complaint is at any rate partisan. (I.e., their concerns about inflation magically disappeared on 6 November 2024 and will at the earliest resurface in November 2028, should a Democrat win then. People in actual economic distress don’t tend to vote conservative but often don’t vote at all.)
The world’s foremost superpower may be in the process of turning itself into a failed state thanks to an alliance of voters who think that Trump is a business genius who will pay off the national debt using blockchain and voters who want to make sexist jokes without anybody being allowed to get mad at them. The question “stupid or evil” being answered with: some of both.
Again, maybe that is just my ideological bias, and I am curious to see if Musk is right about most government administration being waste and most regulation being unnecessary. But it does seem to me that this is a case of taking the stability and functionality of our world for granted, of not understanding that removing the investment that creates a benefit will make that benefit disappear. It may, however, take ten or twenty years for some of the consequences to unfold, especially in areas such as medical research, consumer safety, or soft power projection.
somebody who remembers the guns at school board meetings the last four years 02.08.25 at 12:59 am
it’s just another book-burning, but this time it’s people rich enough to buy an entire PMC army instead of people bringing shitty faux-tactical AR-15s to scream at school board members that the library is turning the kids trans.
bruce wilder 02.08.25 at 5:07 am
We live in an era in which much of the administrative capacity of the state is given over to keeping secrets, promoting deceptions and generating propaganda. Those partisans who would aspire to be authorized by a misinformed electorate to govern the state cultivate their own capacity to “control the narrative” through reckless propaganda and indirect influence over Media platforms that gatekeep the expression of opinion.
Oligarchs of 19th century England, resting on the political foundation of an hereditary landed aristocracy dating at least to the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the 16th century, enhanced by subsequent imperial pillage and plunder, may not have felt the need to keep secrets or to manipulate a mass audience to maintain a hold on political power.
Ideally, perhaps, we can acknowledge the need for a modicum of realism and integrity for either the institutions of representative democracy to function or for “expert” institutions to maintain competence. But, realistically, do we have a basis for claiming that we have that requisite modicum?
We would do well to remember that we have, collectively, sown the wind.
nastywoman 02.08.25 at 1:06 pm
OR – as in the NYMag – so much better:
‘Musk’s role here is, as the Silicon Valley adage goes, to “move fast and break things.” He sees the government as a sclerotic and inefficient instrument, fettered by regulation and ideology. But in many government systems — including the Treasury payment system recently seized by Musk’s team of peach-fuzz prefects — inefficiency is a feature, not a bug. Nathan Tankus, an expert on the government’s fiscal plumbing, told The American Prospect that his “central terror” in regard to Musk is that he will look at “the redundancies which are the premise of mission-critical IT systems … and say look at this inefficiency.” In matters of state, inefficiency is the price we pay for consistency, for fail-safes and predictability. If the Treasury system goes haywire because one of Musk’s whiz kids messes with the code, we could see Social Security and disability checks interrupted, veterans deprived of health care, kids going hungry. We saw a preview of this sort of crisis on January 27, when an Office of Management and Budget memo (later rescinded) froze federal grant payments across the government, causing health-care officials to lose access to the Medicaid portal. The administration may or may not have intended this outcome, but a larger and longer malfunction, whether mistaken or engineered, could cost lives.
The Silicon Valley mind-set is also perilous for personnel policy. For tech leaders, people themselves are an impediment, an anachronism holding back our machine-led future. (If the overeducated middle strata can’t be disabused of their progressive notions, they can at least be replaced by AI.) But firing or forcing retirement on large portions of the federal workforce and waiting to see which systems falter in the breach — as Musk did when he took over Twitter — is not a risk the government can afford. You can’t rip the wiring out of the walls to map the circuitry. For many parts of the bureaucracy, including those that could use renovation, the mantra is the opposite of Silicon Valley’s: Move slowly and try not to break anything because human lives hang in the balance. According to an internal FAA report, staffing at Reagan’s air-traffic-control tower the night of the collision was “not normal for the time of day and volume of traffic.” Per the Times, a single controller was handling an amount of work usually assigned to two. This is effectively the future Trump and Musk want. It is one in which many good people would be made to witness terrible, preventable catastrophes — while resorting to God’s mercy alone’.
Alex SL 02.08.25 at 10:00 pm
bruce wilder,
Yours is a very odd statement. The conversation is taking place in the context of a neo-nazi man-child deleting all information on climate change so that the public cannot see any information about it and of US science being gleichgeschaltet to deny the existence of transgender people and of any effects of poverty and inequality on social outcomes. But your immediate concern is that past governments have been keeping secrets?
Yes, of course, every complex organisation that wants to remain functional will have to manage some confidential information, be it the personal identity of an informant in an enemy state, research data that are still being prepared for a patent application, or the fact that a staff member has a medical condition that they do not want widely known. Other pieces of information are merely irrelevant to everybody except those directly affected, and it would be effectively impossible to make everything transparent; who exactly needs to know the list of the books that are in my office right now? This all appears legitimate to me and is, as far as “keeping secrets” is concerned, in no way comparable to deleting the database of past USAID projects or actively erasing the history of black and indigenous people from public memory.
More to the point, budget allocations and staff numbers are generally publicised in easily accessible reports. You can even find those numbers on Wikipedia. Voters do not think that 25% of the budget is foreign aid because the true number is cunningly hidden. They do so because they are too lazy to look it up, and at any rate people usually don’t want to accept being wrong once they have worked themselves up into righteous indignation.
As for “promoting deceptions and generating propaganda”, I think you are confusing public servants who work under strict record keeping and freedom of information request laws with Fox News, Facebook’s algorithm, and the Telegraph newspaper.
It is also odd that you are talking of “we have, collectively, sown the wind”. If you actually mean collectively, then that means you are including Trump voters, and I struggle to see what your conclusion is even supposed to be. An alternative interpretation is that you view the readers and commenters on this blog collectively as the past US government that is now reaping the storm of being kicked by Trump voters. But I was not a high-level policy maker in the administration of Joe Biden, and I strongly assume the same is true for at least the vast majority of readers and commenters here. Even if had been high-level anything anywhere to influence policy, as a nerdy scientist, I am extremely happy to tell anybody exactly what I am doing in my work and how; just try to shut me up, if you can! (The reality is that most people don’t care.)
Given all of that, what are you actually talking about?
LFC 02.09.25 at 2:39 pm
Peter Dorman @1
We shouldn’t forget that Musk is not very smart.
Musk has claimed that USAID is full of “radical Marxists” (and Trump has echoed this). Assuming Musk believes this, and even if one knew nothing else about Musk, this alone establishes: (1) that he’s not very smart, or (2) that he’s extremely ignorant (which is different from lack of intelligence), or (3) both.
steven t johnson 02.09.25 at 5:00 pm
Yes, asking for free teaching online is rather gauche…but in my defense it is the tribute of respect?
So, I am so far behind that I haven’t yet figured out how DOGE isn’t explicable as a private attempt to purge the government? It has a facade of being an actual department of government, but it is not in any previously understood sense of the word. So at this point I don’t understand how the point is to criticize how it restructures government, but to reject the entire project.
My feeling is that if this happened in a history book, it would be straightforwardly described as how an autocracy was set up, under cover of bromides evoking tradition. (Perhaps I don’t understand how America is exceptional and thus can’t be analogized to Caesar Augstus setting up a principate with all the old names?) And my reaction is to think DOGE is even more suitable as a candidate for RICO statutes than the Federalist Society.
It may be effrontery, but could anyone sketch how I’ve gotten it so wrong?
bruce wilder 02.09.25 at 8:45 pm
@ Alex SL
I was commenting on the OP, and its sleight-of-hand in using the early modern history of state-building to identify fundamental functions of the state supposedly under attack by Trump and Elon Musk, while hiding from the implications of more recent history that might be found inconvenient to acknowledge, not just for the OP’s argument but for some large part of CT’s community.
I do find the election of Trump and Elon Musk’s manic stampede thru the China shop — if that is what it is — of bureaucratic process alarming, but I await developments in that regard before forming my understanding. I have hypotheses about Musk’s intent and so on, of course, but consequences will follow only after opposing political forces have made themselves felt. My comment was in a highly indirect way making an observation about the degeneracy of some of those latent opposing political forces.
With regard to the OP, I do think Eric’s use of the religious phrase, “witnessing truth”, to denote a function of institutions put in jeopardy by the Trump whirlwind a bit cute, in light of recent history. He acknowledged the “highly contested” nature of some “social facts” governments may have a hand in forming, but chose not to come to grips with a core element of the partisan struggle in U.S. politics: that Democrats in 2016, to arm themselves with a manipulative propaganda narrative and secure support from certain business interests, made an alliance with the intelligence agencies, an alliance that entailed the risks and costs of a proxy war with a nuclear power. Whether you think the Presidency of an already corrupted politician with advanced Parkinson’s was a mere coincidence or the furtherance of Deep State policy is the stuff of conspiracy theories, because we no longer have reliable witnesses to history in our institutions. That certainly is not consistent with the prevailing narrative of the Ukraine War. Maybe a girl and five guys met in a bar, rented a sailboat and blew up Nordstream. Could happen, I guess.
Like Peter Dorman, I do not imagine anything good will come out of “reform” of the CIA or FBI by authoritarians like Musk or Trump. That would be a delusional expectation. But, the realignment of politics that had a Democratic Senator last week demanding that a Trump nominee denounce Snowden as a traitor is very real. I just do not think there is enough integrity or principle left in the Democratic Party to matter. So we are left with the bizarro-world of Republican populism in its alliance with the usual cast of Country Club crooks that made up the traditional Republican Party.
JPL 02.09.25 at 10:19 pm
LFC@8:
I would agree that Elon Musk is both not very smart and extremely ignorant, but not necessarily based on his claim that USAID is full of radical Marxists, since I’m not sure he really believes that irrelevant idea. I think probably he uttered those words only to give an excuse for the MAGA types to go along with his focus on USAID in particular. He seems to have a personal vendetta against USAID because of its role in ending apartheid in SA, which of course shows that he would be on the side of the racist Afrikaners in that ongoing conflict, also evidenced by his probable role in ending aid to SA and indicating support for Afrikaners in their cause. I don’t recall Trump mentioning these USAID and SA issues in his campaign, so this Trump response is probably to please Musk rather than his voters.
But I want to mention something about the larger project that the attempted USAID destruction is a part of. The larger project seems to be to illegally take over the mechanisms of government functioning and bring it under the total control of the executive branch, bypassing the constitutional role of the legislature in determining policymaking leading to budgets and appropriations. The idea that this aim is based on is a crackpot idea and can’t work out in practical terms. But it seems that the underlying (determining) motivation for this motley group of billionaires is not primarily the traditional moneylust, or powergrabbing in the service of moneylust, although it surely includes that, but rather it seems to stem from the belief, typical of so-called “conservatives”, that they alone know what’s best for the country, that what they are doing is in service to putting these crackpot ideas into practice, and they’re just going to do it themselves. Musk has a lot of crackpot ideas that that he tries to instantiate in action, not necessarily the same as those of Russell Vought, etc. I don’t have time to list them here.
So what I want to know is, where do these crackpot ideas come from and how do people come to believe them? The intellectual attitude behind this project seems to be a war against rationality, reasonableness, truth-seeking and best practices of problem-solving by causal analysis, as used in the sciences. So what they are doing lacks seriousness (it is corrupt) because it is merely scheming to get what they want. What leads people to take on this self-serving approach to problem-solving, even beyond serving their moneylustful needs? What is it that separates serious problem-solving under ideals of truth, equivalence and reciprocity from this kind of crackpottery? That’s an ongoing question, but what to do? How about, for a start, explicitly refuting the crackpot ideas and incompetent approaches to practical problem-solving for the benefit of those of us who have not yet abandoned rationality to the blood-dimmed tide, the mire of human veins? (Sorry for the long post, I tried to make it as concise as possible.)
LFC 02.10.25 at 2:54 am
JPL @11
A couple of fairly brief points. First, with the caveat that I am very far from an expert on the modern history of South Africa, I’m not aware that USAID had much to do with ending apartheid (though I will stand open to correction by those who may be better informed). The fight against apartheid was largely, I think, carried out by S. Africans themselves with help in terms of the armed aspect of the fight from a few allies. The apartheid South African government was gradually isolated internationally, but the U.S. took time to impose its own sanctions — it did so in 1986, with Congress overriding Reagan’s veto, iirc.
Second, I’m not sure whether Musk has ever expressed his ideas, or what passes for his ideas, except on X and in occasional interviews and/or speeches. By contrast, Russell Vought, a self-described “Christian nationalist,” in addition to contributing heavily to the Project 2025 document, wrote a piece in 2022 that lays out his notion of “radical constitutionalism.” (His views and career were the subject of a Wash Post piece in June 2024 that I just came across.) I haven’t really read the 2022 piece yet but will link it below, along with a fairly lengthy related (and critical) analysis that I’ve only skimmed through.
https://americanmind.org/salvo/renewing-american-purpose/
https://www.aei.org/op-eds/the-trump-executive-orders-as-radical-constitutionalism/
JPL 02.10.25 at 6:46 am
LFC@12:
Thanks for responding. I myself was not aware that USAID had played any role at all in ending apartheid, and have always believed that South Africans themselves were primarily the effective force. (I have always praised the role of the clergy (Desmond Tutu, Alan Boesak, for ex.) The only foreign influence that I could have pointed to would be the communists from Cuba. I wish I could cite the source for the info about Musk’s attitude toward USAID being related to his South African experience, but I can only say it was from recent reporting in either the Guardian, WaPo or NYT. In any case it’s a relationship that can be clarified, and it leaves open the question of why he has it in for the USAID to such an extent. However that shakes out, the animus toward USAID seems to be driven more by Musk personally than by pressure from the MAGA voters.
Again, let’s lay out the texts where he attempts to express what passes for the ideas, wherever they are, that underlie his actions, his “views”, and let’s look at them. I’m trying to agree with you that he’s not very smart, but I want to focus on the particular kind of maladaptive thinking that he tends to engage in. It’s that kind of thinking that is the problem. It doesn’t do any good to use labels like “radical constitutionalism” and “Christian nationalism” to try to understand the faulty logic and absence of ethical grounding of the approach these people take to the task of problem-solving. You have to look at the sentences that express what passes for their pre-action thinking.
Chris Bertram 02.10.25 at 11:17 am
The state’s capacities to standardize information and to “witness truth” are certainly going to be contested by competitors, as you say. But another thing worth noting is that this is going to play out differently defending on the dominant language of the state concerned. For a long time, for example, the French state was sufficiently dominant within la Francophonie that it got to set the standards and social facts and even, via the Académie Francaise the contours of the language. Presumably the Hungarian and Greek states are even more uncontested in their local domains. However, an English-speaking state cannot hope for such dominance as there will always be other Anglophone states and millions of other Anglophones making practices that are continually candidates for adoption elsewhere.
Eric Schliesser 02.10.25 at 4:36 pm
Hi JPL,
As it happens, I just published a piece on Vought here:
https://digressionsimpressions.substack.com/p/on-our-post-constitutional-moment
Let me know what you think?
After I publish the second part, I’ll probably adapt both for CrookedTimber at some point.
Eric Schliesser 02.10.25 at 4:38 pm
Hi Chris,
Yes, I fully agree that this plays out differently in different contexts. And it helps that while CrookedTimber is US-centric, so many of us live on distant shores with politics that have different institutional and historical pathways, so we don’t conflate the US with all the possibilities.
somebody who remembers what musk actually thinks about jewish people 02.10.25 at 6:37 pm
saying that usaid didn’t actually overthrow apartheid in south africa is irrelevant – deranged racists like musk believe that black people, violent and low-iq as they all are, only take action when ordered to by race-traitor white people (or, given musk specifically, “The International Jew” ™). black people had nothing to do with their own liberation in south africa, to musk. if they did then his beliefs in racial supremacy are wrong. unthinkable, he’s the richest man in the world, he has to be right! therefore usaid did it. simple logic inside a simple brain.
LFC 02.10.25 at 7:51 pm
JPL @13
You write that we have to look at the “texts.” Well, I provided a text in the first link in my comment @12. Just as Eric Schliesser analyzes Vought’s essay in the Substack piece to which he links @15, so you (JPL) could look at Vought’s text should you have the time and inclination to do so.
Instead of thanking me for providing that link, you proceeded to deliver a lecture about the uselessness of labels: “It doesn’t do any good [you wrote] to use labels like ‘radical constitutionalism’ and ‘Christian nationalism’ to try to understand the faulty logic and absence of ethical grounding of the approach these people take to the task of problem-solving. You have to look at the sentences that express what passes for their pre-action thinking.”
Putting to one side your debatable use of the phrase “the task of problem-solving,” that comes very close to saying: It doesn’t do any good to label Lenin a revolutionary Communist without having read and parsed every sentence of State and Revolution, and it doesn’t do any good to label Hitler a Nazi without having read and parsed every sentence of Mein Kampf, and it doesn’t do any good to label Robert Owen a (certain kind of) socialist without having read every word of A New View of Society, and it doesn’t do any good to label Mill a liberal without having parsed every sentence of On Liberty, etc., etc. While I’m all in favor of reading the “texts,” that strikes me as a somewhat bizarre position, to put it politely.
Alex SL 02.10.25 at 10:33 pm
As a response to the last few comments:
It is a general principle that I already learned in what would here be called high school age that it is futile to try to convert those who have already loudly proclaimed their support of a nonsense idea. You can only hope to convert those who have not yet spoken up, those who are on the fence. Right now, about a third of the US population is deeply invested in a cult. They cannot be reasoned with. Even if Musk burned down the entire country and salted the soil of their own gardens specifically while they were watching, these voters would never admit that their core beliefs are wrong but at most conclude that the failure to achieve an ethnically cleansed tech utopia with 10% annual economic growth and zero public debt is the fault of Democrat obstruction and of traitors in the Deep State. The only hope is to address unaffiliated voters and the next generation growing up.
As for how they got to that point, I do not know. But the starting point would be academic research on cults. These people profess to believe that:
The 6 January rioters were heroes who have been treated unfairly and 6 January was a false flag operation by antifa.
Covid-19 is just the common cold and Covid-19 is a Chinese bioweapon.
Left-wing activists are evil for wanting to censor language by outlawing the word “woman” in favour of “person with uterus” and it is just and right that all research papers are censored and all grant proposals are rejected if they contain the word “woman” (but “man” is okay).
Add to that those fascinating graphs that show economic and inflation concerns separated by party affiliation, with Republican voters’ concerns completely uncoupled from economic reality but perfectly correlated with whether or not their party holds the presidency.
It is generally not productive to pathologise one’s political opponents. Socialists, greens, conservatives, religious conservatives are not mentally ill but merely have different values and world views. But in this particular case, pathology is evident. It is not merely a different set of values but blind adherence to a cult. Beneficial or adverse outcomes, evidence, and logic are subordinate to the cult scoring a win over the enemy of the day.
Musk himself is, however, much simpler. First, he is a racist. Second, his image is build on “fake it till you make it” and “move fast, break things” tech ideology, and he is now applying that to government. Third, he is a con man who has serially over-promised, under-delivered, and never faced any repercussions for it, so he has concluded he can keep doing it (robotaxis, full self-driving, Mars colonisation, hyperloop, cybertruck, etc.). Fourth, he is so unfathomably rich that concepts like you or I not making rent, not being able to trust product safety, or having our entire life savings wiped out by a financial crash are incomprehensible to him. He really is an immature child in a billionaire’s body, and people’s lives and livelihoods are like the ants that the immature child squishes for fun because his doting mother never tells him that ants also deserve some empathy.
JPL 02.10.25 at 11:10 pm
LFC@18:
Oh dear, I thought I was just making a friendly comment. I really was pressed for time yesterday, so no doubt my reply was too hastily drafted. I remembered after I posted it that I forgot to thank you for the links, so thank you for those. They are very helpful; I had seen the Goldsmith/Bauer article, but have not had a chance to read it. And Eric’s Substack article looks like just what I was talking about, so I am going to read that one at the earliest opportunity.
My remark about labels was not directed at you, but is just part of my general complaint about the unanalyzed use of labels in philosophy (e.g., realism/antirealism, empiricism/idealism, etc.) or in the media (democracy/authoritarianism, or “the unitary executive theory”). I certainly would not say any of the things you say I come very close to saying, and that is definitely not my position.
My interest in these comments was to raise a question about the phenomenon of crackpot ideas and crankery in the Trump administration, and the general question of what separates serious truth-seeking and practical problem- solving, as is standard in scientific inquiry, from this kind of unserious thinking that produces ideas that we might call “crazy”? (And to wonder about the relation between the phenomenon of unseriousness and that of “corruption”.) (Even this comment is hastily drafted, so please grant me some indulgence.)
Tm 02.11.25 at 9:10 am
Alex is right: “The cult-like nature of what is happening is not entirely unprecedented – … What makes this moment so unique is not that arrogance but how unprompted and unnecessary it all is.”
I think we really need to wrap our heads around how unprecedented this attempt at systematically destroying state capacity really is. There are obvious parallels to the Nazi Machtergreifung of course, their first act in power was to purge the civil service and the military, both ethnically and ideologically; Musk and Trump are using the very same playbook. But the aim of the Nazis was of course to take over the state apparatus and control it, not destroy it. This level of insanity defies any rational explanation and that makes it even more worrying.
The Mump regime is supported by the oligarchy, by much of the capitalist class. They are supposed to be guided by rational economic interest, not by ideology. And what they are doing, for example destroying the public health system and the public research infrastructure, is really contrary to rational economic decision-making. The modern administrative state cum rule of law after all isn’t antagonistic to capitalism, it really enables modern capitalism to function as it does. Have today’s capitalists internalized Randian fiction to the extent that they now take their own propaganda at face value?
steven t johnson 02.11.25 at 2:46 pm
“Have today’s capitalists internalized Randian fiction to the extent that they now take their own propaganda at face value?” Tm@21
Here’s a wild guess at an answer? The goal is not to destroy the administrative state per se, it is to tear up what they perceive as a social contract where government provides services to the public at large, while the lion’s share goes to the owners. My thought is that maybe this crew no longer believes they can afford (insert your own scare quotes?) this, because at some level they see themselves losing in the future. They know the damage, but they feel or plan to not suffer the consequences personally, in hopes that the chaos will be a ladder of opportunity. Compare to the masters of Japan attacking the US in 1941, despite knowing the nation as a whole had very little chance…but they themselves really had none without it. Surrender or gamble with someone else’s lives? I suspect it is an easy choice, one that has it’s own economic rationality. And that’s especially true if you’re thinking about your estate/heirs, past the quarterly reports.
Tm 02.12.25 at 8:09 am
stj 22: “The goal is not to destroy the administrative state per se, it is to tear up what they perceive as a social contract where government provides services to the public at large, while the lion’s share goes to the owners.”
Indeed the capitalists are tearing up the postwar social contract, including liberal democracy, rule of law, public investment in infrastructure, education and research, and a limited welfare state. But that contract was good to the capitalists. They thrived in it for 80 years. The question is why tear it up now? Is this really driven by economic rationality? I doubt it.
steven t johnson 02.12.25 at 3:09 pm
“The question is why tear it up now? Is this really driven by economic rationality?” TM@23
Your mention of 80 years takes us back to 1955? In my understanding, the current version of the social contract (hope this usage isn’t too loose?) dates back to the Popular Front Era, the New Deal, the Thirties or the Civil Rights Era, Great Society. As I see it, powerful factions of the ownership class (they seem to see themselves as the only true citizens) have worked relentlessly to abolish the New Deal from its inception, despite thriving. The thing is, thriving has so many meanings. We have come to the place that a man with a measly few hundred million by comparison to his betters is just another lower middle class striver. There’s never enough money.
And why now? Because the relative power of the US in economic production in the world is declining, they know it. They know US military power can no longer dependably win, not even by the anti-communist standard where trashing a country serves to deter. The GFC taught them they aren’t even masters of their own house. There is a reason Trumpers imagine Marxists in the Democratic Party, they are afraid because on one level they know this system is not the end of history and they project their fears. It’s not just because they know the most important political commitment of most so-called middle class people is anti-communism.
But if you think the current system could in fact go on indefinitely and/or you think economic rationality is simply looking at your checkbook and stock portfolio and current property values, I agree the question of why now? would seem important.
Alex SL 02.13.25 at 9:41 pm
steven t johnson,
I do not grasp how it benefits the oligarchs of the USA to dismantle the power basis of the USA in response to perceiving that the US power base will decline anyway. There are some steps in that thought process that I am missing. Would it not make more sense to entrench one’s power over the police, the army, and the courts, and turn elections into a sham, while keeping administrative capability and world-leading research intact? That would maximise your power and agency once you have control of the state.
And that is also what authoritarians usually do. Yes, they purge their opponents and may shovel money into their own pockets, but with very few take the axe to the state that they have fought so hard to control, because they can purge their opponents and shovel money into their pockets more efficiently if that state still works. Like, the Nazis did not dismantle Germany’s regulatory capability, health care, education system, and science, instead they bent those to their will.
The few exceptions are those who preference ideology or religion over their material interests, like the Khmer Rouge and the Taliban. It therefore seems more parsimonious to me that what is happening in the USA right now is not the billionaire class making a strategic decision based on a prognosis about the trajectory of their own and their nation’s power but instead true believers trying to enact their beliefs. These people actually do believe that the government is largely superfluous, that most public servants are wastrels and frauds who could be replaced by ten coders and an AI model, that there is no such thing as public service and public good, that ideally everybody should work in a for-profit company, that all regulations are superfluous because they just get in the way of progress, and that everybody who ends up a bloody smear on the ground after they are done had it coming because they could have just become a billionaire themselves or remain healthy without vaccinations if they were virtuous enough.
They truly believe all of this, and they are trying to implement these beliefs. They aren’t very smart. They will cause a lot of damage, but not because they have a great strategic plan. As I read elsewhere earlier this week, somebody who operates a fork lift while on hallucinogenic drugs can also cause a lot of damage. But that doesn’t mean they are smart or have a grand plan or even understand vaguely what it is they are currently doing; it merely means they shouldn’t have been put in charge of a fork lift.
J-D 02.13.25 at 11:48 pm
One of the most illuminating comments I have read on the present United State administration is that dogs don’t understand how doorknobs work; another, that if you don’t understand how anything works, then everything is a conspiracy theory.
steven t johnson 02.14.25 at 3:52 am
“Like, the Nazis did not dismantle Germany’s regulatory capability, health care, education system, and science, instead they bent those to their will.” Alex SL@25
Apparently I am far behind, influenced too much by stuff like Tooze’s Wages of Destruction. The pioneering of privatization, favoritism for select firms, purging the schools of Jews and driving key scientists into exile, above all the too late switch to a war economy, do strike me as the same genus of irrationality. They were steps necessary to the overall reorganization of the state to pursue the great anti-Communist crusade. Were they irrational?
To rephrase what I was driving at, there are no rational ways to pursue grand goals in an irrational system. Superficially, WWII looks like a replay of WWI, hence the phrase Thirty Years’ War applied. This crackup of imperialism is I think inevitable because it is obsolete. And every scheme is tantamount in the end to forbidding the tide (the future) to come in. Yet, every vain attempt to restore the past is still rational in the sense that the goal is to preserve their way of life, which does after all benefit them greatly. That trying to fix crazy is crazy is a tragedy of history.
Alex SL 02.14.25 at 8:10 am
steven t johnson,
Privatisation, favoritism, and purging one’s enemies is one thing. I would understand (although not condone) if replacing key civil servants with loyalists and funneling money towards themselves was all Musk and Trump did. But most authoritarians don’t prioritise shuttering their country’s medical research and international soft power projection. That is so, as they say these days, “extra”, so inexplicable in terms of corruption or entrenching power, that it cannot be explained as a strategic scheme.
Where the Nazis turned comparably irrational was when they funneled scarce resources towards the extermination of Jews that could have been used for an increasingly desperate war effort. Their antisemitism was genuine, so they prioritised genocide over their own military survival. But a few years earlier they correctly reasoned that they would find achieving their goals easier by having a strong police, a strong army, a healthy population (or at least the part that mattered to them), working infrastructure, and an effective administration. I feel an authoritarian who directly and deliberately weakens the tools of their own authority reveals what they really believe.
Tm 02.14.25 at 2:38 pm
The Nazis driving many of the best scientists and intellectuals into exile (or worse) is the kind of own goal that results from putting ideology over rational self-interest. And this is precisely what I see the Trump regime doing and it makes me shudder. That’s an important indicator that this is genuine fascism and not just authoritarianism.
If only there were European leaders capable of exploiting this huge opportunity that the incompetence and irrationality of the Trumpists is offering them. Too bad they have spent recent years scapegoating immigrants instead of welcoming them.
Trump is accelerating US decline. Putin is accelerating Russia’s decline. European fascists look at the spectacle and cry “that’s exactly what we want for us”. They work hard to accelerate European decline, dismantle the EU and turn Western Europe into vassals of the dying Russian empire. Funny kind of nationalists, eager to sell their country out to foreign cleptocrats.
Peter T 02.14.25 at 11:52 pm
steven t johnson @ 27.
IIRC, Tooze’s makes the case in Wages of Destruction that Nazi Germany switched to a war economy from 1934, to the point that by 1939 it was war or reduce the military. Housing, consumer goods and investment in transport were all wound back in favour of military production, steel and chemicals. It may not have been an efficient war economy, but it was definitely a war economy.
Alex SL 02.15.25 at 5:35 am
I have lately been thinking of the fascist-adjacent dictum, “Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create hard times”. There is probably some truth to that, but not in the way those who spout that think.
The fascists think that weak men are those who are so spoiled, pampered, and unused to facing repercussions for their inaction that they have no stomach to take unpleasant actions, flinch at the idea of murdering (imagined) enemies, refuse to keep the bloodline pure, stuff like that.
What we are seeing now is that the dictum makes sense if the weak men are those who are so spoiled, pampered, and unused to facing repercussions for their actions that they think that they can still have their cake even after having eaten it, never have to make trade-offs or take other people’s interests and agency into account, do not need to maintain the public investments that made their nation powerful and life comfortable, and simply shout and pound the table to make all complexities go away.
Again, not sinister figures with a great strategy. Instead, spoiled brats who do not understand what it means to live without vaccinations, to have one’s sons fall at the front and cower under bombings, to choose between buying bread and repairing shoes, led by spoiled brats who have never been told “no” and never seen repercussions for not paying rent or breaking laws because god forbid we put billionaire entrepreneurial geniuses into prison like some poor black teenager. It is, then, understandable that they would think they can break laws and ignore rulings without being punished, destroy medical infrastructure without getting sick, break contracts of the government without anybody losing trust in contracts, fire an underling who dares point out that reality doesn’t match their preconceptions – because so far, yes, that always worked out for them.
I guess we will see if that continues to be the case when an African nation has to decide between China and a USA that has recently broken various contracts with them, when natural disasters and diseases happen despite the refusal to accept the data, when more and more people see the primary local employers fold due to the funding cuts, the fruit pickers and meat workers stay home out of fear of being deported, etc. Surely Trump and Musk will be insulated from any financial or physical consequences, but they have extremely brittle egos. When the world doesn’t behave as they think it should, things may get even more chaotic.
Tm 02.15.25 at 8:48 am
Alex: As I said on the other thread: „It has become unfashionable to blame the fall of the Roman Empire on the decadence of the elite but watching the worlds richest oligarch in the oval office talking absolute nonsense while his little son named X makes grimaces and god-emperor Trump sits half asleep at the desk makes one wonder whether perhaps there’s something to the decadence theory after all.“
You are putting this way more eloquently! Thanks for that great summary.
steven t johnson 02.15.25 at 5:59 pm
Peter T@30 Perhaps my memory of Wages of Destruction is defective? If so that’s because my impression that a war economy is not just massive military budgeting, nor just protective tariffs, capital flight controls and favoring cooperative banks.* My notion of a war economy is that it is the widespread use of direct investment by government; coordination of private investment according to centrally set priorities; high progressive taxation including on businesses; price controls; rationing; even directing the movement of labor by such methods as building new housing; forced/voluntary loans in the form of purchase of bonds—all widely and systematically applied. Obviously my image is set by things like the War Industries Board or Office of Price Administration (in the US, WWI and WWII respectively.) In that perspective Germany didn’t seem to get a serious war economy until after the war on the USSR was launched. Could that be the misreading of Tooze?
*By that standard, to what degree is the US a permanent war economy?
“… because so far, yes, that always worked out for them.” That is the kind of economic rationality I am trying to highlight. My further point is that they can’t have a genius strategy because the situation is fundamentally irrational and there are no long-term solutions. Their system is obsolete in my view.
PatinIowa 02.15.25 at 11:57 pm
I think the ideology, such as it is, has been in the discourse in American conservatism all along:
I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.
-Grover Norquist: Interview on NPR’s Morning Edition, May 25, 2001
Comments on this entry are closed.