by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
February 20, 2025
https://www.democracynow.org/2025/2/20/ ... transcript
Who are the minds behind DOGE, and what do they really believe? Historian Quinn Slobodian says three strains of conservatism have converged to form the second Trump administration’s anti-democratic coalition: finance-backed corporate interests previously friendly to the Democratic Party, Christian conservative think tanks who have long advocated for the end of the administrative state, and the online-driven movement of reactionary extremists who traffic in white supremacist and neo-Nazi rhetoric. Meanwhile, says Slobodian, “Trump is a person who doesn’t believe in much, but he believes in money,” leaving him willing to enact the political visions of these three pro-capitalist projects. Slobodian, an expert in German history, also discusses the connections between the Trump sphere and Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, supported by Musk and Vice President JD Vance.
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: We look further now at the purge of the federal government underway by DOGE, led by tech billionaire Elon Musk, the richest man in the world. As protests mount, the two, Donald Trump and Elon Musk, appeared on Fox News together to defend their cuts. This is Elon Musk.
ELON MUSK: I think what we’re seeing here is the sort of — the thrashing of the bureaucracy as we try to restore democracy and the will of the people.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: This comes as President Trump spoke at an investor conference in Miami Wednesday and floated the idea of sharing some of the savings he claims DOGE is making.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: There’s even under consideration a new concept where we give 20% of the DOGE savings to American citizens and 20% goes to paying down debt, because the numbers are incredible, Elon, so many billions of dollars — billions, hundreds of billions.
AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined by Quinn Slobodian, professor of international history at Boston University, author of Crack-Up Capitalism. His new piece is “Speed Up the Breakdown.” It’s about Musk’s push to do that.
We welcome you to Democracy Now! Professor Slobodian, if you can start off by telling us what Elon Musk is doing? This whole question over the last two days: What is his role? Does he run the Department of Government Efficiency, that President Trump says, when questioned about it, because court papers came out that indicated he didn’t, he just said, “Well, what counts is he’s a patriot”?
QUINN SLOBODIAN: Yeah, I mean, I might have something to say about the patriot question later, but I think that, first, I think it’s helpful to kind of dispel some of the fog of war and the sort of chaotic, anarchistic impressions that we’re getting out of Washington these days, with a sense of what the actual lineages are of the political projects we’re seeing unfolding here, because I think, and what I wrote about in the piece, is I think there’s basically three somewhat distinct political projects underway here that haven’t really had the chance to weave together and have the space close to power the way that they have now in the past.
The first one is the idea that the government should be run like a corporation, right? There’s a kind of a core Clintonite notion here that we should treat citizens like consumers, we should, you know, expose bureaucracy to the same kind of competitive pressures and kind of hallmarking and benchmarking that private companies are, and then you have to go in and sort of act like an asset-stripping private equity firm and peel out all the waste and abuse and put back in sort of more efficient processes. That’s how Musk sold DOGE to the American people in late 2024, and that’s actually why even some Democrats were on board with a DOGE caucus already in December still. So, there’s something kind of normal about that, and there’s a reason why Musk has been posting pictures of Clinton and Gore and saying, “Hey, I’m just doing that sort of business here.” But, obviously, things have gone to another level.
The third strain, though, that sort of gets to some of the more extreme dynamics that people have been picking up on is what I think you can call right-wing accelerationism. So, this is a kind of very online ideology, often associated with people like Curtis Yarvin and Nick Land. And there, the idea is that you don’t just sort of trim the state or kind of streamline it, but you shatter it altogether. And so, there’s a vision of total decentralization of sovereignty, back to smaller kind of fortified private enclaves, turning the United States into a kind of a patchwork of fiefdoms, or “sovcorps,” as Yarvin calls them, where people are sort of, you know, opting in, paying to get into gated communities, and then sort of in zero-sum social Darwinist competition with the world beyond them. And that’s quite sci-fi and kind of speculative, but at times I think that the sort of sense of panic that we feel is people wondering whether you can just delete all of the kind of capacities of the state and expect to be able to plug them back in at any level afterwards, or if there is a kind of irreversible process of dismantlement happening here.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And so, Professor Slobodian, we’ll get to Curtis Yarvin in a minute, whom you mentioned, but if you could elaborate on some of the ideological precursors to these three strains you identify? I mean, you mentioned in the second, for example, deconstructing the administrative state. We heard that first from Steve Bannon. So, if you could, you know, elaborate on where these strains are coming from within the American political tradition, most recently, you know, the last Trump administration, but also prior to that?
QUINN SLOBODIAN: Yeah, I mean, many of these things that we think of as kind of natural parts of the way the U.S. government operates — for example, something like income tax — are actually just over a hundred years old. So, the idea of having a federal government that oversees many parts of social life is actually — you know, it’s only a few generations in the past. And there are conservatives who see that as a kind of a project of decline.
So, famous examples would be someone like James Burnham, who wrote about what he called the managerial revolution. So, there was this fear that, you know, the kind of the essence of American enterprise was being strangled because there were just all of these civil servants producing a kind of a sclerotic layer over the economy and then pursuing their own kind of ideological projects. So, Russell Vought at OMB talks about what he calls the “woke and weaponized bureaucracy.” He talks about a almost complete Marxist takeover of the government.
So, this isn’t really that much of a sort of neoliberal economic way of thinking. It’s this belief that the state is a kind of a battlefield for opposing ideologies. And that’s been, you know, pretty consistent on the American right, and certainly was informing Steve Bannon’s more cultural and political idea of the kind of wars that need to be fought inside of bureaucracy and, indeed, outside of it.
AMY GOODMAN: And can you talk about that battle right now between Bannon and Elon Musk, and who, in fact, is winning? He’s been talking about vowing to get Elon Musk kicked out, just said, “He’s a truly evil guy, a very bad guy,” and most recently referred to him as a “parasitic illegal immigrant.” Talk more about these two strains.
QUINN SLOBODIAN: Sure. Yeah, I mean, this really flared up, obviously, at the end of last year with the debate about immigration, with the sort of Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, Silicon Valley wing defending temporary visas, so-called H-1B visas, for their sector, because they need a lot of skilled workers kind of in the back office, and then Bannon saying that that was itself unpatriotic, and there needed to be a American-jobs-for-American-native-workers policy and a much more complete kind of exclusion of, you know, new incoming workers.
What was interesting is that got extremely heated. I mean, as you say, Bannon has been not holding back at all in the way he’s been describing Silicon Valley as an “apartheid state.” He’s even using categories that are more common on the left, like calling it “technofeudalism,” and claiming that, like, the bayonets are out, and he’s advancing, and he’s coming for Musk. But what’s symptomatic and interesting there is the way that Trump has sort of kept aloof from the whole conflict, right? I think that he is probably instinctively seeing you don’t actually need to choose a side. Actually, you can accommodate — and you will, I think, and are accommodating — both sides of this apparent schism inside of the big MAGA coalition.
So, there’s no reason why the kind of hard-border nativists can’t get the kind of sadistic roundups that you were talking about at the top of the program, can’t produce terror in the lives of young people in the way that they are doing so effectively, that will fulfill the kind of libidinal, sadistic desires of a certain sector of the MAGA coalition, even as, you know, more quietly, you keep doing more pragmatic immigration policy to fill out the programmers in the back offices of Silicon Valley. I think that, more likely than not, we’re going to get a mixture of both.
And as to who gets closest to Trump’s ear, I mean, the answer, I think, is in the bank accounts. There are 500 billion reasons why Trump is going to listen to Musk more than he’s going to listen to Bannon. And Trump is a person who doesn’t believe in much, but he believes in money. And he doesn’t trust many people, but he trusts people who are richer than him. And Musk’s ability to kind of, you know, stroll through the White House as if he has been elected himself, have his 3-year-old sort of like muttering to Trump in the middle of a press conference, I think it gives us as much evidence as we need of the fact that he has been given kind of carte blanche here to act as, effectively, unelected co-president.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, let’s go back to Curtis Yarvin, who you mentioned earlier. This is Yarvin speaking on The New York Times podcast The Interview last month. In this clip, he’s asked about his belief that the Civil War and the end of chattel slavery were bad for the formerly enslaved.
DAVID MARCHESE: But are you seriously arguing that the era of slavery was somehow better than the era —
CURTIS YARVIN: The era of 1865 to 1875 was absolutely — and the war itself wasn’t good, either, but if you look at the living conditions for an African American in the South, they are absolutely at their nadir between 1865 and 1875. They are very, very bad, because, basically, this economic system has been disrupted —
DAVID MARCHESE: But abolition was a necessary step to get through that period towards —
CURTIS YARVIN: So —
DAVID MARCHESE: — to make people free.
CURTIS YARVIN: Sure.
DAVID MARCHESE: Like, I can’t believe I’m arguing this.
CURTIS YARVIN: Brazil — Brazil abolished slavery in the 1880s without a civil war.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, that was Curtis Yarvin, someone who Vice President JD Vance frequently invokes. And back in 2021, Vance, then Ohio candidate for U.S. Senate, he was interviewed by the conservative Jack Murphy Live podcast. Murphy just asked Vance how to root out wokeism from American institutions.
JD VANCE: There’s this guy Curtis Yarvin, who’s written about some of these things. And so, one is to basically accept that this entire thing is going to fall in on itself, right? … I tend to think that we should seize the institutions of the left and turn them against the left, right? We need like a de-Ba’athification program, but like a de-woke-ification program in the United States, right?
NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, if you could tell us, Professor Slobodian, who is Curtis Yarvin? You note in your recent New York Review of Books piece, “His idea” — this is quote — “His idea of RAGE — Retire All Government Employees — looks a lot like that of DOGE.” So, who is this guy? Where did he emerge from? And how did he become so influential?
QUINN SLOBODIAN: Yeah, I mean, he was someone who moved to the Bay Area and became a computer programmer, also kind of an amateur poet, and, I guess, most importantly, a pretty widely read blogger in the 2000s, especially the late 2000s, under the name Mencius Moldbug. And he became someone who was kind of giving voice to a nascent kind of what was called neo-reactionary or Dark Enlightenment sentiment in Silicon Valley, which I think combines, as the way I’ve been describing it, a kind of belief in economistic bottom-line thinking and productivity, but then also an idea that what we need to get back to is a proper sense of hierarchy in this country and in the world.
In November-December 1908, at the age of 26, Anthony Mario Ludovici lectured at the University of London on the subject of Nietzsche's philosophy. From the man who later translated Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche's infamous biography of her brother, it comes as no surprise to find statements such as the following: 'The strong will and must discharge their strength, and in doing so, the havoc they may make of other beings in their environment is purely incidental.' In 1967, displaying a remarkable lifelong attachment to ideas that had long since become unfashionable, Ludovici claimed in his last book that 'everywhere in Europe the mob, high and low, has been indoctrinated with the Liberal heresy that heredity plays no part in human breeding, and that therefore special endowments cannot be transmitted from one generation to another'.
In this chapter I discuss the writings of Anthony Ludovici, a man who, despite his many publications (over fifty books and pamphlets, and numerous articles), has been almost totally forgotten. The interest of Ludovici's extreme ideology lies not in 'the fact that he was the only person to espouse the views he did -- at least before 1939 -- but in the fact that he continued to maintain his position until his death in 1971, entirely failing to modify his opinions. Furthermore, the peculiar melange of ideas which went into making Ludovici's ideology cannot easily be labelled with any familiar term. I argue that we should not forget the 'extremes of Englishness' just because its ideas, here represented by Ludovici, did not ultimately inform policy.
While it would be overstating the case to claim that Ludovici's writings were widely influential, he was well known as a public figure, whose ideas, particularly early on in his career, acquired some intellectual currency. But the Whiggish view of history which still dominates interpretations of British fascism -- that its failure was a result of the inherent strength of British parliamentary institutions -- means that he has long been ignored. Ludovici's idiosyncratic blend of Forster-Nietzscheanism, Lamarckianism, social Darwinism, antisemitism, anti-feminism, monarchism and aristocratic conservatism was, however, not as ridiculous to Edwardian minds as it is to ours today; it is easy to dismiss Ludovici as a crank, and therefore miss the fact that many of his ideas chimed in with those being espoused by people on the left as well as on the right certainly before 1914, and even until 1939. I argue that reminding ourselves of the existence of men such as Ludovici -- who was not as marginal as might at first appear -- can help in dispelling the complacency which still surrounds the historiography of British fascism.
-- Breeding Superman: Nietzsche, Race and Eugenics in Edwardian and Interwar Britain, by Dan Stone
So, one of the problems of the administrative state is that it has been pursuing equality, and it’s been working under the false assumption that all humans are somehow equal, that in fact there are kind of hierarchies of intelligence, best measured in IQ, which people like Yarvin and increasingly Vance and Trump are seemingly quite obsessed with. It can be measured in things like race — group differences in IQ are, you know, commonly assumed to be real empirical facts in the world of the sort of Silicon Valley right — and, perhaps most importantly, into hierarchies of gender. So, the masculinity component in all of this is kind of impossible to overstate. There is a reason why the sort of apparent scrambling of gender in gender queer and trans movements is so triggering and so terrifying to people in this world. Elon Musk has described the “woke mind virus” as having killed his child, even though his child is very much alive.
So, the project, I think, is really about how, through the mechanisms of the market and the dismantlement of the sort of post-New Deal state, the post-Great Society and civil rights state, we can get back to what they see as a more natural world where men are in charge, white people are in charge, and there is a kind of restoration of the natural order of things. And that sort of wishy-washy treatment of things like slavery is sort of a provocative way of reopening those questions.
AMY GOODMAN: And, Professor Slobodian, this is about both JD Vance and Elon Musk, the question of their stance on the far-right German party AfD. On Friday, Vice President JD Vance gave a speech at the Munich Security Conference where he repeatedly attacked Europe on a number of issues. And he, while in Germany, held a 30-minute meeting Friday with the head of Germany’s far-right AfD party, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz rebuking Vance for meeting with the AfD ahead of Germany’s election. And, of course, you have Elon Musk repeatedly using his social media platform X to support what many call the neo-Nazi party, or the Nazi-curious party, for those who are more generous.
QUINN SLOBODIAN: Yeah, I mean, the AfD in Germany is actually a really good example of one of these sort of strange bedfellow-type parties that I actually think is sort of unhelpfully described as either neo-Nazi or Nazi-curious. What it actually is is it was founded by ordoliberal economics professors who disliked the way Merkel was handling the eurozone crisis, and thought you needed more monetary discipline and more fiscal discipline. They then created an alliance with basically ethnonationalists, traditionalist members of the so-called New Right, who felt that modernity had produced a fallen world, and we needed to get back to more rooted links to the land and that certain populations belonged in some spaces and not others. And now they have created this kind of this far-right neoliberal party, that Alice Weidel sort of gives voice to when she says that, you know, “We’re actually a libertarian conservative party,” as she said in her Spaces chat with Musk.
The AfD is one of only many far-right parties that now Musk is aggressively platforming. In the last few days, he has promoted Viktor Orbán, Giorgia Meloni, the AfD, and in the past has gone as far as promoting Tommy Robinson, the sort of far-right figure from the U.K. He has adopted not just sort of a tame language of democracy, as Vance tends to be using, but a language as he used in the rally that he zoomed into of “Germany for the Germans” and saying that multiculturalism must not be allowed to dilute the German people. So these are now proper tropes of the far right as such, and indeed tropes of the “great replacement” theory, which suggests that liberals have used welfare policy and refugee policy to buy voters, which can then swamp and dilute the native population. This has now become a common talking point.
The thing that I think is interesting and important, and perhaps a sign of rare optimism these days, is that Germans actually don’t like Elon Musk interfering in their politics. Polls have showed that, of non-AfD voters, you know, well over three-quarters thinks he has no right to butt in. And even among AfD voters, only about half actually wants him to be involved. So, I think what we’re seeing already is a bit of a backlash against his attempt to kind of, you know, play kingmaker in countries, another country that is not his own. The Left Party in Germany has had a surge in recent weeks. They have more people entering the party now than they have since 2009. That’s partially on the back of like a really full-throated anti-fascist call for the defense of democratic principles by the young leaders, the young female leaders of that party. So I think there is a chance here of his belief that he can just, you know, play puppet master globally actually having a boomerang effect and backlashing on his own attempts at manipulation.
AMY GOODMAN: Quinn Slobodian, we want to thank you for being with us, professor of international history at Boston University, author of Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy. We’ll also link to your New York Review of Books headlined “Speed Up the Breakdown.”
