So the people in Elon Musk’s DOGE camp have made an analysis a little bit like yours, seizing the instruments available on the back end of the financial system, but with the goal of destroying the system. They’re like the supervillains to your superhero, ripping out all the plumbing that you have worked to understand. How does that happen?
[NATHAN TANKUS:] A lot of these big tech CEOs, they’ve created an ecosystem for themselves, these secret Signal chats, conferences, of course, Twitter itself. They’ve created this bubble. But in the Trump era, they took a second look, started meeting these right-wingers, and what the far right had been saying about the administrative state for decades suddenly made sense to them in a way that it hadn’t back in 2012.
They’ve always been anti-union, but had this understanding that they were going to supply all the good stuff society needed, and people wouldn’t need to organize against them.
[TANKUS] There were people hanging around who had always had these far-right ideas, but it became generalized in a kind of zeal of the converted, where they became fully committed to what they were hearing from the far-right think tanks about the administrative state. So we got this kind of hypercharged version of the libertarianism that was aimed at gutting the administrative state. But now it’s big techified — and this is the key.
If you’re a tech person, what you start looking at is the technology. For someone like Elon Musk, you have to remember PayPal is where he made his money, and ultimately, he’s still a payments person, down to his bones.
And if you’re him, and you start doing whatever cocktail of substances that he’s doing, you’re asking yourself, “Why isn’t there just a button? Why isn’t there just a button that I could press?”
A button to turn off the administrative state — and, as you have suggested, there actually kind of is one?
Lambert here: Not yet. Though I think they tried.
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