D.O.G.E. Will Win Through Chaos
The Visible D.O.G.E. Doesn't Have to Succeed for D.O.G.E. to be a Success
A Failure?
As federal judges claim the ability to block Trump/Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (D.O.G.E.), the long-expected bureaucratic pushback, or for Elon Musk, “autoimmune response of the system defending itself” might seem to be a sign of gloom in the task of dismantling the deep state. Musk's rumored departure from D.O.G.E only makes things seem even worse. If even Elon Musk is giving up, surely things can’t be looking up.
We’re further than we were in 2016 when it comes to “draining the swamp” (or at least it seems) but, progress has greatly slowed from the first few glorious weeks of Musk’s employees forcing their way into the halls of power (and the real less visible halls, the computer systems) and firing government goons left and right.
As of now, $140 billion has been saved in two months, yes, and D.O.G.E. hasn’t really gone after the Defense Department yet, nor made a real effort to reduce entitlements fraud, but the current pace is definitely slower than the glorious days of late January: we’re only 7% of the way to closing the budget deficit by D.O.G.E.’s count. According to one far more pessimistic measure, perhaps, we’ve actually made zero progress as baseline budgeting increases already factored into spending and the Impoundment Act make the financial savings a net wash, or perhaps even still going up:
With more than two months in the rearview mirror, it’s tempting to despairingly call D.O.G.E. a failure in the much-stated primary goal of cutting spending.
Of course, as both Elon Musk and the brief co-head of D.O.G.E., Vivek Ramaswamy have also spoken at great length about, cutting regulations, streamlining processes, and eliminating bureaucrats less for the savings and more for the mere benefit of not having bureaucratic parasites everywhere causing trouble for the productive people in society is a benefit in itself. But here too, the administration is running into (or, more properly, neglecting to ignore) challenges still working their way through the courts.
But what if this all wasn’t the point to begin with? What if, even as D.O.G.E. itself seems to be struggling, the stated goals were not the real goals, and D.O.G.E. in an end-around way is actually making great strides towards destroying the bureaucracy, its true enemy? What if the real battle isn’t over access to federal buildings and computer systems but is a mimetic (and/or memetic) battle to fracture the very confidence of the system, at which point the broken, mutilated corpse of the deep state can be easily buried and replaced?
Here’s how this Spirit of D.O.G.E. has actually been winning the whole time.
Bureaucracies and Stability Go Hand In Hand
Elon Musk has made it clear that the bureaucracy and its stranglehold over America, and upon him and his companies in particular, is D.O.G.E.’s enemy. Now, bureaucracies thrive on stability. Even if that stability is, misquoting the Roman historian Tacitus’s line “they create a wasteland and call it [stability]”, this is very much what they are made to do. Bureaucracies are systems set up to produce an equilibrium between opposing forces, interests, and desires. When they were set up, as when a new government is formed out of the disorders of a war, they were preferable to all the parties at a time to the continuance of a war. They are tools for sublimating, dispelling, and dissipating kinetic energy (violence) and preserving a state of equilibrium of potential energies at a lower tempo.
Bureaucracies are not just systems and people set up to enforce visible regulations and defend job descriptions, but the entire system of unspoken customs, mutual understandings, and habits that are so unconscious that they’re barely noticed or questioned. We question the visible bureaucrats who enforce the visible systems, yes, when they displease us, but the real bureaucracy is one step deeper, the unquestioned, unstaffed layer of unwritten rules and customs that don’t even make it into the rulebook.
The bureaucrats we see don’t often even realize it, but their real jobs, outside of the “Director of Diversity Hiring for Air Traffic Control” or “Mandator of the “The Gay Stuff” that they might officially hold, is, as I wrote about a while back, to preserve the stability of the system, to preserve the unwritten layer of the bureaucracy:
Or as James Mills points out here, Leviathan’s job is to defend itself:
The front-end message, the external marketing, and the ideology that the bureaucracy enforces may change, but the bureaucracy's back-end programming and the internal principles that the bureaucracy is tasked with managing and maintaining are generally constant over time as this meme hilariously illustrates. Unless we somehow destroy the backend roots of the system, we’ll never fix the problem. Until we hit at the root, we’ll get the same wars, the same banking cabals stealing from us, and the same regulatory and tax attacks on us regardless of who holds the jobs in the federal bureaucracy.
The way Donald Trump, and even more now, Elon Musk’s D.O.G.E are feared and understood by the denizens of the visible bureaucracy, illustrates this unwritten layer of katechons that the two have broken as
points out in this great piece below. Trump and Musk don’t speak like politicians are “supposed to”, don’t express their demands through the channels and methods preferred by the bureaucracy, and, worst of all, don’t feel like they need the visible bureaucrats.
Yes, bureaucracies can be productive and beneficial as well, as at a base level a bureaucracy is merely a set pattern of behavior with people whose job it is to enforce that other people follow that pattern. The idea of bureaucracy worked great for Henry Ford’s factories, for the U.S. into the 1960s, and even for global conglomerates into the 2010s, but it’s been ever clearer ever since that they are the problem. Malfunctioning, misaligned, slow, destructive molasses as they are, they’re also impossible to eliminate completely. Since we don’t yet have a viable alternative way of organizing ourselves to perform collective tasks—other than perhaps the way Musk runs his own companies—the choice, even in the best-case scenario for America is to have anarchy or to have a different, transformed and slightly less bad bureaucracy.
Chaos Is Sometimes Good, Actually
D.O.G.E.’s visible, public goal is a visible, front-on attack meant to achieve just this sort of transformation. In its front-on attack on the system, the countermeasures of the system are deflecting the blow, absorbing the pressure, and seem to be maintaining the persistence and continuity of the deep, inner-core bureaucracy.
But the Achilles Heel of bureaucracies is that their persistence and seeming inevitability require people’s belief that they are inevitable and persistent.
Government bureaucracy today, being a replacement and sublimation of force of arms by paperwork, signs, and secretaries filing reports in air-conditioned offices, can’t sustain itself on its own.
Acquiescence sustains them. The bureaucracy sustains acquiescence. Bureaucracy and equilibrium go hand in hand, each sustaining the other.
Someone filing reports and orders in a central office, no matter how powerful their job description, are meaningless and powerless if events make their job, their underlings, and their budget meaningless.
The preference cascade that hit Eastern Europe in 1989 and the Soviet Union in 1991 demonstrates this. Apparatchiks of the Soviet bureaucracy weren’t defeated by Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost, the late-USSR’s versions of Trumpism and D.O.G.E.
They were defeated by the spirit of Gorbachev, the spirit of perestroika, and the spirit of glasnost, that is, the spirit of uncertainty, chaos, disequilibrium, and, most of all, events.
Sure the Soviet hard-liners staged a military coup attempt to regain power, but events and the uncertainties bound up in them made the bureaucracy’s grasp at retaining its comfortable position meaningless. They lost for the same reason that the Tsar’s (and Kerensky’s) forces lost a half-century earlier. They each lost for the fact that they were slow-moving bureaucracies and enough people were willing to call their bluff all at once.
Bureaucracies are by nature risk-averse and too small-c conservative to play high stakes nimble games. But that’s the only game and the only shot that challengers to the status quo play.
D.O.G.E., and Trump and Musk’s actions more broadly have been about creating disequilibrium to create new events that allow them to create more disequilibrium in the system. That’s how Trump won this time, and that’s how he’s accomplished things at a much higher rate so far this time around as well.
As long as Trump can continue making bold announcements and wild new policies every day he and his team have new opportunities. Even more so, by way of the mimetic (and memetic) effects of the “by the horns” boldness Trump’s team is fearlessly executing day by day, new opportunities open up socially for the rest of us in our own lives.
Disequilibrium lubricates the gears of history making the real change possible.
Yes, Musk launched a high-risk game by launching D.O.G.E., but high stakes are the only way to get out of an internal creeping 1984 as Europe and especially the U.K. are currently demonstrating so darkly for all the world to see. Nigel Farage and his Reform Party’s failure to play the high-stakes game and Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s willingness to play are why the U.K. is in the state it’s in and we’re in the place we’re in.
The real revolution in D.O.G.E. is the spirit of D.O.G.E., just as the real revolution in Vatican II was performed by the mimetic mental challenges to tradition in the minds of Catholics around the world that we call the “spirit of Vatican II.” The real revolution and the openings for liberation are the mimetic and memetic uncertainties the visible D.O.G.E. has already induced in events and in the minds of the bureaucracy’s supporters and its enemies.
Hey, we’re only 2.5 months into Trump’s term, and “liberating Canada and Greenland” is already a moderate middle-ground common sense consensus position. Tariffs on anyone and everyone are normal. Deportations of gang members to El Salvador’s prisons are almost normal.
What’s going to be normal in 2.5 months at this rate? A sensible liberation of all of Europe? Imprisonment of the entirety of the managerial state? Sending the bureaucrats to Mars to dig Musk’s colonization tunnels?
What’s going to be normal in two years?
Sure I have qualms about some of these things. Some things are already slightly morally questionable for my taste as I covered in this piece below. I fear occult intentions in Musk (and Trump). I fear that Trump’s movement itself could be a mimetic deception of the ruling central bankers’ branch of the bureaucracy.
and are well to remind us of many of the potential downsides.
But events, no matter their apparent quality or success, have a quality all their own from their quantity, especially when they induce instability.
Even if things won’t be perfect in any new dispensation to come, at least we’re on our way to new opportunities that we at least have a chance at exploiting. We didn’t have a chance in the 2015 Mitt Romney/Jeb Bush Republican Party.
The real revolution is the revolution in our (and in our enemy’s) hearts.
To the liberal establishmentarian (and moving to Canada)
, I say, you’re right, yes, this is a coup, and I hope you and all the bureaucrats of the deep state are aware of that.The more they fear, the more pressure they’re under, the more confused they are, the greater our chances of winning, and really winging.
We don’t just want a new logo on the bureaucracy, or new members running it. We want to eliminate it. And the best way for this to happen, in fact, is for D.O.G.E., as we are seeing now, to appear to be a failure in its visible aspect, but to succeed in the real mission.
I feel awkward to quote Lenin, but since
has blazed that mimetic trail for me, “Timing is everything.” Yes, it’s high stakes, but if we can just get the bureaucracy to fight back a little harder, the real opportunities to really crush the head of the Hydra serpent that is the deep state bureaucracy is just around the corner, in the opportunities that will open up on their next misstep.For one potential outcome, perhaps, the real game isn’t success at Musk’s starting bid of saving $2 trillion from the federal budget. The real game is making that question meaningless, perhaps because there is no federal budget in 2026 because there is in fact no meaningful federal government to fund…
Think big and take advantage of events as they come.
"Even if things won’t be perfect in any new dispensation to come, at least we’re on our way to new opportunities that we at least have a chance at exploiting. We didn’t have a chance in the 2015 Mitt Romney/Jeb Bush Republican Party."
Solid point. Trump's statements and actions since January have got me thinking Neoliberal Feudalism and Rurik Skywalker are correct that Trump is compromised and a willing agent of the zionist central bankers, but ... there is that slight possibility that he's not, and that's at least something. With the Mitt Romneys and Jeb Bushes of the GOP, there would be no possibility at all, so I'm glad it's Trump and not them. I hope Rurik and NLF are wrong about him, but they have been right about a lot of things so far and every time I hear about someone getting deported for protesting against Israel's ethnic cleansing of Gaza (but never deported for having protested with BLM or Antifa against America), or about how we're going to send more military assets to the Middle East, or about how we're going to take responsibility for cleaning up and securing Gaza, I have to give NLF and Rurik credit for having called it when few others would.
That said, I do believe the shift in the Overton Window on so many topics has been healthy, and Trump has played a huge role in that. I hope that continues, and that it eventually shifts so much on so many things that all the curious exceptions around zionism become too big for even Boomer normies to ignore.
I don't know enough about the policy details to say if DOGE is successful overall (and neither, despite what they say, does anyone else!). I see DOGE as the beginning of a long, hard struggle and a SYMBOLIC step in a certain new direction.
If you attend to the criticisms of DOGE (which you obviously have) you notice that most of the complaints don't actually refer to actual policies or spending items or unmet needs. This would be the best way to attack the plan, but instead the defenders of the Blob usually try to use human interest stories (sympathy), or express outrage that Musk could even think he has the RIGHT to do this. These reflexes seem a bit immature and entitled... but they ARE entitled. This is a class which has long enriched itself on government waste and social corrosion, finally being questioned on its privileges and prerogatives.
Is DOGFE doing what it claims? I'm not sure. I AM sure that we need to cut federal spending and nonprofit grants and research funds and transfer payments drastically before we fall off of a cliff, and that there's undoubtedly a lot of spending which is basically functioning as wealth transfer to college graduates. It's serving no purpose whatsoever and its class defenders don't even claim that it serves a purpose. They're not saying all of this spending is rationally ordered and good for society. They're saying that all of this money is their due, and they're expressing rage that class traitors and communist would even question their divine prerogatives. The fact that this class uses the language and concepts of radical egalitarianism is irrelevant. Radical egalitarians would never support a system which lavishly rewards a caste system based upon selective private colleges. Yet they do. That's really all you need to know to understand that these people might desire to be PERCEIVED as virtuous, and egalitarian... but they desire their homes and jobs and careers and protected neighborhoods and luxurious, exclusive children's schools far more. This process has been an introduction to America's Brahmin class for many people. Including myself.