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Here's a theory I've been toying with - let me start with an analogy, though.
Is it good for me, as a random American citizen, for the Chinese government to become more efficient, effective, capable, and trusted by its residents, to the point where such residents are willing to sacrifice personal things for some greater common good? Should I applaud any such efforts, or even figure out how to participate in various international organizations that could somehow encourage such things?
I think it's obviously that the answer isn't trivially "yes", because I have no reason to assume that an effective Chinese government actually has my values and concerns and best interest in mind. In fact, it's fairly likely that their values and goals might have some very zero sum consequences for me and my loved ones. The more effective the Chinese government is, the worse for me... at least possibly. This is not a crazy thing to think. And indeed, every empire that has leaned on divide et impera seems to have a similar view, because they very frequently find ways to keep their competitors divided and low trust to prevent exactly that kind of efficiency.
One of the consequences of the Reagan revolution is that it cemented a certain kind of public rhetoric about the American Federal government in relation to citizens. We've been habituated to that rhetoric being what it means to be conservative. "Of course we need good government, of course we have a shared common good... but the problem is waste. The problem is corruption. The problem is big government is too distant from local communities. The problem is that do-gooder liberals have real difficulty understanding second order consequences, and they often don't understand economics at all. Let's shrink government and make it better, let's get of waste, let's give taxes back to responsible taxpayers who work and raise families and follow the law and participate in the military."
But that rhetoric, successful as it was, still pushed the idea that there was a shared, consensus common good, and that an effective central government simply needed to be pointed correctly in the direction of the revised common good. It needed to be pruned, it needed to be tended. But that rhetoric intentionally papered over a lot serious fissures. This is especially true if you pay more attention to the kinds of people who might be labeled paleocons in their inclination. If you read about the history of forced busing in the seventies, for example, you might personally read it as a story of good intentions not being enough to achieve a desirable outcome - the right thing was done the wrong way. That's a very public Reagan conservative way to talk about it. But for a LOT of people who lived through it, they actually experienced it as the government and its utopian bureaucrats, as external tyrannical forces, actively ethnic cleansing them. For people who experienced it that way, having the government be more effective or efficient, and having it cut waste, is arguably a worse outcome, not a better one. Destroying the capacity of the government to function, if that's your view of things, is a feature, not a bug.
I'm not exactly saying Musk believes something like this in relation to either the Federal government or international institutions. But I am saying that this issue - whether or not the Federal government is intrinsically a foe, or if it can be a friend - seems much more live on the Right in positions of actual power these days than it ever has been in my lifetime. All my years growing up, seeing the government as an outside, malign force of extreme power was a really widely held position by the adults around me, but they were accustomed to getting lip service from their politicians about the issue but never any actual movement. And the issue is that all the adults around me were like the ones who were on the receiving end of forced busing and other similar liberal projects. They did not experience the Federal Government as a solution to a problem, but more like a God like Zeus at his worse - it had to be placated and otherwise avoided as much as possible.
Anyway, this is a long winded way of saying, if there is interest in wrecking government, then it's absolutely possible for public rhetoric that involves conspicuously lazy fact checking, repeated at very high volume and frequency, to be a feature, not a bug. Because anything that bolsters public trust in shared public discussion helps build trust in shared public institutions. And anything that pollutes the media environment and invites skepticism reduces that kind of shared public resource. This is part of why the high profile failures of Federal institutions during 2020 and Covid were much more damaging for pro-centralizing, pro-institution progressives; they need public trust for public authority to gain the power they want and to achieve their goals in a way that some other political strands simply don't. It's likewise why the public radicalization of so many professors and prestige journalists, spewing all their misinformed, polarized, clickbait political opinions on twitter for the last 15 years, was probably a mistake of historical proportions for the legitimacy of the American academy and legacy press - I'm supposed to implicitly trust well-credentialed voices in a way that I don't trust Alex Jones, but it turns out a lot of "smart" people sound about as epistemically rigorous as Alex Jones when you get them away from the very narrow slices of knowledge where they actually maintain rigor, and it turns out that a lot of them have very different values from me, and are deep in a Schmittian friend-foe distinction that they used to be able to hide much better, maybe even from themselves. Elon Musk being exactly as epistemically lazy as those other voices doesn't redeem them; instead, arguably it just reinforces my skepticism. There are serious asymmetries at play here about the consequences of public distrust. I'm thinking very specifically here, too, of the 2016 Adam Curtis documentary HyperNormalisation, by the way, which makes a very specific argument that established political forces under Putin in Russia had mastered a form of flooding the media environment with conflicting sensational garbage to get people to become very skeptical and disengage from political engagement more broadly.
As I say, I have no idea how Musk actually fits in in all of this. But it's a theory.
Great post. As someone that leans more libertarian, it does seem like government programs do more harm than good, especially w.r.t. second order effects and longer term unintended consequences (ie: nanny and welfare state slowly destroying the family unit, esp in poorer communities).
So yes, Musk, Trump et al. acting brash, irrational, and abusing power might be a great thing, if it reduces the government loving progressive caucus’ trust in the whole apparatus.
Why on Earth would it do that? When the opposition party makes it clear their plan is overt sabotage, you're not going to think "the system is broken, better hand even more power to people like Musk." You're going to think "we have a problem with saboteurs."
Obviously not 100% of people will be convinced but this does a lot to discredit the legitimacy and even constitutionality of our current government. If the government is only legit when progressives win, well it’s not legit about half the time. So you’re halfway there.
To correct for this, some will want to rig elections so that their side can’t lose. Well doesn’t that make it even less legit for everyone else?
Finally, there are other forms of government or organization that are not extremely top-down federal level OR full corporatocracy. State, local level? The Federal level is fucked and a money grab, we can all see this.
Can we? State and local government often makes the Feds look efficient and honest. Some of the most high-impact bad policy is attributable to decisions made at the state and local level. It's rent seeking all the way down, and half the time "local autonomy" just local elites stamping the boot on the necks of local out group members.
Again, this makes no sense. Accelerationism rarely plays out the way you expect. If you start corruption and abuse-maxing, the most likely reaction is tightening accountability and proceduralism such that officials have less discretion to abuse. It also raises the risk of authoritarianism as the power abusers you enthroned to destroy state legitimacy abuse their power to hang onto to power. Bad faith participation may make sense of your goal is to literally wreck the country, but that's just a different form of shooting yourself in the dick.
Like, how do you see this playing out? Trump abuses executive discretion, therefore we're going to abolish social security?
Sure, but at least states have competition. If some state has bad policy, people will leave to a better managed one. I strongly believe in competition and some sort of free market here, where bad states fail, good ones succeed and grow, and then regimes will change and improve in bad states.
Not even about social security, what about all this immoral shit that the government does, or corporations use government to do? Like regime changes, war mongering (and how fucking profitable war is), immunity for vaccine manufacturers, all this is shady as fuck and the right seems bent on tearing it down and stopping left-wing grifts. When the left gets in power, I’d love to see them reveal and tear down right wing grifts (there are many) and after a few cycles of this, government is dramatically smaller, less grifty, and more moral.
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