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FRHe'll need more than DOGE (Photo by Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
A nation in turmoil. An economy in flux. A professional class paddling in profligacy, and a public increasingly disgusted by the out-of-touch elite in the centre. The answer? A brilliant outsider, a financial wizard and a foreigner, who can whip the national finances into shape along with the complacent bureaucrats, too. I’m talking, of course, about ancien régime France, on the eve of the revolution. Or maybe I’m describing America in 2024. To a remarkable degree, Donald Trump’s promise to shake up the stodgy Washington consensus has striking parallels to Louis XVI and Versailles back in the pox-ridden 1780s.
For just as Trump seems to have hit upon Elon Musk to solve America’s woes — self-made, South African, and co-head of the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) — so too did the French monarch hit upon his own outsider: Jacques Necker. At first glance, clearly, the portly Genevan economist, with his frockcoats and earnest Enlightenment morality, seems about as different from Musk as you can imagine. But in both his personal story, and too his final inability to tackle France’s deep, systemic problems, Necker may yet offer lessons for his New World successor.
Whatever way you look at it, the US has a laundry list of challenges. Quite aside from the issues beyond its borders — from Nato to China to the bloodbath in the Middle East — that’s clear enough domestically. From massive political polarisation to a military whose recruitment has collapsed and whose budget is shrinking or stagnant when adjusted for inflation. Then there’s that vast and growing number of Americans who simply feel like the country is going in the wrong direction. On top of that, America is flat-out broke, with the government forced to borrow increasing amounts of money just to keep the lights on. Two years ago, around 10% of total federal revenues were being spent on interest payments. Today, that sum hovers around 23% — representing nearly a quarter of the federal government’s total revenue, a figure that’s rising all the time.
To get a sense of just how dangerous that last issue is, consider what happens to someone suffering from terminal cancer. Over time, healthy and functional cells get replaced with nonfunctional, malignant alternatives, and eventually the body simply gives up and stops functioning. But no human being has ever had a body consisting entirely of cancerous cells: death happens far before the disease gets to that point. In fiscal terms, money going to interest payments can be understood in these terms: every dollar spent on paying creditors is a dollar that can’t be used on the military, or roads or bridges or schools. Throughout history, many governments have entered the same sort of debt spiral the US is currently in the middle of; none have ever gotten anywhere close to spending 100% of their total revenue on interest payments.
It’s against this backdrop that we should understand Trump’s appointment of Musk: a phenomenon we might call “the cult of the rockstar technocrat”. In him, after all, an increasing number of Americans seem to be placing their hopes of economic salvation, this one Great Man whose professional and entrepreneurial background supposedly gives him a unique ability to wade into a gridlocked bureaucracy and start cleaning up. From solving the debt crisis, to firing 70% of government workers, the dreams imputed onto Elon Musk are only growing. The system, in short, may be broken. But if the talent of driven, private sector champions could only be harnessed, perhaps the gordian knot of American dysfunction can finally, finally be hacked away.
In truth, though, the fact that DOGE is being taken even remotely seriously is in itself a cause for concern. Trump, as part of the executive branch, has very little power to tell the legislature what it can or even should do. Whatever (minimal) authority he may enjoy leading a department named after a cryptocurrency and an online meme, Musk is at most empowered to make non-binding suggestions. Moreover, if he wants his “department” to actually receive any funding, it is Congress, not Trump, that secures it. The fact that the US state is split into three branches, each with their own remit, is something American children learn very early on. Neither Musk, nor his new boss, have the power to upend this division of power, nor fix problems outside the executive branch of government.
But what’s most interesting with American narratives of the sainted, singularly reformer is that they’re far from new. When France descended into gridlock and dysfunction, the same saintly aura and the same illusory hopes were then assigned to Jacques Necker. That’s clear enough even if you examine that earlier rockstar’s upbringing to his Tesla-founding successor. Born into an upper-middle-class family in Geneva (read: Pretoria), Necker moved to Paris (read: Palo Alto) early in his career and started working as a clerk at a local bank. Before long, he amassed a fortune through smart trading and commodity speculation, and was quickly made a partner. His career only flourished past that point, and he quickly made the jump from private enterprise to government service, becoming director general of the Royal Treasury in 1777. That essentially made him the finance minister of one of Europe’s great powers.
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SubscribeOur contemporary obsession with rockstar reformers is understandable, not least given where America finds itself today.
A little play on words there which of course amounts to nothing. Rockstars are merely entertainers whose success distorts their importance and relevance. Filling a stadium with fans is hardly the same as firing rockets into space and returning them. Tagging rockstar to reformer suggests the reformer is something of a fake or pretender.
Putting Musk among the “rockstar reformers” is pretty cheap. He’s obviously successful at what he does and in a way that leaves others looking like amateurs, or grifters. Surely he has something to offer on the basis of his innovative work with NASA and other business interests. What harm could there be in channeling some of those skills towards the countries wellbeing? And anyway what are the alternatives? Have people forgotten how exciting life can be?
The relevant adjective here is ‘faux’.
“A nation in turmoil. An economy in flux. A professional class paddling in profligacy, and a public increasingly disgusted by the out-of-touch elite in the centre. The answer?”
Simple. Don’t reelect Democrats who gave us these results after nearly four years of controlling the Office of the Presidency.
Somehow, Democrat Leaders really did expect to be reelected with such a dismal track record. Yet Americans seem to understand that a viable definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
A more useful analogy for the 2024 election was the ‘Judgment of Paris’ (i.e. the Paris Wine Tasting of 1976). This competition was a wine blind taste comparison in two categories: Chardonnays and red wines.
The wine entries from Team France had the history. They had the legacy. They had the star power, the word-of-mouth, and the world’s admiration. They had the advertising spend and significantly more investment dollars since wine is a product of honor in the eyes of the French nation.
And yet they were bested in both categories by wine entries from the upstarts growing vineyards in small-town Napa Valley, California.
Incroyable.
The outrage in France was palpable. The controversies were swirling and the incriminations swift.
Surely the outcome was a mistake, or the entire competition was utterly corrupt. How could the judges have been so hoodwinked? There was only one right answer – obviously – and the judges clearly blew it. They were clearly certifiable and suspect.
On the 30th Anniversary in 2006, a repeat match-up was conducted on both sides of the Atlantic. The Times reported on the outcome:
“Despite the French tasters, many of whom had taken part in the original tasting, ‘expecting the downfall’ of the American vineyards, they had to admit that the harmony of the Californian cabernets had beaten them again. Judges on both continents gave top honors to a 1971 Ridge Monte Bello cabernet. Four Californian reds occupied the next placings before the highest-ranked Bordeaux, a 1970 Château Mouton-Rothschild, came in at sixth.”
… returning to the 2024 election …
The voters have experienced four years of Trump’s Leadership.
And the voters have experienced four years of Biden and Kamala’s Leadership, along with the muscle of Democrats’ behemoth Chicago-style political machine under the indirect leadership of Obama.
After the four-year ‘taste test’ recently concluded, the outcome indicates that the American voters choose Trump over the best candidates and vision that Democrats have to offer.
No matter now many billions were spent or how many star endorsements were received. No matter how the legal system and the FBI were manipulated to destroy both Trump and his allies.
No matter how many false narratives were spun by the media.
On this last point, Trump has consistently received between 80 and 95 percent negative news coverage in America – each and every year – since 2016. Such percentages are statistically impossible to consistently achieve without significant bias in news reporting for a candidate who has won the presidential election TWICE by the voice of the American people. People who, with their vote, serve their own best interests and, therefore, the interests of the nation as a collective whole.
And now America’s choice in leadership is selecting his own team, as is the right of every President Elect.
All anyone can credibly say after such a recent and overwhelming mandate was given by the American people to Trump is “carry on in executing the will of the American people.”
carry on in executing the will of the American people.
What? How dare you!
Incroyable! 🙂
I find these historical comparisons irritating. There’s an infinite parade of ancient actors you could use as a comparison – each with a different outcome. It really says more about the author’s preconceptions.
The author is correct. The executive, the US President, has no direct control over the composition of the federal budget. That power is held entirely by the Senate. The President has only a veto on the budget set by the Senate. And vetos are very blunt instruments: ultimately a budget must be agreed at some point by a President or else their entire policy programme stops.
Trump’s Republican party may control the Senate but most of the Republican Senators were there before Trump came along and will be there long after he leaves office. To compound that problem, most of those Republican Senators are not allies of Trump. If that wasn’t problematic enough, all of them are funded by special interests that want something from government. And perhaps most problematic of all is the federal budget consists of huge pots of cash whose spending is at the discretion of federal agencies who are largely beyond the control of even the Senate bar the periodic appointment of new leaders.
Musk may be an amazingly influential and inspiring person, but his success has been built on his hiring, firing and leading people ready and willing to be led by him. He can’t hire and fire the Senate. He can’t hire and fire the leaders of the federal agencies. And neither the Senate nor the federal agencies are intetested in being led by anyone but themselves, and especially someone like Musk.
NB: For UK readers, the US is the exact opposite of the UK. The UK executive has full control of the budget and it is Parliament that has the veto. And of course the UK executive also sits in parliament and employs more than 100 of the 325 MPs needed to pass a budget. UK governments never fail to pass a budget. Further still, the UK is a highly centralised state with regions only having budget controls delegated by the executive. In theory UK governments have the power to implement radical change. However, unlike the USA, UK civil servants are tenured for life and governments are constitutionally bound to “protect” the “independence” of the civil service. In practice this means the UK civil service is a permament continuity government controlling the state, not Parliament nor the executive.
The common problem across the West is the relative stability of our systems of government. That stability has allowed the tentacles of the state to first grow and then ossify. Now ossified, the state is beyond all attempts to control it by elected government or rockstar influencers. Only complete failure and the hardships that follow will force a reset in thinking and culture. That might be political revolution or defeat in war or, more likely, economic failure.
I love a good “nota bene” usage!
NB: for all readers, it is the US Congress, House of Representatives and Senate, who together must approve spending bills that propose to allocate federal funds. Additionally, the President must also sign the bills in order to become law and actually allocate the funds. If the President does not sign, a veto of one kind or another, the House and Senate can override the veto with a super majority re-approval of the bill, and then it becomes law.
My points are twofold: 1) it takes at least the House and Senate to approve funding, of every kind, at the federal level; and 2) therefore the funding of the Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches are all controlled, with the exception of the Federal Reserve, and can be increased or decreased, by a super majority of Congress (House and Senate) or a majority with the agreement of the President.
Can the President and the Legislature cut funding of all parts of the federal government other than the self-funding Federal Reserve? Absolutely.
Will they? They seemed to have struggled to do so this far.
That, if nothing else, feels like a relevant lesson for today. Put your hopes in Elon Musk and other rockstar reformers at your peril.
Maybe don’t be afraid but wish him well with his task. Perhaps complete collapse and a painful rebirth from the ashes isn’t a historical necessity. But it does seem like human nature to look away from problems until five past midnight and only make the necessary changes when there’s no other choice.
It’s interesting to think about the comparison, and I’m sure there will be some similarities. He will become even more unpopular with many, for sure. However there are some huge differences which make such speculation close to worthless.
France was in a terrible economic state, such that it couldn’t pay anyone working for it, at a time when it was in the grip of famine etc. It took special deals to secure new loans. The US is still driving the global economy, in tech but also in many other areas. Its military spending and equipment dwarf the whole of europe combined. It would have no problem raising more money, and like the UK there are incredible volumes of money wasted by state organisation inefficiency. Just an hour investigating the way UK councils fill potholes (in reality, not on the internet) will reveal a process that is literally insane. How you get a sane person to review so many processes is not an easy question, as management consultants are often the source of the original problem, but it’s not unfeasible to fix these.
Of course the main area Musk is interested in fixing are the layers of legal red tape that always get added to and never removed. This is far ‘worse’ in Europe than the US, with the latter they have no federal laws at all for animal welfare on farms. Arguably they need more in some areas such as this. Nonetheless they have the same political disease we have – whenever a new politician comes to power they see their job as creating new legislation. The state becomes an ever growing burden in terms of it’s own cost, but also to the natural functioning of the rest of society when, for example, HR departments are focussing all their time and energy on ticking identity demographics when they recruit, rather than focussing on the best person for the role, or finance departments have to hire increasingly specialised people to understand the arcane layers of tax laws.
This second area is definitely ripe for disruption. Like we saw during Covid, the whole political and media landscape is captured by a kind of ideology where what something looks like under a five minute summary by a progressivist journalist on the 24hr news cycle is all that matters. The big picture where you step back and think about what is really necessary and best for long term cohesion and viability has been lost for decades now.
The article seems to suggest that Musk is doomed to failure, as if the situation is finished and it’s best to just wait for the collapse of western civilisation. I’m all for realism, and perhaps this is correct, but what a dismal way to see the world. Choose hope, and act in that direction.
Interesting take but in comparing the US today with the France of yesterday you miss the massive changes we find in society today.
Working people are informed … the elites are being constantly exposed on a daily basis for their corruption … we have no choice, the bureacracy must be strangled, not only in the US but the UK and hopefully the EU.
I would say working people, or people in general, have more access to (heterodox) information than ever. But that does not automatically make one informed. In fact, I think a major problem in our society is that most people are being informed by sound bites, tweets, and PR more than ever. Just because that information is, seemingly, anti-establishment doesn’t mean it is not indoctrination.
Being informed requires some time and effort. Read the big names, read history, learn analytical methods. Very few people actually do that.
Whatever way you look at it, the US has a laundry list of challenges.
Atop that list is a DC cabal/uniparty that made Trump possible if not necessary. Can we please dispense with the pants-wetting and pearl-clutching over Trump being elected and consider how that came to pass? Whatever the problem is, Trump did not cause it. Perhaps he can fix it, or part of it, or begin the process of a fix, but this is American politics, which means entrenched interests will purposely miss the point because to notice it gets in their way.
The Free Press is lapping Unherd. It has become very rare to read something smart and informative here. Unherd is now publishing a lot of useless mastubatory drivel by leftists who only hang out with leftists. You all should re-think how you’re doing things. If you publish leftists who have had to defend their ideas to non-leftists, you get better ideas. It seems downright intuitive when I put down on paper.
Nothing! That’s the only answer to authors question in the title
Is it just me or are these meaningless historical analogies becoming boring and simply an exercise in having a writer try and air their flabby bits of knowledge for we unwashed. Really, Unherd must do better – or at least get some good minds and writers on the site.
A bit of positivism may not go unheeded, as well perhaps?
You seem to be omyimg that Musk and Trump shpuld have absolute power in the US. That may work but if so you need to be honest that you dislike democracy.
Reading articles on UnHerd always cheers me up.
The original Doge was a figurehead, often elected to keep someone out of the way of where all the real work was going on by offering them the ultimate vanity “reward”.
Trump promised to change everything last time in Washington. Meanwhile he backstabbed anyone who didn’t like his latest whim. Musk beware