Elon’s Fatuous Zealotry
The principle he and his technobrats are too shallow to grasp.
“Do not remove a fence until you know why it was put up in the first place.”
— Paraphrasing G.K. Chesterton
It’s an unfortunate fact that government is vulnerable to criticism because its successes are often invisible. It’s easy to note flaws and failures in a system or institution, but harder to point out successes when the successes are bad things that never happened because the system prevented them from happening. Things like the thousands of seniors who never declared medical bankruptcy because of something called Medicare.
There’s a name for this problem: The preparedness paradox. Example, citing the Chesterton quote above: A man builds a fence around his property to keep the wolves out. He sells it to a second man, who decides to take down the fence, which strikes him as unnecessary because there are no wolves on the property. Anyone can see the flawed logic here, specifically the confusion of causation: There are no wolves precisely because the fence works, just as intended. Unless there’s reason to believe that the wolves have all disappeared, best to leave it in place.
This prudential principle would seem to be elementary and intuitive, and yet it has apparently eluded the Vulcan mind of Elon and his Gen-Z technobrats, eager to burn down the house just because it’s a like totally kewel thing to do, and because, of course, they don’t live in the house. For Elon, this may be nothing more than another spiteful fuck-you to everyone who’s not Elon, as well as a flagrant use of political power to protect private interests (somehow government payments to Elon are in no way problematic). For the technobrats, it may be some sort of extra-credit project.
Whatever the motivation, it’s worth remembering why the programs in DOGE’s crosshairs were put there in the first place. Take USAID, which for decades has been the primary dispenser of American assistance to countries in need. No one can count the children never subjected to human trafficking and sexual abuse precisely because of USAID’s assistance to groups like the Coordination for Youth and the Fight Against Sexual Violence and Trafficking in Persons, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. We can’t document these cases, again, because they never occurred.
We can infer how many might have occurred by looking at successes that have been documented, as in the Philippines, where thanks partly to USAID hundreds of children have been rescued and dozens of perpetrators arrested. (And yet, according to Elon, USAID is the “criminal organization” here. As usual with his slurs, he provides no evidence.)
Never happened
Likewise, we can’t say how many workplace injuries never occurred, or how many hazardous workplace conditions never went unreported for fear of retribution, precisely because the Occupational Safety and Health Administration imposes safety standards, allows workers to report abuses confidentially, and tries to hold negligent employers accountable (among them Elon).
We can’t count the unsophisticated people who weren’t ruined by financial scammers and payday lenders because there is a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). We can’t say precisely how many people never suffered from contagious diseases because there are the Centers for Disease Control. We can’t appreciate the lives that weren’t permanently destroyed by natural disasters because there is a Federal Emergency Management Agency. DOGE has threatened all of these entities in one way or another.
To be sure, there are legitimate criticisms of programs like USAID (and openings for right-wing snark), but that’s true of any organization that involves thousands of people and spends billions of dollars. This is a good place to note a partisan bias at play here: Conservatives apply a standard of perfection to vilified agencies that they don’t apply to favored agencies. The Pentagon has a long history of waste, fraud and abuse. Does anyone say that’s cause for “deleting” it?
On Tuesday, standing next to Donald Trump in the Oval Office, Elon provided a clarifying glimpse into the fatuous quality of his thinking and his profound ignorance about the nature and purpose of democratic governance:
“If the bureaucracy's in charge, then what meaning does democracy actually have? If the people cannot vote and have their will be decided by their elected representatives in the form of the president and the Senate and the House, then we don't live in a democracy, we live in a bureaucracy. So it’s incredibly important that we close that feedback loop, we fix that feedback loop, and that the public’s elected representatives—the president, the House and the Senate—decide what happens, as opposed to a large, unelected bureaucracy. This is not to say that there are not good people who are in the federal bureaucracy, but you can't have an autonomous federal bureaucracy.”
Expertise matters
Of course bureaucrats are not elected; they not supposed to be. Leaving aside the fact that Elon himself is unelected, what he demonstrates here is not a regard for democracy but a contempt for democratic outcomes borne of his own ignorance. In a democracy, any law, policy, regulation or program, however flawed, is premised on some sort of public consensus or it wouldn’t exist. Representatives do decide what happens, and what they’ve decided is that technocrats — “experts” to use MAGA’s favorite weapon-word — should run programs that lawmakers have no idea how to run and couldn’t collectively run if they did know how. There’s a reason public administration is a profession.
Arguing that Congress should administer vast, complicated federal programs is like arguing that the passengers should fly the plane. It offends populist sensibilities to say so, but some people are more competent than others to perform complicated tasks. Some people are experts, and others are not.
Another piece of rank hypocrisy relevant here: the selective quality of right-wing concerns about adherence to law. Conservatives who howl about an “illegal” and “unaccountable” CFPB show scant concern about Trump’s illegal impoundment of congressionally authorized funds or the DOGE bros’ almost certainly illegal access to the private information of millions of Americans. Note that these are the people who bellow loudest about Big Government intruding into everyone’s life.
Elon, like Donald, cannot open his mouth on the topic of government without confirming the truism that being rich doesn’t make you smart. But it can make you a shallow cynic, which Oscar Wilde astutely defined as someone “who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.”