Clowns Criticizing the Clown Show
They wanted chaos but not this chaos.
·
Friday, May 9, 2025
·
17 comments
I was rather amused by the WaPo report, “Curtis Yarvin helped inspire DOGE. Now he scorns it.”
Before gutting the federal workforce became Elon Musk’s job, it was Curtis Yarvin’s dream.
Yarvin — a Silicon Valley blogger and software developer who argues for replacing American democracy with a dictatorship — spent years outlining an assault on what he calls “the cathedral” of elite power and consensus. Long before the U.S. DOGE Service launched in January, Yarvin coined his own four-letter acronym for bureaucracy-slashing: RAGE, or “Retire All Government Employees.”
Although he says he has never met Musk, Yarvin is a powerful influence among those carrying out DOGE’s radical cost-cutting agenda, two advisers to the effort said. One, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to describe the group’s work, said Yarvin had offered “the most crisp articulation” of what DOGE, which stands for Department of Government Efficiency, is trying to achieve.
“There’s this alliance of the media, of universities, of government,” the DOGE adviser said. “These people are capturing the government and using it for their own ends and for their own power. And that’s very scary to us. You want to lessen the power of the cathedral.”
It’s not every day a neo-monarchist’s Substack helps shape disruptive federal policies. But Yarvin, 51, isn’t celebrating. In fact, in several recent interviews with The Washington Post, he offered a surprisingly harsh assessment of DOGE, comparing it to an orchestra of chimpanzees trying to perform Wagner. He also said the group’s attitude toward federal workers resembles that of a brash but insecure man who repels potential sexual partners.
“In the worst aspects of DOGE, there’s this aspect of the incel who gets mad at the girl who won’t sleep with him,” Yarvin said, using the term for so-called involuntary celibates. “That’s not a powerful attitude.”
[…]
That such a provocative figure should deem the early activity of the second Trump administration too, well, provocative is among the many unpredictable developments since the president assumed office less than four months ago. Despite his informal role as secular prophet to DOGE and some Trump administration policymakers, Yarvin now asserts that Musk and President Donald Trump are needlessly harming and antagonizing government experts whose support they should be seeking.
“It’s very shortsighted behavior from the standpoint of building capital, or building power,” Yarvin said. “They’re really acting on a seat-of-the-pants basis.”
Yarvin’s DOGE disillusionment is somewhat surreal, almost as if Marx had lived long enough to troll the Bolsheviks for misreading “Das Kapital.” It is also, perhaps, an object lesson in the dangers of translating the often outlandish digital discourse that has shaped the American far right into real-world policies that have scaled back scientific research, jeopardized some lifesaving foreign aid programs and risked hobbling government services with mass firings.
I’m only marginally familiar with Yarvin’s work but this doesn’t shock me at all. Enthusiasts for authoritarian rule almost always envision that the authoritarian will be someone very much like them if not, well, them. It’s not nearly as much fun when someone wields unchecked power with a different vision.
Beyond that, many people who broadly support President Trump’s ostensible policy goals nonetheless oppose the manner in which his administration is going about achieving them.
Aside from the obvious cruelty, DOGE is simply reckless. It’s not only not actually achieving any real government efficiency, it’s destroying capacity in areas where all but the nuttiest anti-government ideologues think government is necessary.
Similarly, whatever your views on what American trade policy should look like, it’s hard to find any serious economic analyst who thinks wildly erratic tariffs are a good idea. Predictability is a sine qua non of a sound economy.
Lastly, the Bolsheviks clearly misapplied Marx’s work, which was a description of how sociopolitical systems evolve, not a prescription for governance. It certainly didn’t call for pogroms and totalitarian rule.
