- Wired on the incompetence of DOGE;
- Thoughts about why all this is happening now;
- Heather Cox Richardson quotes James Marriott of The Times about how the post-World War II liberal order has allowed the seeds of its own destruction to flourish;
- With a note about Tom Nichols’ latest book, which I’ll write up here soon.
Wired, Brian Barrett, 20 Feb 2025: The Incompetence of DOGE Is a Feature, Not a Bug, subitled “A series of mistakes by DOGE shows just how arbitrary and destructive this slash-and-burn strategy can get.”
Beginning with a list of the things DOGE has recently done.
This is incompetence born of self-confidence. It’s a familiar Silicon Valley mindset, the reason startups are forever reinventing a bus, or a bodega, or mail. It’s the implacable certainty that if you’re smart at one thing you must be smart at all of the things.
Then about what probationary employees are.
Not only does DOGE not seem to understand this, it has given no indication that it wants to understand. These are the easiest employees to fire, legally speaking, so they’re gone. It even changed the length of the probationary period—from one year of service to two—in order to super-size its purge of the National Science Foundation.
It takes a certain swashbuckling arrogance to propel a startup to glory. But as we’ve repeatedly said, the United States is not a startup. The federal government exists to do all of the things that are definitionally not profitable, that serve the public good rather than protect investor profits. (The vast majority of startups also fail, something the United States cannot afford to do.)
And if you don’t believe in the public good? You sprint through the ruination. You metastasize from agency to agency, leveling the maximum allowable destruction under the law. DOGE’s costly, embarrassing mistakes are a byproduct of reckless nihilism; if artificial intelligence can sell you a pizza, of course it can future-proof the General Services Administration.
Once again my recurring point: the government is not a business.
(I just subscribed to Wired, partly to see this article, and because I’d been thinking about it anyway. Originally a techie magazine beginning 1993, which I bought off the newsstands for a while, these days it’s increasingly regarded as a reputable news source, especially on current political matters. So I’ll give it a try; it’s just $12 for the first year.)
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I’m always curious about the big picture: why is all this happening now? What broad currents of history, in the past few decades, have led to this undermining of democracy and the Enlightenment worldview, with its concepts of equal rights, rule of law, empiricism, the scientific method, and secularism combined with religious freedom? My provisional conclusion so far is that democracy and reliance on the scientific method (as opposed to intuitive superstition or received religious tradition) are fragile things, that each generation is born anew with a base human nature and has to be trained in these ideas, and if they are not, society will fall back on traditional tribal forms of government. But… why now?
So here’s one idea.
Heather Cox Richardson, February 20, 2025
On Monday, James Marriott of The Times, published in London, noted that the very stability and comfort of the post–World War II liberal order has permitted the seeds of its own destruction to flourish. A society with firm scientific and political guardrails that protect health and freedom, can sustain “an underbelly of madmen and extremists—medical sceptics, conspiracy types and anti-democratic fantasists.”
“Our society has been peaceful and healthy for so long that for many people serious disaster has become inconceivable,” Marriott writes. “Americans who parade around in amateur militia groups and brandish Nazi symbols do so partly because they are unable to conceive of what life would actually be like in a fascist state.” Those who attack modern medicine cannot really comprehend a society without it. And, Marriott adds, those who are cheering the rise of autocracy in the United States “have no serious understanding of what it means to live under an autocratic government.”
She then segues into the current measles outbreaks in five Texas counties. Then, how the stability of the “U.S.-backed international rules-based order” has meant that people, including politicians, cannot imagine what it was like in the before-times (so to speak; my phrase).
At home, the relative stability of American democracy in the late twentieth century allowed politicians to win office with the narrative that the government was stifling individualism, taking money from hardworking taxpayers to provide benefits to the undeserving.
Although the actual size of the federal workforce has shrunk slightly in the last fifty years even while the U.S. population has grown by about 68%, the Republican Party insisted that the government was wasting tax dollars, usually on racial, religious, or gender minorities. That claim became an article of faith for MAGA voters and reliably turned them out to vote. Now, political scientist Adam Bonica’s research shows that the firings at DOGE are “a direct push to weaken federal agencies perceived as…left-leaning.”
And ending:
The reason Americans created the government that the Trump administration is now dismantling was that in the 1930s, they knew very well the dangers of authoritarianism. On February 20, 1939, in honor of President George Washington’s birthday, Nazis held a rally at New York City’s Madison Square Garden. More than 20,000 people showed up for the “true Americanism” event, which was held on a stage that featured a huge portrait of Washington in his Continental Army uniform flanked by swastikas.
Just two years later, Americans went to war against fascism.
Over the next century they worked to build a liberal order, one that had strong scientific and political guardrails.
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I note this piece in particular because I’ve just read Tom Nichols’ OUR OWN WORST ENEMY, published in 2021, whose central thesis is counter-intuitive. Namely, that our current problems are precisely because “we’ve never had it so good.” (See Pinker, Rosling, et al.) People remember only the good parts of the past, and forget the bad parts — disease, discrimination, and so on — and so don’t realize how much better life is now than 50 years ago, or 100 years ago. And *because* life is so easy now, people are restless, and uncomfortable. I won’t say any more about Nichols’ thesis until I write up the book, in the next week.
