In “Their Target Is ‘the Very Core of Modern American Liberalism’,” Thomas Edsall—a long-time New York Times columnist I’ve never heard of—is outraged at Trump and Elon’s desecrations. In another recent opinion piece, Edsall, and the editors choosing his title, thinks of the new President and its administration as “a hostile takeover of the federal government.”
Across the pond, the Financial Times’ long-time professional commentator Martin Wolf writes the embarrassingly titled “In defence of the state.” The same day, in the same paper, Edward Luce subheads a piece with “The world’s richest man is taking a torch to the American state on behalf of Donald Trump.” A few days before that, the New York Times had, dutifully and enthusiastically, reported on protesters calling Trump a “tyrant,” widely describing current affairs as a “coup.”
Let’s not revisit the irony that the very same people, on the very same pages, spent four years shouting that Trump was a threat to democracy for refusing to accept the outcome of a democratic election. Stunningly, then, Wolf—in no uncertain terms—lets us know that what Musk and DOGE is up to now is “a coup”…but Trump winning 2020 “a lie.” (I guess things feel very different when the shoe is on the other authoritarian foot; cognitive dissonance is a powerful force).
But what, exactly, are these credentialed members of the legacy corporate media so up in arms about?
In sum, it’s some aggressive, trolling tweets (mostly by Elon Musk), at most so far a hundred thousand federal employees leaving their jobs (most, supposedly, with eight months’ severance), and the $60-billion-dollar agency that is USAID. If we’re lucky, the Department of Education also.
If these hyperbolic wailings were merely stray coincidences among the intelligentsia, this would be one thing, but since Trump’s inauguration a mere month ago, the legacy media has been flat-out littered with similar such stories, opinion pieces, aggressive-looking videos, protests, indignant university staff, and hysterical bureaucrats.
The timing and the viciousness with which these credentialed members of the commentariat are responding to the Department of Government Efficiency trolls and uncovering of government improprieties is enough to make even the most dispassionate of us outside observers subscribe to some deep state conspiracy theory.
Not only does the anger and vitriol feel coordinated, but it’s undeniably performative: Clearly, they cannot genuinely be this upset over such trifling matters. This little spring cleaning, having already annoyed absolutely everyone in the world of Anglo-American intelligentsia, is but mere a trickle. If shrinking the federal workforce by some single-digit percentages is “taking a torch to the American state,” I would like to know in which segment of the dictionary Messrs. Luce, Edsall, and Wolf intend to find the appropriate words for any actual (and urgently needed) reduction of America’s government.
Even if the DOGE team manages to gut the entire USAID (an unlikely feat), that’s only some $60 billion dollars, (i.e., what the federal government spends in about four days). Employee compensation is some 8 percent of total federal government outlays, and so even firing every single person on the government payroll (oh, the glory!) doesn’t move the needle much. (Excuse me, FiscalData.Treasury.gov, but the 2,436 billions spent by the Treasury since October have not been spent “to ensure the well-being of the people of the United States”).
The Financial Times includes this very helpful chart (mistitled though it may be) in Wolf’s piece—even though the author draws precisely the wrong conclusion from it. Staring at a record-high fiscal size of the US government, he reaches the non-obvious conclusion that America needs more cowbell.
Is it so hard to consider that maybe—just maybe—the never-ending, disastrous growth of America’s public sector is…not good?
The ratchet effect of repeatedly and steadily increased spending as a consequence of crises (usually of the state’s own making), increases the size of government, year in and year out. While it may be dreamy-eyed of us libertarian and hard money types to think that the US could shrink the footprint of its incompetent, corrupt, reckless, insert-adjective-of-choice bureaucratic class back to those hallowed years of the classical gold standard, this bloating cannot keep growing. The current backlash—while political in nature—is merely one way in which a sane, stable order of things reasserts itself. That line must come down, radically—by hook or crook; by economic crises or political takeovers; or by rich, productive members of society moving their operations and lives elsewhere until the edifice collapses under its own weight.
“Government cannot function without the means to collect taxes,” concludes Luce in pearl-clutching horror from an ideological conviction long since out of date. Judging once more by the graph above, it seems “means to collect taxes” is the least of America’s troubles. Wolf’s appeal to technocrats, specifically in those fields (pharmaceuticals, aircraft safety, dangerous pollutants) where they have recently failed and monumentally overreached, is a most elaborate gaslighting.
He opened his FT article with the powerful sentence, “Civilised societies depend on institutions.” At a high enough level, that’s right—although his continuation, “the most important institutions are those of the state,” is laughable. Moreover, he’s wrong about which institutions, and on which side of “civilized” we find him and these other unsavory characters in legacy media, politics, and the state bureaucracy.
The intelligentsia really feels like they’re in mortal danger. It’s lovely to see.
