What Comes after the Cleansing Fire of MAGA?
One faction aims to build a theocracy, the other an oligarchic pleasuredome. It's hard to see how that partnership can work out long term.
Abolishing the civil service: what gives?
As you’d expect from an unreformed neocon, Applebaum frames what Musk and Trump are up to as “regime change,” which is somewhat dubious. But as a roundup of the news, she offers a nice tour de horizon of how DOGE is dismantling the professional federal civil service. The official reason for this dismantling is cost-cutting reasons to address deficits. But as Reuters pointed out yesterday, DOGE’s cuts so far have been based more on political ideology than real cost savings. How could it be otherwise? The total compensation of ALL federal employees combined ($560B in 2023, according to the Cato Institute) is just a fifth of the annual incremental national deficit ($2700B in 2023). Indeed, anyone serious about tackling the nation debt would start with the $1789B in tax breaks, something Trump has no intention of doing (except perhaps in the service of attacking perceived enemies in civil society). So deficits are a pretext.
The U.S. federal civil service was developed nearly a century and a half ago. As a cornerstone of Progressive Era “good governance” reforms, the creation of a professional civil service administering effectively in the public interest aimed to overcome the pervasive corruptions and incompetencies of the so-called “spoils system” that in the fifty years after Andrew Jackson — by no coincidence, Trump’s favorite president — had been the approach to filling government roles.
As Applebaum points out, MAGA believes that the very idea of “good governance” or “the public interest” is a ruse for promoting liberalism or worse. As far as MAGA is concerned, first two hundred names in the Wichita phone book would govern us better than the swamp dwellers of the professional civil service. That MAGA’s demolition process is being carried out by bunch of college age kids who know nothing about the missions of the organizations they are blowing up, both symbolizes and embodies the idea that qualification for government positions will no longer be based on expertise or other professional competency, but rather will be assigned based on patronage, in other words, as rewards for financial or ideological loyalty. The Red Guards are in charge now.
These demolition efforts are unfolding in three registers. First, for agencies whose missions MAGA hates in principle — aiding the global poor, monitoring climate change, stopping financial fraud, or protecting the environment, for example — the goal is to destroy the institution wholesale, as has already taken place with USAID or the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau. Second, for agencies where there is money to be made, Trump is going install loyalists who will be able to direct contracts towards and regulatory scrutiny away from friends, and the opposite for political enemies. Lastly, with respect to what the Soviets used to call the “power ministries,” e.g. the security agencies (such as the Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security, the intelligence agencies, and the military) the aim is to install loyalists who believe that the President’s constitutional authority is unlimited.
Two final points before we get to the main question:
First, let’s be clear what the results of this demolition of the civil service will be: replacing competent operators with corrupt opportunists will be an catastrophe for effective or even merely functional governance. To put it mildly, ideological reliability is a poor way to pick people the people responsible for things like managing the nuclear stockpile, keeping the air and water clean, making sure our medicines aren’t quack, preventing airplanes from crashing into each other, safeguarding against terrorist attacks, etc. If you don’t like the imperfect results that experts produce, you’re going to love what the dipshits do. But that’s a topic for a forthcoming post.
Second, Applebaum is a bit vague on what is motivating this detonation. She implies it’s mainly about the opportunity for corruption, and while I don’t doubt that there will be many acts of comical corruption under the coming order, I think it’s simplistic to think that what’s holding MAGA together is the desire to create looting opportunities. I believe that what in fact is holding them together is a shared hatred of “woke” ideology, and, by extension of the bureaucracies that they believe have been critical in implementing woke-ism in the form of DEI programs. That’s the topic for different forthcoming post.
But OK, leave aside both what’s motivating MAGA’s desire to detonate large parts of the civil service, and what the effects of that detonation will be, Applebaum then, almost as her own aside, asks the interesting question of what comes next after the razing is done:
“What precisely replaces the civil-service ethos remains unclear. Christian nationalists want a religious state to replace our secular one. Tech authoritarians want a dictatorship of engineers, led by a monarchical CEO. Musk and Trump might prefer an oligarchy that serves their business interests.”
So, what comes next?
Here we get to the main point of this point of this post: it’s not so much that it “remains unclear” what the major factions of the MAGA coalition want to build after they’ve razed the existing system. Rather, it’s that it is clear that what each of these factions wants to build is at odds with what the other wants to build. Let’s unpack the agenda of each of these factions at a little more length:
First, the “Christian nationalist” faction. These people are political nostalgists, in that they are looking for a return to the moral and political order of the 19th or even the 18th century. Led intellectually by “integralists” like Notre Dame professor Patrick Deneen and Harvard professor Adrian Vermeule and operationally by Russ Vought, the architect of Project 2025 and now OMB Director, the vision of the Christian nationalists is to raze the federal government in order to create space for a hundred local micro-theocracies to bloom.
These people hate DEI and woke-ism because it represents an alternative set of moral presciptions to the traditional moral codes of Christianity, with very different heroes and villains, including often themselves as avatars of white heteronormative patriarchy. For them crushing woke, first in the government, and then throughout civil society, is the necessary step toward restoring the old cultural norms associated with God-fearing Christianity.
Longer term, once they consolidate the right sort of cultural and moral order across most of the country, I expect they may seek to rebuild a strong federal government with the capacity to enforce theocratic norms at a national scale. However, given pretty sharp doctrinal differences between, say, Opus Dei-sympathetic Catholics like Deneen or Vermeule and Evangelical Protestants like Russ Vought, they will struggle with coming up with a unified program. So maybe the next step, after rolling back the 20th and 19th centuries, will be to roll back the 18th century too, to bring back the wars of religion that tore “Western civilization” to pieces in the 17th century.
Second, what Applebaum calls the “tech authoritarian” faction. These people are political fantastists in the sense that, unlike the Christian nationalists, they do not dream of a return to some prelapsarian past, but rather of the creation of something that’s truly never been tried before: a “network state.” Led intellectually by did-my-own-political-theory-research engineers like Balaji Srinivasan or Curtis Yarvin, and operationally by people like Elon Musk (with the likes of Marc Andreessen as a kind of broker between them), the vision is to “disrupt” the federal government a replace it with a network of corporate-run micro-states, with each node in the network commanded by a “techno-king” — literally the job title Musk sports at Tesla — with absolute power.
As you’d expect from Silicon Valley folks, they’ve developed extensive vaporware demos of what they promise this will look like. I confess that these visions are about as personally appealing to me as the dystopic virtual worlds of Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One or Neal Stephenson’s Snowcrash — but then again, I am unlike a lot of these man-children and their minions in that my own sybaritic sensibilities are somewhat more evolved than those of a fourteen year old boy.
These people hate DEI and woke-ism not because it alternative to Christianity, but because they represents a set of moral prescriptions, ones that can be used to hem in and constrain the freedom of action of the techno-kings. In other words, the technbro hatred of woke-ism follows an opposite logic from the Christianist hatred of woke-ism. The polyamorous microdosing technorati of Silicon Valley aren’t going to be too keen on a bunch of squares telling them their lifestyle is problematic: bad oligarch, no ketamine for you!
The starkly differing ethical orientations of the nostalgic Christian nationalists and the techbro fantasists brings us to the central argument of this post: while the visions of the nostalgists and the visions of the fantasists share an initial operational first step of destroying the federal bureaucracy, they are almost completely at odds with one another in terms of what they hope will come next. Once the looting and pillaging phase is over — which, to be fair, may take a long time given the size of the federal bureaucracy — where they want to go next in terms of rebuilding looks extremely different, with neither remotely capable (at least at present) of commanding a popular majority.
By analogy: it’s like two architects looking at an old factory they consider primed for redevelopment. Both agree that it needs to be razed to the ground, and they’ve contracted the local mafia boss to do the demolition for them, which he’s happy to accommodate in exchange for proper respect and an appropriate fee. The problem is that one of these architects has in his hand a blueprint for a giant megachurch, while the other has the designs for a cheesy resort festooned with casinos, brothels, and an Esports arena. A functional design compromise is hard to imagine.
(In addition, unmentioned by Applebaum, there’s a third faction within MAGA — the “national greatness” faction, which I covered for Noema a couple of years back. Led intellectually by people like Michael Lind and
, and championed politically by Marco Rubio, it imagines renewing the American working class with state-led industrial policies unfolding behind tariff walls. These people seem pretty marginalized within Trump’s current cabinet — Lind is largely off the radar, Cass has been reduced to whining about other Republicans in front of the libs, and Rubio has been kicked upstairs into policy irrelevance at State. Be that as it may, what these people want to build is certainly radically different from what either the Christianists or the anarcho-libertarians are after, so insofar as they ever become relevant again, they will only make the post-razing future more murky.)So ultimately, Applebaum is right: what comes next is “unclear.” We are in “Year One” in the revolutionary calendar. Perhaps a Piggly Wiggly Robespierre or a Dollar General Napoleon awaits us. But one distinct possibility is that once the demolition is over, neither side will be able to significantly advance their “positive agenda.” In that case, Americans face a future of living amidst the ruins of a once-great nation.
Very interesting, thank you! So, it looks like we're probably going to get a corrupt, hollowed out state ruled by a mafia. Something like Russia. Until China takes over one way or another. But, assuming elections would still mean anything, I'd not totally discount a huge backlash against the right, with the left forcefully taking over. But chances are slim.
If you are so motivated, I’d have great interest in your analysis of the long-term causes for the Democrats’ loss of the Presidential election and their present fecklessness. Those causes seem over-determined.