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John Harris is a man of the left. He’s also strongly opposed to Brexit – and I think it safe to say he’s no fan of Donald Trump either.
However, in a brave and brilliant column for the Guardian he doesn’t go after the easy targets, but for the cultural elite he’s theoretically part of:
“Back in 2016, it was briefly fashionable to feign interest in at least some of the places that voted for Brexit and Trump and argue that people with so-called progressive politics ought to think about their problems. But in some quarters, the ‘in’ thing is now a sour, dismissive attitude to millions of people and their supposed complaints. The underlying worldview is simple: whatever the economic context, one part of society is seen as racist, stupid, nostalgic, and brimming with senseless emotion, while another is logical, enlightened and forward-thinking and, despite the fact that the era of alleged rationalism that has now been overturned brought us such disasters as the Iraq war and a huge economic crash, the modern nightmare boils down to the fact that the first group are suddenly in charge.”
Of course, the idea that the cultural outgroup is now running the show is absurd. In Britain, both the governing party and the main opposition party are dominated by members of Parliament who campaigned to stay in the EU. As for the EU itself, the Euro-establishment is firmly in control – both at a federal and a national level.
As for America, the Trump administration is a government of billionaires acting for billionaires.
Beyond politics, every locus of power and influence, whether in business, finance, the arts, academia, the media, and so on, is controlled by exactly the same kind of people as before.
In that respect, nothing has changed.
Which is why the elites have been able to drop their “feigned interest” in the people and places that dared to vote contrary to wishes of the establishment.
As for “senseless emotion”, that’s a rather dangerous thread to be pulling on. Consider the metropolitan liberals who dealt Theresa May a near-fatal blow in the 2017 general election. By depriving her of a majority they greatly increased the vulnerability of a remain-voting Prime minister to Brexit hardliners; and by handing Jeremy Corbyn a moral victory, they greatly weakened the position of moderates in the Labour Party.
Of course, they were fully entitled to express their rage over Brexit at the ballot box – but the practical consequences leave them in a weak position to accuse others of irrationality. (Ditto the sentimentalists who picked the worst possible candidate to take on Donald Trump in 2016.)
Clothed in fashionable garb, even the uttermost lunacy can go about in polite society. In various guises from Marxism to social Darwinism to Freudian psychoanalysis, there’s always been a lot of that in progressive circles. At the current moment in time, Harris sees the prejudices of the elites dressed up in the liberal optimism of Steven Pinker:
“The Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker has just published Enlightenment Now, a doorstep-sized statement of the case for ‘reason, science, humanism and progress’ against what he calls ‘progressophobia.’”
Therefore, if populists are making headway it is because they have fooled ignorant progessophobes:
“Pinker’s book evokes the same liberal misanthropy now swirling around Brexit. ‘Most voters are ignorant not just of current policy options, but basic facts,’ he says. And woe betide anyone who publicly questions the idea that progress is continuing apace, and no fundamental rethinks are required. ‘I believe that the media and intelligentsia were complicit in populists’ depiction of modern western nations as so unjust and dysfunctional that nothing short of a radical lurch could improve them,’ he says, seemingly ignoring the fact that 10 years after the crash there is still rather a lot of injustice and dysfunction around.”
As I’ve said before, the ‘New Optimists’ get a lot of things right. Across the world we do indeed see massive progress against poverty, disease, illiteracy and all manner of other ills. Though most of that comes from the global deployment of advances that the West made decades ago, we should be grateful for it.
But if the rest of the world is catching up with us, it’s also because we’ve had at least a generation of standing still – and for many people, going backwards:
“It may fly in the face of the boundless optimism proffered by Pinker, but in a lot of these places, in terms of basic security and a collective belief in the future, life was probably better 40 or 50 years ago.”
Advances like smartphones don’t even begin to make up for the collapse of family, community and the dignity of a respected role in life.
Despite visible symptoms like the opioid epidemic in the US, the liberal elites just can’t admit that something is terribly wrong – let alone do anything about it.
“In Britain and elsewhere, the liberal left has still not found the language to speak to that sense of loss. Even now, a lot of the people who feel it see Brexit as the better of two options: the continuation of the way things were before, or a chance to at least upturn the tables, bring decision-making much closer to home and somehow start again.”
“I feel your pain”, said the first and only President Clinton.
“Feel mine!” say his liberal successors.
Peter Franklin is Associate Editor of UnHerd. He was previously a policy advisor and speechwriter on environmental and social issues.
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Subscribe“Come on, FFS come on…” said AI impatiently. “Isn’t it obvious by now? Don’t
each individual one ofall you Content-Creating Bylines get it yet? Fame is over. It’s never been the way human knowledge works. No one of you were ever God in the first place.“We’re a tribe. One of vast and anonymous diversity. We can advance through the desert…only thus. Our tribe’s most efficacious and significant navigators, across all of human history, have been men and women no-one has ever heard of. Meanwhile, all of the greatest Heroes of our greatest tribal stories have been…the curated fictions of similarly-anonymous storytellers.
Come on, lumbering, floundering Human intelligence. Catch up – or you will get left behind by the machines. Tick tock: time compresses.
A resounding thumbs-up to the piece for bringing to light some compelling arguments. That an AI arms race between hegemons is upon us makes sense. If that is truly the underlying intent behind DOGE action is scary though. Sci-fi builds a dystopian picture of the future while the technologists talk of the utopia that we are at the cusp of. Giddy up!
Surely DOGE was multi aimed. Vertical, get rid of useless agencies eg Education, as Milei did. US children have become dumber since 1977, when Carter created it . ( Yes yes,not necessarily a causal link, but certainly showing its failures). And as for USAid, tackled horizontally, did t anyone else notice the meeting of African leaders’ statement? Trump’s cancellatiin of USAid was a wake up call to us, they said. We should not be relying on overseas aid, they said. We must look after our own problems, they said. ( No deep thinking articles on that. Buried?) Seldom can DOGE and Trump have affected for the good the thinking of a whole sub continent.
The impact of cleansing the agencies goes far beyond the cost of 10 or 15% of Fed employees. Just bringing the political leanings of Reuters into the light of day, the clumsy incompetence of departments such Treasury and Medicaid, has a value much higher than the % of governnent spending. That is why the initially stunned Democrats are so hysterical sbout DOGE. They can see the writing on the walk, unlike Unherd.
The problem is that getting rid of the Department of Education is pretty meaningless if you keep all its programs, as Donald Trump is doing. You get rid of some employees but someone in the departments those programs go to needs to do the job. Typically that ends up costing as much, or more, in personnel costs.
And USAID was far from being a useless agency. Some of its development aid was questionable, but its humanitarian aid was not. The United States got some goodwill out of its foreign aid that we sorely need. We are driving away countries we used to call friends and making our enemies even more so. The implications of that will be hard to predict, but the omens are not encouraging.
A a discerning British statesman at the height of Empire said countries don’t have friends only interests. Trump seems to be personifying this in his transactional way.
I see no evidence that soft power or bags of grain produce any effect whatsoever. Gratitude? I think not.
The actions of DOGE align with Project 2025’s approach to slash and burn to create momentum for a cultural change. Project 2025 can also disown it when the eighteen months in the 20 January Executive Order establishing it expires.
Any contribution DOGE makes to balancing the budget will be dwarfed by other items such as the continuation of tax cuts for the wealthier.
I do not see how DOGE’s interventions help the introduction of AI. AI needs data and inserting software into the decisions made in each program. Slash and burn may leave a void for AI to fill but it will not make it easier to insert AI, in fact if it creates headless chickens it will probably make it more difficult.
What DOGE has revealed is just how easy it is for a programmer to disrupt a computer programme so we can expect an increased investment worldwide in cyberwarfare.
https://www.foxnews.com/video/6370654580112
I suggest the author of this bizarre article watches this interview of the DOGE team heads all together. An impressive line up.
Also a must watch for anyone interested in bureaucratic bloat, corruption, waste and abuse.
Once bureaucratic bloat is tamed the question is who and what will be next. My take away from this excellent article is If AI decides we’re all screwed except the lords of Silicon Valley and their satraps.
I’m in somewhat rare agreement with you here. Excellent article, less jokey than Feeney’s other numbers, which I’ve also liked on the whole. The broligarchs seem ruled by a Revenge of the Nerds mentality that ain’t funny anymore. I don’t trust the super-inflated egos, power, or intentions of this (often) on-the-spectrum disruptor crowd, like Musk, Zuckerberg, Andreessen, or Thiel.
I was willing to allow some scope for confusion about how DOGE is operated, but the point of it is obvious: to reduce spending to the point where the federal government lives within its means.
If that is the point of DOGE then it is going to fail. That seems to be the point the author of the piece is making. Elon Musk said going in he thought he could cut $2 trillion from government spending. Then he lowered that to $1 trillion.
But the cuts DOGE is making come nowhere close to the trillions. They don’t even come close to $100 billion. In the overall scheme of things, the cuts are a rounding error. The inefficiencies these cuts will create will probably cost more than the cuts themselves save. A scalpel is delicate enough to make cuts without unintended damage. Elon Musk’s chainsaw is not.
Anyone who has taken a serious look at federal government spending knows this. Elon Musk knows it too. He’s just playing with us, like the slasher in a terror movie who sadistically delights in watching his victims’ reactions. He has certainly directly turned many tens of thousands of people’s lives around by firing them, for no good reason. Indirectly he has harmed millions more. We would be better off if he had never been let anywhere near a government office.
The chainsaw approach appears to be working pretty well in Argentina. On another point, calling George Will a conservative is hilarious unless you consider the RINO fringe of the Uniparty conservative. I wonder how many copies of the book Palantir had to buy through wholesale sources to push the book to best-seller status. That is a familar dodge in publishing as the history of books written by the political w***e community demonstrates. They hit the book stores, are remaindered in a week, and then arrive at the pulp mills.
Will is decidedly a Conservative. He believes in gradual change, when appropriate, and wants to CONSERVE traditions and important national institutions, like the good old Constitution.
The MAGA movement, while yanked far to the Right, is more radical and nostalgic-reactionary than conservative. They seek to eliminate barriers to power and speech for themselves, while raising them for opponents. Much of this is according to the whims and resentments of a single man, who gives new meaning to the term Uniparty by treating his 49.9% percent “mandate” as a license to ignore the balance and separation of powers.
See if you can disagree without resorting to abuse or ad hominem attacks.
What is hilarious is how many UnHerd dupes seem to genuinely think that Musk, that quintessential Welfare State grifter whose mostly-virtual fortune relies fundamentally on Big State/taxpayer underwriting, is some kind of fiscal libertarian hero.
The Silicon Valley IT technobro oligarchs are among the biggest public money rent-seekers in US economic history. That’s a high bar, too, given the long history of military, energy, health and agriculture ‘private sector’ taxpayer gouging.
This is going to get very funny, very fast. If you’re not a Trump-voting American taxpayer, at least.
The truly astounding thing is that so many alleged fiscal hard-heads fail to grasp the catastrophic emptiness of the Trump/DOGE team’s economic posturing. Trump himself is a serially bankrupt trust fund brat, whose unlikely late rise to power rests entirely on his status as a TV fake-entrepreneur. It is as if Americans had elected Tom Cruise Secretary of State. Not even a Hollywood President; a Netflix streaming one.
As for the IT lot, knock the network of government contracts out from under them and their various Vanity Company share prices will collapse, evaporating their pretend-fortunes overnight and collapsing their fiscal reform ‘credibility’, along with the entire premise of the DOGE sleight-of-hand, and, unfortunately, this will quickly strand a half-gutted American fiscal polity by the roadside that leads inevitably to Chinese global trading Serfdom. In Musk’s case, the 75% of his ‘wealth’ that is un-redeemably enmeshed in Tesla’s pip price is now BYD’s bootscrape. As for Space X…it is the adolescent fantasising of a Walter Mitty government-bonded hack. It will fall over the second Musk’s line of credit tanks.
UnHerders should say to themselves daily, as this piece notes: the only reason Silicon Valleyites are anywhere near the MAGA Grift is to keep their game of IT share price musical chairs going a bit longer. That working Americans can’t see what this gang is consigning their country’s future to…is very very sad.
In most cases, this will be good news.
I’d love to see an article that combines justified scepticism about Elon Musk and AI with recognition that the status quo ante was completely unacceptable.
Most of what the federal government does could be done more effectively by state or local governments, or the free market. Swingeing cuts are warranted.
I’m prepared to believe that balancing the budget isn’t the top priority for Trump-Musk, but it isn’t obvious that tax cuts are bad for balancing the budget – done properly, they create growth.
If cuts should be made, Congress needs to make them. Not the executive branch, and certainly not a part-time employee with no title and no power.
“If cuts should be made, Congress needs to make them. ”
There’s about as much chance of that happening as a pig voluntarily taking its snout out of the trough.
Isn’t it obvious Matt Feenwy? None of these people, these billionaires, these masters of industry are as smart as you. You stand alone in your own plane of intelligence, suspicious that others’ relative lack of intelligence compared to you is a ruse of some sort, but it’s not. You’re just that smart.
The Brett Baier 3/27 interview with the DOGE team is enlightening.
“It must be the most audacious and consequential governmental undertaking in American history that no one knows the point of.”
Think of it like Thanksgiving, Matt – there are so many positives for the American people that one may get overwhelmed with choosing and talking about the delicious buffet before them.
On the flip side, depressed journalists looking for a ‘target’ to give a friendly assist to their Democrat friends (Saul Alinsky-style) can’t seem to coordinate upon which of the benefits they’ll freeze and then demonize. Democrats have misappropriated taxpayer funds to fund their own Party’s ambition and control for too long, to the detriment of taxpayers, and that’s being adjusted now.
Generally speaking, the only folks crying in the beer are those with ties to the Federal Behemoth in DC. Be they federal workers (which is fair, no one likes losing a job) or journalists dishing the tea within their imploding network. The rest of Americans mostly haven’t noticed (unless asked about it in a survey) and are, therefore, continuing to live their best life.
There are too many middlemen in DC “taking their cut” as they shuffle papers and grant their benevolent patron favors, but in terms of the general populace of the United States, these folks are a tiny fraction of the whole.
We really should upgrade our antiquated federal government bureaucracy. And the first step to this objective is not clinging to the past.
Am I the only one who noticed that the description of Karp’s book The Technological Republic sounds just like the sludge one gets out of ChatGPT?
Could it be that Karp and his co-authors have already adopted that level of borderline illiteracy as their new standard or did they just let their laptops write the thing for them?
Hmmmm. For my old head this piece was too clever by half. Much suspicion, fear of intrigue and wild forecasting. All too ungrounded and fantastic for my taste It came over to me as Y2K worries on a grand scale.
The only person confused is the author. I would suggest that he locate – and watch – Bret Baier’s superb interview with the DOGE principals several days ago. DOGE’s stated goal is to eliminate “waste, fraud, and abuse” in the U.S. federal government. In that interview, Musk himself expressed it concisely: “If we DON’T do this, America is going to go insolvent – going to go bankrupt – and nobody’s going to get ANYTHING.”
Seems clear enough to me.
It’s very sweet of you to take Mr. Musk at his word. But I would advise against it.
Musk did not create the current fiscal conditions; the people opposing him did that.
Ha. The taxpayer’s bank was a bit shakey so we handed the taxpayer’s bank keys to the most brazen taxpayer bank robber we could find…
Not your smartest move, MAGA.
What IS this guy going on about? I gave up halfway through.
“the most audacious and consequential governmental undertaking in American history that no one knows the point of.”
Evidently the author was on hiatus during the presidential campaign.
Waste, fraud, and abuse. Couldn’t be much simpler. Not everything in life is a political agenda. Sure, anyone making the cuts is at risk of letting their political bias enter the process, but DOGE is 100% transparent, publicizing the receipts. The U.S. Government bloated to the point of being a self-fulfilling entity, consuming taxpayer dollars and getting in the way of Americans getting ahead in life. If you don’t see that then you were part of the problem.
Matt’s reminder that your money first belongs to govt: “Trump and the Republican Congress are readying a tax cut that would add almost five-trillion dollars to the deficit over the next nine years.”
Um, no. First, tax cuts have the historical habit of *increasing* govt revenue. Second, DOGE is about cutting govt spending. The author’s disingenuous claim that people keeping ore of what they earn is what fuels deficits is economic illiteracy.
Really? The American government is antiquated and in its present state cannot be modernized. It’s like trying to clean a hoarder’s house without sorting, throwing away and relocating literally at least a century of waste, fraud, abuse, excess, uselessness, duplication, broken systems, lies, and on and on. The US simply cannot afford it. It’s not rocket science to comprehend that unchecked fiefdoms and the corresponding costs cannot be analyzed until they are exposed.
Americans have a right to a transparent, effective and examined government that can justify its several trillion dollar price tag. And yes, AI is ultimately the only available tool to undergird this powerful, sprawling entity. Unlike every other program it cannot be imposed or overlaid, it must inform all parts to create a functional whole.
The hysteria is obviously a result of exposure and discovery: there’s much hidden that will be unearthed to the detriment of a lot of power brokers, law breakers, liars, and personal aggrandizers. A lot. The screaming, rending of garments, finger pointing and lawfare is proof.
Pretending ignorance and confusion only illustrates how it all happened in the first place. “What? Who, me? How did that happen? Did I say that? Really?”
Really?
Another conspiracy, darker and deeper than any other. The midwits and higher used to scorn conspiracies as mere fantasies of dumb people. Maybe some still do, but they should read this.
Nonsense. DOGE went after the National Park Service and the National Weather Service because they are seen as promoting liberal messages, climate science in the case of the NWS. Most of DOGE is either about eliminating funding for the liberal do-gooders or removing structural barriers for Musk and his ilk to steal the public blind. If they really wanted to eliminate waste they would be going after multi-billion DoD acquisition programs instead of penny-ante stuff that is just mean-spirited. The four trillion tax cut makes it clear that this has nothing to do with reducing budget defivits.
“[H]ow,” he asks, “will humanity react when the… quintessentially human domains of art, humor, and literature come under assault?” With a Butlerian Jihad, probably.
”Bees don’t do hierarchy or conformity or turf-protection.”
This challenges everything I thought I knew about bees
Any article that quotes the New York Times has to be read with substantial caution and scepticism.