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The cynic and the nihiilist: where Team Trump wants to take us
My brother did a tour of duty with the Peace Corps in Lesotho, and reported (among other things) on the politics: there were apparently free and fair elections, among candidates from multiple political parties, none of which had any distinct policy positions to run on. The only reason to work for, or vote for, one party over another was which one had promised you a government job. Which offered a steady, if small, paycheck -- and something more.
In modern Russia, and the old Soviet Union, and sometimes Mexico, and many other "developing" countries noted for endemic corruption, it's been taken for granted that government officials can be, and indeed must be, bribed -- not only to overlook the law, but even to apply the law or to do their jobs as the law demands. If you have any kind of complex interaction with the government, you need to show up with lots of cash in order to grease the palm of each successive official along the way. Indeed, in such countries a government job pays you not primarily in wages, but in the authority over ordinary people that enables you to extort bribes and kickbacks from them.
Such a regime, of course, impoverishes ordinary people, except those already too poor to afford bribes, who can expect no help at all from government or the law. The system drives home, every day, the lesson that government serves the rich; indeed, why would anyone expect government to serve all the people? That's not what it's for.
It could reasonably be argued that most nations throughout history have been like that: almost everyone was desperately poor, including government officials, and the most obvious way for the latter to make money was to use their government authority to extort bribes and kickbacks. And of course government serves the interests of the rich; that's the way it's always been and always will be.
In such nations, it's also taken for granted that elections are rigged, predetermined to favor the incumbent. If you have governmental power, and one of government's functions is to hold elections, of course you're going to use your power to make sure your side wins; why would anybody expect otherwise?
The United States prided itself on being different. From the start, the authors of the Declaration and Constitution expected at least its elected officials to be public servants, accountable to all the people (a category which gradually expanded throughout the 19th and 20th centuries), and removable peacefully from their posts when they failed to serve the people. The Constitution mentions two specific crimes for which a high judicial or executive official can be impeached, and one of them is bribery: a public official taking bribes, or otherwise using his official powers to enrich himself, was not doing his job and shouldn't continue to hold it. And for many years the fairness and honesty of elections was the closest thing we had to a national religion: the most un-American, un-patriotic things you can do are cheat on an election, or refuse to leave peacefully when you lose.
As this NY Times piece explains, the 1881 assassination of President Garfield by a disgruntled campaign worker who hadn't gotten the government job he expected triggered a backlash against the then-accepted "spoils system" by which elected officials routinely gave lots of government jobs to their supporters, regardless of qualifications, competence, or interest in the specific job. Congress passed laws requiring some, and eventually most, Federal civil servants to be hired on the basis of competence, and forbidding them to be fired or demoted for political reasons. The new expectation was that Federal employees at all levels were there to do their jobs for the benefit of the American people regardless of their personal political leanings, and would continue to serve, and develop role-relevant expertise, through Democratic and Republican administrations alike. That expectation has lasted us for well over a century, but Donald Trump is intent on ending it.
In the 20th century, the United States developed a new self-appointed role in the world: the shining city on the hill, the exemplar of how a nation should work, with free speech and association for all its people, free and fair elections, law and justice impartially applied to all, and a government that honestly tried to serve the needs of all its people. The US cast itself as the honest, upstanding hero in a morality play in which Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Imperial Japan, the Soviet Union, Red China, Cuba, North Korea, and other "un-democratic" nations were the enemy. Naturally, the US didn't always live up to those ideals, and it frequently compromised with one un-democratic nation in order to fight another or to gain access to natural resources... but even so, it often acted in the interest of "spreading democracy", and not only Americans but downtrodden people around the world saw the US as on the right side of history. Pro-democracy activists around the world fought and died for the right to have what Americans had.
After World War II, General MacArthur occupied Japan for seven years, with half a million US and allied troops. The Japanese people prepared to be treated as vanquished enemies -- abused, crushed, humiliated. But for the most part, that didn't happen: high-ranking Japanese military officers were tried for war crimes and forbidden to enter politics, but the occupying forces were strictly forbidden to abuse the locals, and punished when they did. Instead, they concentrated on distributing food to the starving Japanese people and rebuilding a functioning economy and government. They legalized trade unions, redistributed land ownership from a few quasi-feudal lords to their multitude of tenants, guaranteed labor standards, and wrote a new Constitution in which women could vote and the Emperor continued as the ceremonial head of a parliamentary democracy with self-defense forces but no offensive military. All of this was forced on Japan, but it produced, peacefully, a sustainable system that over the next fifty years thrived and grew into a major world economy.
In 1977, Congress passed the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, forbidding US-based companies from bribing government officials even in foreign countries where such bribery was a common, accepted practice. The affected companies chafed under this constraint, but since American companies were so awesome they figured they could still compete for foreign business while upholding Truth, Justice, and the American Way.
This sort of self-consciously-virtuous government requires a massive act of faith: the people have to believe that their government is accountable and will generally act in the public interest, that elections are free and fair and honest, and that government officials are there to do their jobs well rather than to extort bribes. These ideals, once instilled, form a positive feedback loop: if most people honestly believe in them, officials who violate them are likely to actually be punished, which reinforces public belief in the ideals, and so on.
Conversely, in a country without public belief in these ideals, it's difficult to instill them: if people expect most government officials to be corrupt, they won't expect corrupt officials to be punished, so officials will see no reason not to be corrupt, and the people's expectation will be fulfilled. Nations can be divided into those with a widespread belief in accountable, honest government, and those with widespread cynicism about government corruption and self-interest, and it's difficult to cross from one category to the other.
Starting with Ronald Reagan in 1980, the US Republican Party began a decades-long program to dismantle people's faith in government. It was necessary to convince the American people that government could not, and should not, make ordinary people's lives better, and could never be accountable enough to be trusted with power. Whenever government threatened to make ordinary people's lives better, Republicans were obligated to sabotage it, lest people come to expect government to make their lives better. Once Donald Trump came on the scene, he concentrated his efforts on dividing Americans against one another and telling them that elections were not free and fair, but rigged against him (and therefore against his supporters, the "real" Americans). Today, in 2025, this program is bearing fruit: recent generations pride themselves on being cynical about government and democracy, and have seldom experienced a public-interest government program that worked smoothly, so (the theory goes) they won't lift a finger to stop government and democracy from being dismantled.
Which brings us to the substantial minority of Americans who are passionate, dedicated Trump-supporters. As Timothy Burke pointed out in 2020, Trump's die-hard supporters aren't blind to his autocratic, un-democratic tendencies; they're in favor of them. "Fundamentally they think power is a zero-sum game. You hold it or you are held by it. You are the boot on someone’s neck or there will be a boot on yours. They agree that what they have was taken from others; they think that’s the way of all things. You take or are taken from.... That what can be taken must be taken.... Authority is cruel and without mercy because it must be. They simply expect authority to be far more cruel to others than it is to them. And they expect to be cruel with the authority they possess." I made a similar point about Trump himself here.
Donald Trump has made clear that he wants to reinstate the 19th-century "spoils system" in which government workers are hired and fired for their political allegiance, not their qualifications or competence. If you seek a job in the Trump administration, you'll be asked "Was the 2020 Presidential election stolen from Donald Trump?", and if you can't answer "yes" with a straight face, you don't get the job.
On the issue of bribery and other financial crimes, he explained nine years ago on the campaign trail how he routinely donated lots of money to political candidates so they would do him favors once in office, with the implication that that was entirely right and proper. He's recently "halted enforcement" of the aforementioned FCPA, ordered IRS agents repurposed from catching tax evaders to catching illegal aliens, ordered Justice Department prosecutors reallocated from financial crimes and election interference to international drug cartels, pardoned numerous politicians (Democrat and Republican alike) convicted of bribery or tax evasion, and ordered the dropping of bribery charges against NYC Mayor Eric Adams, explicitly so that Adams could help him catch illegal aliens. In short, he's trying to legalize and normalize bribery and corruption, to turn the US into something more like Russia. After all, everybody in the President's circles commits financial crimes routinely, so it seems unfair to prosecute them as though they were "real" crimes.
Now add Elon Musk to the mix. He appears (based on the past few weeks) to be engaged in a holy war of wanton destruction. His strategy seems to be to destroy government agencies, their knowledgeable staff, and their data so quickly that he can irreversibly change the facts on the ground before the law and the courts can catch up to him. Because of this need for speed, he can't waste time analyzing individual programs to see whether they're actually wasteful or serve a useful purpose (Congressional staff typically spend months doing that); it's much easier and more fun to burn everything to the ground and rebuild from scratch (or leave the latter job for somebody who cares).
So the President is trying to turn the United States into a Russian-style kleptocracy in which bribery, nepotism, political patronage, election-rigging, and silencing of dissenters are taken for granted as normal and acceptable. Meanwhile, the co-President-without-portfolio is playing a videogame whose side effect is turning the United States into a nation without a civil service: there's an all-powerful President, his extremely manly military, a purely advisory Congress, an irrelevant and toothless hierarchy of courts, and nothing else.
The word "nothing" there is important. A more recent Timothy Burke post makes the interesting point that Elon Musk, and a handful of others in his bracket (Trump isn't rich enough for this club), are so mind-bogglingly wealthy that they couldn't lose or spend it if they tried. The annual interest on Musk's wealth is what 10,000 average Americans will earn in their combined lifetimes.
Such people have transcended the usual entrepreneur "take risks with other people's money" success story and reached "take risks because even if I lose every bet, I'm still unimaginably rich". Musk theoretically lost $30 billion buying and mismanaging Twitter, and it doesn't matter: he got control of a major social-media network, and if it no longer produces revenue, who cares? He can afford to "move fast and break things" because it doesn't matter to him if he breaks everything. He isn't acting irrationally or irresponsibly; he's a rational nihilist. He needs to find bigger and bigger risks to take, bigger and bigger things to break, just to stave off boredom and keep the adrenaline flowing. The US government is a big enough target that destroying it is actually a bit of a challenge, and therefore worth doing.
The reader may have noticed that the cynic and the nihilist aren't entirely on the same wavelength. If the nihilist succeeds, there will be almost no US government authority left that the cynic can milk for bribes and kickbacks. In the most charitable, optimistic reading, the latter is the culmination of Reagan's dream: reduce the US government to the point that it's not worth capturing, so "regulatory capture" disappears. As yet another Timothy Burke post points out, Musk is rapidly dismantling exactly the infrastructure and expertise that Trump (or any other would-be dictator) needs to enforce his will. But that comes at a cost: with the rule of law gone, your security depends on what you personally can enforce, and you'll have to spend a good deal of your time enforcing it rather than building anything new. If you're not a strongman, your best hope is to find one and throw yourself on his mercy.
One is steering the ship towards dictatorship, the other towards anarchy. Where will we actually end up?
In modern Russia, and the old Soviet Union, and sometimes Mexico, and many other "developing" countries noted for endemic corruption, it's been taken for granted that government officials can be, and indeed must be, bribed -- not only to overlook the law, but even to apply the law or to do their jobs as the law demands. If you have any kind of complex interaction with the government, you need to show up with lots of cash in order to grease the palm of each successive official along the way. Indeed, in such countries a government job pays you not primarily in wages, but in the authority over ordinary people that enables you to extort bribes and kickbacks from them.
Such a regime, of course, impoverishes ordinary people, except those already too poor to afford bribes, who can expect no help at all from government or the law. The system drives home, every day, the lesson that government serves the rich; indeed, why would anyone expect government to serve all the people? That's not what it's for.
It could reasonably be argued that most nations throughout history have been like that: almost everyone was desperately poor, including government officials, and the most obvious way for the latter to make money was to use their government authority to extort bribes and kickbacks. And of course government serves the interests of the rich; that's the way it's always been and always will be.
In such nations, it's also taken for granted that elections are rigged, predetermined to favor the incumbent. If you have governmental power, and one of government's functions is to hold elections, of course you're going to use your power to make sure your side wins; why would anybody expect otherwise?
The United States prided itself on being different. From the start, the authors of the Declaration and Constitution expected at least its elected officials to be public servants, accountable to all the people (a category which gradually expanded throughout the 19th and 20th centuries), and removable peacefully from their posts when they failed to serve the people. The Constitution mentions two specific crimes for which a high judicial or executive official can be impeached, and one of them is bribery: a public official taking bribes, or otherwise using his official powers to enrich himself, was not doing his job and shouldn't continue to hold it. And for many years the fairness and honesty of elections was the closest thing we had to a national religion: the most un-American, un-patriotic things you can do are cheat on an election, or refuse to leave peacefully when you lose.
As this NY Times piece explains, the 1881 assassination of President Garfield by a disgruntled campaign worker who hadn't gotten the government job he expected triggered a backlash against the then-accepted "spoils system" by which elected officials routinely gave lots of government jobs to their supporters, regardless of qualifications, competence, or interest in the specific job. Congress passed laws requiring some, and eventually most, Federal civil servants to be hired on the basis of competence, and forbidding them to be fired or demoted for political reasons. The new expectation was that Federal employees at all levels were there to do their jobs for the benefit of the American people regardless of their personal political leanings, and would continue to serve, and develop role-relevant expertise, through Democratic and Republican administrations alike. That expectation has lasted us for well over a century, but Donald Trump is intent on ending it.
In the 20th century, the United States developed a new self-appointed role in the world: the shining city on the hill, the exemplar of how a nation should work, with free speech and association for all its people, free and fair elections, law and justice impartially applied to all, and a government that honestly tried to serve the needs of all its people. The US cast itself as the honest, upstanding hero in a morality play in which Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Imperial Japan, the Soviet Union, Red China, Cuba, North Korea, and other "un-democratic" nations were the enemy. Naturally, the US didn't always live up to those ideals, and it frequently compromised with one un-democratic nation in order to fight another or to gain access to natural resources... but even so, it often acted in the interest of "spreading democracy", and not only Americans but downtrodden people around the world saw the US as on the right side of history. Pro-democracy activists around the world fought and died for the right to have what Americans had.
After World War II, General MacArthur occupied Japan for seven years, with half a million US and allied troops. The Japanese people prepared to be treated as vanquished enemies -- abused, crushed, humiliated. But for the most part, that didn't happen: high-ranking Japanese military officers were tried for war crimes and forbidden to enter politics, but the occupying forces were strictly forbidden to abuse the locals, and punished when they did. Instead, they concentrated on distributing food to the starving Japanese people and rebuilding a functioning economy and government. They legalized trade unions, redistributed land ownership from a few quasi-feudal lords to their multitude of tenants, guaranteed labor standards, and wrote a new Constitution in which women could vote and the Emperor continued as the ceremonial head of a parliamentary democracy with self-defense forces but no offensive military. All of this was forced on Japan, but it produced, peacefully, a sustainable system that over the next fifty years thrived and grew into a major world economy.
In 1977, Congress passed the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, forbidding US-based companies from bribing government officials even in foreign countries where such bribery was a common, accepted practice. The affected companies chafed under this constraint, but since American companies were so awesome they figured they could still compete for foreign business while upholding Truth, Justice, and the American Way.
This sort of self-consciously-virtuous government requires a massive act of faith: the people have to believe that their government is accountable and will generally act in the public interest, that elections are free and fair and honest, and that government officials are there to do their jobs well rather than to extort bribes. These ideals, once instilled, form a positive feedback loop: if most people honestly believe in them, officials who violate them are likely to actually be punished, which reinforces public belief in the ideals, and so on.
Conversely, in a country without public belief in these ideals, it's difficult to instill them: if people expect most government officials to be corrupt, they won't expect corrupt officials to be punished, so officials will see no reason not to be corrupt, and the people's expectation will be fulfilled. Nations can be divided into those with a widespread belief in accountable, honest government, and those with widespread cynicism about government corruption and self-interest, and it's difficult to cross from one category to the other.
Starting with Ronald Reagan in 1980, the US Republican Party began a decades-long program to dismantle people's faith in government. It was necessary to convince the American people that government could not, and should not, make ordinary people's lives better, and could never be accountable enough to be trusted with power. Whenever government threatened to make ordinary people's lives better, Republicans were obligated to sabotage it, lest people come to expect government to make their lives better. Once Donald Trump came on the scene, he concentrated his efforts on dividing Americans against one another and telling them that elections were not free and fair, but rigged against him (and therefore against his supporters, the "real" Americans). Today, in 2025, this program is bearing fruit: recent generations pride themselves on being cynical about government and democracy, and have seldom experienced a public-interest government program that worked smoothly, so (the theory goes) they won't lift a finger to stop government and democracy from being dismantled.
Which brings us to the substantial minority of Americans who are passionate, dedicated Trump-supporters. As Timothy Burke pointed out in 2020, Trump's die-hard supporters aren't blind to his autocratic, un-democratic tendencies; they're in favor of them. "Fundamentally they think power is a zero-sum game. You hold it or you are held by it. You are the boot on someone’s neck or there will be a boot on yours. They agree that what they have was taken from others; they think that’s the way of all things. You take or are taken from.... That what can be taken must be taken.... Authority is cruel and without mercy because it must be. They simply expect authority to be far more cruel to others than it is to them. And they expect to be cruel with the authority they possess." I made a similar point about Trump himself here.
Donald Trump has made clear that he wants to reinstate the 19th-century "spoils system" in which government workers are hired and fired for their political allegiance, not their qualifications or competence. If you seek a job in the Trump administration, you'll be asked "Was the 2020 Presidential election stolen from Donald Trump?", and if you can't answer "yes" with a straight face, you don't get the job.
On the issue of bribery and other financial crimes, he explained nine years ago on the campaign trail how he routinely donated lots of money to political candidates so they would do him favors once in office, with the implication that that was entirely right and proper. He's recently "halted enforcement" of the aforementioned FCPA, ordered IRS agents repurposed from catching tax evaders to catching illegal aliens, ordered Justice Department prosecutors reallocated from financial crimes and election interference to international drug cartels, pardoned numerous politicians (Democrat and Republican alike) convicted of bribery or tax evasion, and ordered the dropping of bribery charges against NYC Mayor Eric Adams, explicitly so that Adams could help him catch illegal aliens. In short, he's trying to legalize and normalize bribery and corruption, to turn the US into something more like Russia. After all, everybody in the President's circles commits financial crimes routinely, so it seems unfair to prosecute them as though they were "real" crimes.
Now add Elon Musk to the mix. He appears (based on the past few weeks) to be engaged in a holy war of wanton destruction. His strategy seems to be to destroy government agencies, their knowledgeable staff, and their data so quickly that he can irreversibly change the facts on the ground before the law and the courts can catch up to him. Because of this need for speed, he can't waste time analyzing individual programs to see whether they're actually wasteful or serve a useful purpose (Congressional staff typically spend months doing that); it's much easier and more fun to burn everything to the ground and rebuild from scratch (or leave the latter job for somebody who cares).
So the President is trying to turn the United States into a Russian-style kleptocracy in which bribery, nepotism, political patronage, election-rigging, and silencing of dissenters are taken for granted as normal and acceptable. Meanwhile, the co-President-without-portfolio is playing a videogame whose side effect is turning the United States into a nation without a civil service: there's an all-powerful President, his extremely manly military, a purely advisory Congress, an irrelevant and toothless hierarchy of courts, and nothing else.
The word "nothing" there is important. A more recent Timothy Burke post makes the interesting point that Elon Musk, and a handful of others in his bracket (Trump isn't rich enough for this club), are so mind-bogglingly wealthy that they couldn't lose or spend it if they tried. The annual interest on Musk's wealth is what 10,000 average Americans will earn in their combined lifetimes.
Such people have transcended the usual entrepreneur "take risks with other people's money" success story and reached "take risks because even if I lose every bet, I'm still unimaginably rich". Musk theoretically lost $30 billion buying and mismanaging Twitter, and it doesn't matter: he got control of a major social-media network, and if it no longer produces revenue, who cares? He can afford to "move fast and break things" because it doesn't matter to him if he breaks everything. He isn't acting irrationally or irresponsibly; he's a rational nihilist. He needs to find bigger and bigger risks to take, bigger and bigger things to break, just to stave off boredom and keep the adrenaline flowing. The US government is a big enough target that destroying it is actually a bit of a challenge, and therefore worth doing.
The reader may have noticed that the cynic and the nihilist aren't entirely on the same wavelength. If the nihilist succeeds, there will be almost no US government authority left that the cynic can milk for bribes and kickbacks. In the most charitable, optimistic reading, the latter is the culmination of Reagan's dream: reduce the US government to the point that it's not worth capturing, so "regulatory capture" disappears. As yet another Timothy Burke post points out, Musk is rapidly dismantling exactly the infrastructure and expertise that Trump (or any other would-be dictator) needs to enforce his will. But that comes at a cost: with the rule of law gone, your security depends on what you personally can enforce, and you'll have to spend a good deal of your time enforcing it rather than building anything new. If you're not a strongman, your best hope is to find one and throw yourself on his mercy.
One is steering the ship towards dictatorship, the other towards anarchy. Where will we actually end up?
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Here via![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
siderea. May I share to BlueSky?
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I would like to ensure that you are aware of an Elon Musk anecdote that strongly supports your point here: "Elon Musk and the Infinite Rebuy"
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