'Progressives Should Reject the DOGE Scam'
Asserting the premise that the national deficit and debt was a crisis in the making — and garnering media buy-in of the premise — was always aimed at justifying austerity measures that privatize government services. Wall Street can then raid them, reduce labor power by pushing the poor into further precarity (guaranteeing more compliant low wage labor); slash worker protections; weaken the NLRB [National Labor Relations Board] and OSHA [Occupational Safety and Health Administration], and public sector unions; and overall weaken the already puny power of the working class.
So when incoming President Donald Trump’s right-hand man, internet troll and world’s richest person Elon Musk launched the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE), along with fellow rich ideologue Vivek Ramaswamy, it was a playbook that has been around for decades — pushing a far-right attack on the liberal state under the auspices of “cutting waste” but in new 4chan-speak. This was to be expected. Despite all the manosphere pandering and crying about “censorship,” Musk — like every other super rich person in modern American history — is ultimately just a Club for Growth Republican who wants weak workers, women and Black people who can’t sue for harassment, and low corporate taxes.
What was less expected and far more ominous is that a number of Democrats, both centrist and progressive, responded to this announcement by indulging the premise that DOGE is being carried out in good faith, that there exists some committee being formed to “cut waste,” and that Democrats can “work with it” to advance liberal goals. These high-profile Democrats are nodding along as the Xerox salesman runs them through the supposed “waste,” and now we’ve move onto debating the “solutions” to said waste, ostensibly under the banner of “common sense bipartisanship” or — even more credulous — to advance progressive causes.
...
Republicans are open hypocrites. Trump actively campaigned as a venal philanderer and bullshit artist. We live in a post-irony world. Ideological battles need to be openly fought. Democrats, especially progressives, need to be banging home the message that DOGE is a cat food commission on steroids and talking about what the Trump administration has in store: the death of worker protections, poisoned food, crumbling schools, no more OSHA, and gutting Social Security and Medicare — not doing convoluted Hypocrisy Gotchas with the world’s most odious liars who are openly and proudly horrible people in any event.
But this isn’t the message that’s getting out. Even aside from the Democrats rolling with the false premise of DOGE, many figures in Congress and the media aren’t talking about it much at all. Why aren’t prominent Democrats yelling at the top of their lungs that this is a far-right effort to overturn popular pillars of the liberal state? Why isn’t it being branded as a stalking horse to throw grandma off social security? Where is the genuine resistance to Trump?
